The importance of being an ally in Indigenous education

• Main Author: Dennis, Trine E.
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: Electronic version published by Vancouver Island University 2019
• Subjects: Indigenous peoples—Education; Yukon; Canada; First Nations
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.25316/ir-14511; https://viurrspace.ca/handle/10613/22513

This project is a framework for three days of professional learning, enabling Yukon educators to establish lasting relationships with Yukon First Nations communities whose learners’ achievement and graduation rates are significantly lower than non-First Nations learners (Auditor General of Canada, 2019). Indigenous students are disconnected in classrooms, yet colonial perspective teaching continues. Through this project, non-Indigenous allies are developed for Yukon First Nations communities, essential to disengage systemic racism and colonization in schools. Bishop (as cited in Wallace, 2011) explained: Allies are distinguished by several characteristics: their sense of connection with other people, all other people; their grasp of the concept of collectivity and collective responsibility; their sense of process and change; their understanding of their own process of learning; their realistic sense of their own power - somewhere between all powerful and powerless; their grasp of "power-with" as an alternative to "power-over;" their honesty, openness and lack of shame about their own limitations; their knowledge and sense of history; their acceptance of struggle; their understanding that good intentions do not matter if there is no action against oppression; their knowledge of their own roots (p. 164). Educators are positioned to be curious and learn to fulfill their responsibility to embed Yukon First Nations ways of knowing and doing in curriculum, resulting in increases of achievement and graduation rates for Indigenous learners.