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So I waned to begin by talking about Aboriginal education in Canada and
different ways of looking at it. And so I want to provide a history of
Aboriginal education. It's a way of looking at it that I've put
together from my own reading and looking into some of these issues and the, there's
many sources that contribute to this understanding chief among them are J.R.
Miller and his work in Shingwauk's Vision. Also the work of the Royal Commission on
Aboriginal Peoples their final report is available online.
And it was completed in 1996 but there's a really excellent education, section in
the, in the report. Also the work of Verna Kirkness is really
important for giving, An understanding of how things developed over time and how
they came to be. And there's, there's many others in there
as well, but those are some of the, the main sources.
So, basically, what I've done is divided up this history into four kind of periods
or eras to kind of understand some major shifts in the way that aboriginal people
approach learning. And so we can divide it up into the east
direction, what happened prior to contact with people from other continents, and
then what happened in that early contact period And then there is a period of
intense colonialism and then some of the themes that are emerging in contemporary
times. And these lines between the eras are kind
of fluid and It's not to say when we pass from colonial to contemporary that
colonialism is over. But rather, there are some shifts that we
can observe that have been occurring since, say 1969 or 1982, I'll take about
why those dates are important. But these lines aren't really hard and
fast changes. They're, the wheel is really is something
that is turning and shifting. And all of the elements are kind of
occurring. As we move from one to the other, things
that happened in the pre-contact period continue to influence early contact,
continue to be part of what's going on under the intense colonialism and, and
continue to be part of the contemporary experiences of aboriginal education.
And I'll explain some of that as we go through.
The other thing to know is, is there like a hard and fast time separation, like
1492? No, because contact happened at different
times for different peoples. So on the west coast of Canada and, you
'know, it would be, it would probably be something more like the 1700s, in the far
North again, perhaps, even later point in time.
But the kinds of changes that occur as we move from one to the other are similar, so
the themes are similar. And that's to represent what kind of
changes as we go from one to the other It's not so important to put one date or
another there.
Jean-Paul RestouleAssociate Professor
