Indigenous innovation and organizational change towards equitable higher education systems: the Canadian experience

Abstract

Indigenous knowledges are largely absent from higher education institutions’ efforts to pursue excellence and innovation. Grounded in decolonization literature and institutional theory, this article examines how Indigenous peoples of Canada have engaged with innovation discourses in higher education. Through document analysis of 15 research-intensive Canadian universities and conversation with 13 Indigenous peoples, the article analyses political, functional, and normative pressures associated with Indigenous knowledges shaping Canadian universities. The article demonstrates how Indigenous groups have been able to push post-secondary institutions towards a normative shift in organizational structure. The article also shows how approaching innovation from decolonizing perspectives can provide a way forward for equitable higher education systems, advocating for re-imagining the dominant market economy, and focusing on learning from Indigenous worldviews that centre around reciprocity, ecological sustainability, and connection to land.

Introduction

The concept of innovation has become integral in higher education; it is associated with cutting-edge research, competitiveness, and institutional excellence (Bramwell et al., 2012; Etzkowitz & Leydesdorff, 2000). The quest for excellence through innovation has also become an organizational norm that drives institutional change (Maeße, 2017). However, scholars have cautioned against associating innovation with quality (Wildavsky et al., 2011; Williams, 2016). Rather, the concepts of excellence and innovation have become important instruments of power and a form of symbolic capital that is used to differentiate universities (Maeße, 2017). A new wave of literature has emerged that challenges the traditional concept of innovation and problematizes the universal drive towards institutional excellence. For example, critical scholars have underscored that economic growth has boundaries and that the western framing of innovation has led to massive exploitation of human and land-based resources, resulting in widening inequities among individuals with enhanced racism (Battiste, 2000; Smith et al., 2018). Scholars have also pointed out that higher education institutions play a crucial role in advancing such inequities, as they tend to perpetuate the narratives of competitiveness and meritocracy, focusing on performativity over structural change (Bhopal & Pitkin, 2020; Jin & Ball, 2020). Calls for immediate intervention grounded in decolonizing perspectives have been made particularly by Indigenous scholars (Battiste, 2002; Donald, 2009; Huaman & Sriraman, 2015). There is a need to start thinking about the innovation agenda differently and to examine how higher education institutions can play a role in this shift, which could lead the way towards more equitable higher education systems.

Indigenous peoples of Canada—First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples—are formally recognized diverse groups of Indigenous peoples with distinct cultures, histories, and languages. The relationship between Indigenous peoples of Canada and formal schooling is complex and difficult. It has been characterized by extreme violence and cultural genocide, which has led to the loss of cultural heritage and self-determination for Indigenous groups. From the 1880s until 1996, residential schools in Canada separated over 150,000 Indigenous children from their families, communities, and lands in an effort to assimilate them into Euro-Canadian society (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015). The only path for Indigenous peoples to a formally recognized higher education degree has been through the mainstream Canadian post-secondary education system. Pidgeon (2019) noted that there were few early post-WWII Indigenous participants in Canadian post-secondary institutions because enrolment typically meant giving up one’s Indian status as a First Nations person. Status Indian is a legal definition set by the federal government in the Indian Act 1876 and refers to First Nations people who are registered as Indians under federal jurisdiction. The numbers of Indigenous peoples in the Canadian post-secondary sector have gradually increased, but there is still a lot of mistrust, which has translated into high dropout rates among Indigenous students (Restoule et al., 2013; Statistics Canada, 2016). Indigenous participation in Canadian higher education institutions has been limited, conditioned by assimilation practices, and highly dependent on the mercy of government funding. Overall, Indigenous knowledges at large have been overlooked, ignored, or dismissed in Canadian higher education contexts (Kuokkanen, 2007).

Indigenous innovation has been largely invisible and mostly excluded from Canadian higher education too. Indigenous knowledges, their epistemologies, and their ontologies do not fit with the western agenda of competitiveness and performativity (Kimmerer, 2013). However, recently, an emerging new development has surfaced within the higher education sector in Canada, wherein the developments of Indigenization and decolonization have become more prominent and associated now with innovation and institutional excellence. For example, the University of Manitoba has stated that innovative research, scholarship, teaching, and learning emerge from incorporating Indigenous knowledges and perspectives (University of Manitoba, 2015). Similarly, the University of Ottawa has recognized that introducing Indigenous principles into all disciplinary programmes can lead to innovation through new forms of knowledge production (University of Ottawa, 2019). Alternatively, McGill University (2017, p. 39) has taken a more cautious approach, noting the need to engage in a more critical analysis of the assumptions that underly terms such as “innovation” and “progress”. These examples point out how universities are starting to re-evaluate different kinds of knowledge systems. These developments signal that there is a new power dynamic emerging in higher education in Canada, where Indigenous knowledges are starting to carry more power and symbolic capital in the institutional pursuit of innovation.

The purpose of this article is to examine the concept of Indigenous innovation and assess ways in which Indigenous knowledges have triggered organizational change in higher education planning in Canada. The research questions that guide this article are as follows: (a) What constitutes Indigenous innovation, and does it have connections with western perspectives of innovation? and (b) What environmental pressures have made higher education institutions in Canada consider Indigenous innovation in higher education planning? The purpose of the article is to demonstrate how the concept of innovation can be framed through a decolonizing lens and, thus, inform organizational change in higher education. This article makes an argument that the work of Indigenous communities has led to significant normative pressures on universities, which then have tried to capitalize on this in their quest for innovation and institutional excellence.

As an author of this article, I position myself as a settler who works in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, on Treaty 1 territory, which is also the homeland of the Métis people. My positionality has been shaped by growing up in Estonia during the era of Soviet occupation, where sovereignty, cultural autonomy, and self-determination were critical but unattainable political goals. These experiences have profoundly affected my worldviews and my critical thinking about imperial powers and the political role education plays in perpetuating imperial and colonial legacy on lands, cultures, and languages. Using the lens of decolonization, as well as bringing forward the voices of Indigenous peoples of Canada, may help bring criticality back to the conversations around innovation in relation to knowledge epistemologies that have remained absent or ignored in higher education.

Theoretical framework

This article draws from two strands of literature: critical work on decolonization (Battiste, 2000, 2002; Kovach, 2009; Smith, 1999) and institutional theory on normative pressures leading to organizational change (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Meyer & Rowan, 2006; Oliver, 1992). A decolonial lens allows questioning and dismantling western framings of innovation. Institutional theory provides a framework for explaining the processes of organizational change. Both bodies of literature shed light on how universities may engage in more equitable organizational change, informed by Indigenous knowledges.

Scholars have noted that there are different articulations of decolonization in higher education, ranging from no recognition of decolonization to radically dismantling the systemic violence of modernity (Andreotti et al., 2015). The term decolonization is contested, is messy, and has multiple meanings, both in a general context and in higher education spaces (Stein, 2019; Tuck & Yang, 2012). Peach et al. (2020) defined decolonization in a higher education context as a theoretical and practical concept aiming to critically examine and transform historically ingrained and continued processes of colonization. Decolonizing and Indigenizing processes are often intertwined, as both focus on issues around power, land, and Indigenous bodies. Kovach (2009) pointed out that decolonization perspectives and Indigenization epistemologies emerge from different paradigms. Decolonizing analysis is born out of critical theory found within the transformative paradigm of western tradition (Mertens, 2005). It centres the settler discourse within western literature on ongoing colonialism and the dispossession of lands, whereas an Indigenous paradigm is grounded in Indigenous knowledges. Therefore, my positionality in this article requires me, as a non-Indigenous author, to theoretically ground this work in a critical decolonizing approach rather than Indigenous methodologies. A decolonizing approach allows me to examine the non-Indigenous privilege, problematizing the current dominant knowledges and structures prevalent in higher education. A decolonizing lens helps also to bring to light the non-European epistemes that are necessary to reconceptualize the western notion of what counts as innovation in the higher education context.

Indigenous authors have argued that decolonization is a process that aims to raise the collective voice of Indigenous peoples and redefine and recuperate Indigenous knowledges from the colonial systems of domination, oppression, knowledge dispossession, and erasure in the academy (Battiste, 2002; Kuokkanen, 2007; Simpson, 2014). Indigenous scholars view land as the primary source of knowledge. Land teaches reciprocity, obligations, and living in the world in non-dominating and non-exploitative terms (Kimmerer, 2013). Furthermore, knowledge grounded in cumulative lived experience forms a fundamental dimension of Indigenous worldviews. This dimension features the power of collective, established relationships and the pursuit of inter-generational wisdom and truth as its core values. Direct subjective experience, predicated on a personal and collective closeness to nature, will lead to understanding and deeply rooted knowledge (Cajete, 2004). Thus, innovation from Indigenous perspectives is inherently cultural and includes a body of culturally relevant knowledge that provides methods and means to improve quality of life for Indigenous peoples. Indigenous innovation focuses on human relationships, community-based learning, ecological awareness, and relationship with land. Literature also suggests that Indigenous innovation is primarily connected to preserving Indigenous heritage through (re)learning one’s Indigenous cultural ways of knowing and being (Hindle & Lansdowne, 2005; Huaman, 2015). As such, innovation in Indigenous contexts is often understood as looking back and not necessarily looking forward (Hindle & Lansdowne, 2005). It is often about healing and recovery from the colonial past, focusing on decolonial approaches in institutional structures. In this article, I am guided by the argument made by Peach et al. (2020) that my role as a non-Indigenous author is to interrogate and dismantle the harmful colonial-based practices and structures within the academe to make space for Indigenous theories and methods, which can then fill the gaps and restructure higher education.

Institutional theory, grounded in western knowledge, is a lens that helps to explain the drivers and processes of organizational change, resistance, or stability. The theory suggests that the behaviour of higher education institutions is grounded in the collective formation of rules, norms, and meaning-making practices (Barnett, 1990). These rules, norms, and practices determine the collective behaviour, which currently aligns primarily with the dominant cultural group (Horne & Mollborn, 2020). A university is not a bounded entity. Higher education organizations are dynamic open systems, closely linked to their external political, economic, ideological, and social environments. Accepted norms will change when significant political, functional, and or social pressures start threatening organizational legitimacy and pose risks to survival (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Oliver, 1992). This is when organizations start to evaluate, negotiate, and establish new norms.

Oliver (1992) identified political, such as response to performance crisis, functional such as competition for resources, and social such as response to collapse of collective values and beliefs, pressures that trigger organizational change. Political pressures may occur through critique of performance metrics such as equity-related performance indicators, advocacy work through Truth and Reconciliation reports; a growth in the representation of organizational members whose interests or beliefs conflict with the status quo of the institution through Indigenous hires, diversity admissions policies; increased pressure to innovate through innovation strategies from governments; and an increase in the number of individuals who begin questioning previously established norms. Functional pressures exist when economic criteria of efficiency and effectiveness begin to conflict with or intrude on institutional definitions of success. For example, functional pressures may arise from performance-driven demands associated with competition for various resources such as major governmental research grants, or low access and enrolment rates of Indigenous youth. As a result, organizational members start questioning the intrinsic worth and purpose of higher education when they perceive limited functional relevance of universities to society. Social pressures are associated with differentiation of groups within an organization. New members with backgrounds and experiences that differ from those of existing members will bring different interpretive frameworks and social definitions of accepted behaviours to the organization. As a result, these new beliefs act to diminish consensus and problematize taken-for-granted attitudes and practices (Oliver, 1992). Under these conditions, the logic of confidence and institutional coherence begins to break down, as previously shared norms and legitimate behaviours become superseded by the pursuit of organizational survival (Oliver, 1992). Consequently, new norms associated with new power and capital start to emerge and gain acceptance.

Institutional theory suggests that, as a result of these pressures, organizational responses to uncertainty and disrupture may end up being similar. This leads towards homogeneity, often referred to as “institutional isomorphism” (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983, p. 150). This can be observed among Canadian universities vis-à-vis the rise of institutional Indigenization strategies across Canadian post-secondary institutions (Gaudry & Lorenz, 2018). Researchers have also noted that disciplinary silos can lead to organizational incoherence (Becher & Trowler, 2001; Frølich et al., 2013) at the unit level. These conflicting agendas may result in a disconnect between institutional policy and practice.

Context: Canadian universities as colonial institutions

To honour the lens of decolonization, there must be an acceptance of the fact that Canada is a colonial construct in which universities function as an “arm of the settler states” (Grande, 2018, p. 47), supporting the western political economy and knowledge hierarchies. Universities in Canada, and elsewhere, have been founded on the denial of the collective existence of Indigenous peoples. The academy never advocated against or resisted the genocide and dispossession of Indigenous peoples. On the contrary, universities continue to perpetuate colonial narratives of the superiority of western scientific knowledge, while operating on the lands that were confiscated from Indigenous communities (Kuokkanen, 2007; Smith, 1999).

Educational disparities including access to higher education, funding and graduation rates between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians directly connect to Canada’s assimilationist policies from the late 1800s to the present (Pidgeon, 2019). For Indigenous Canadians, attending university pre-1950s meant losing federally recognized Indian status and its accompanying rights (Stein, 2020). Gradually increasing participation of Indigenous individuals in formal higher education programmes began in the 1960s with the establishment of Native Education and Native Studies programmes in public universities (Stonechild, 2006), but access to higher education has remained a pressing issue. Stonechild (2006) has noted major discrepancies among the Indigenous programmes, policies, and student services offered at different Canadian public higher education institutions. He has argued that these services have variously been initiated by Indigenous and non-Indigenous faculty or staff, or whenever the provincial government has provided targeted funds for those services (Stonechild, 2006).

Over the past decade, Canadian higher education institutions have started to transform. The priority has shifted towards processes of Indigenizing and decolonizing the university (Deer, 2020; Gaudry & Lorenz, 2018; Louie et al., 2017; Pidgeon, 2016). This momentum picked up after the release of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s Calls to Action report in 2015, which framed this change within the broader societal discourse of reconciliation (Stein, 2020). The establishment of the Commission was a result of negotiations between the Canadian federal government and Indigenous peoples involved in the largest class action settlement in Canadian history. Documented evidence of residential school survivors, accompanied by strong political pressure from governments, have led to a direct mandate to higher education institutions to work towards reconciliation and to establish a common ground between Indigenous and Canadian values.

In parallel, a growing scholarship has emerged through published journal articles on Indigenous perspectives in Canadian higher education, focusing on the experiences of Indigenous faculty (Deer, 2020; Fitznor, 2005; Henry, 2012), Indigenous student attainment (Ottmann & Jeary, 2016; Parent, 2017; Pidgeon, 2019), curriculum and programming (Louie et al., 2017; Ottmann & Pritchard, 2010; Ragoonaden & Mueller, 2017), and institutional policy change (Preston, 2016; Wilkes et al., 2017). This scholarship has been grounded in a significant criticism towards the colonial ways in which the higher education system operates and has questioned the value of existing norms and beliefs. This advocacy work has been further marked by a wave of new institutional strategic activities intended to Indigenize Canadian higher education spaces as part of reconciliation and, more broadly, diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts (Deer, 2020; Pidgeon, 2016; Tamtik & Guenter, 2019). These processes point to the fact that critical research emerging from Indigenous scholarship is challenging the traditional and accepted norms of what counts as valid knowledge in academia and is consistently pushing for the universities to change.

Methods and methodology

A qualitative case study design was used to explore the complexity associated with Indigenous innovation and organizational change. The research methodology relied on document analysis and fieldwork in Northern Manitoba, Canada, including focused conversations with Indigenous peoples living in their communities but also with those working in various Canadian universities. The first phase of this project involved collecting and analysing publicly available institutional policy documents from 15 Canadian research-intensive universities. Fifteen institutional academic/strategic plans and 15 policy documents associated with Indigenous strategies such as Indigenous strategic plans, Presidents’ Task Force reports, and reports to Vice-Presidents were selected and analysed. Selection criteria included (a) most recent policy documents focusing on Indigenous issues; (b) strategic focus on research and innovation; and (c) public availability. All 30 analysed documents were published between 2009 and 2021. Document analysis consisted of textual analysis through deductive categorization (Burnard, 1991), where higher-order groups were gradually developed, identifying unique themes within the groups (Creswell, 1998; Elo & Kyngӓs, 2008). The following broad categories were used to start the document analysis: Indigenous innovation, Indigenous knowledge, Indigenous peoples, colonialism, excellence, and innovation. The second step involved participant conversations with 13 Indigenous entrepreneurs who operated on the lands of Churchill, Gillam, and Thompson which are rural cities located in the northern part of Manitoba, Canada. Ten faculty members located in various universities across Canada were also interviewed. Indigenous entrepreneurs were identified through word of mouth by spending time in communities. Faculty members were identified through personal contacts, by reaching out to current and former colleagues with whom a previous relationship already existed. Then, these faculty suggested other names of people whom they thought would be interested in participating. Interviews were conducted in 2018 and 2019. The conversations were directed towards learning about the experiences of Indigenous peoples with innovation, experiences of valuing Indigenous knowledge in higher education contexts, and the types of events and processes participants thought had had an impact on change, if any. Faculty members were provided an opportunity to review transcripts and provide further feedback on the thoughts shared, but community members had limited opportunities to provide feedback as, with the emergence of global pandemic, connections were lost with many. The data analysis programme NVivo was used to analyse conversational data. First, open coding was performed with a list of initial thematic categories. Then axial coding was conducted, where the numerous categories related to Indigenous innovation and normative pressures were refined and merged into fewer categories. Finally, selective coding (Creswell, 1998) was used to integrate the categories, interpret data, and answer the research questions. Participant quotes included in the article have been anonymized for confidentiality.

Findings: innovation from Indigenous perspectives

The findings confirmed that innovation is a western concept without direct alignment with Indigenous worldviews; there is no single word in Indigenous languages associated with innovation. When participants were asked to describe what innovation means to them, some mentioned that the word is “very business, technology driven” or “I associate innovation with scientific discovery.” One person stated,

I most often think of this idea of progress, that innovation is tied to but this may be my own colonized thoughts around what it means to be Indigenous and what it means to be innovative. (Matthew, assistant professor in social sciences)

The concept was noted to be contradictory and a misnomer by some people. My conversation partners had a hard time suggesting a word in Indigenous languages such as Cree which is spoken by Cree people, Indigenous people of northern plains region of North America or Anishinaabemowin, which is a language spoken by Anishinaabe peoples, Indigenous peoples of Great Lakes region of North America, for innovation, noting that “I cannot think of one”, “it wouldn’t be a word that I would use regularly”, and it was “not a word that I know of”. The following suggestion was made to describe the essence of innovation: “mâmaskâc—a Cree word for somebody that does amazing things” (Linda, associate professor in social sciences). Another faculty member reflected: “I think, innovation would just mean trying to build something new out of something that’s there. And Indigenous people have been doing that since contact” (Tim, assistant professor in social sciences). While the word innovation was primarily linked to mainstream scientific and technological narratives, it still had a positive undertone associated with improvement and transformation.

The findings demonstrated that there were other important connections and promising parallels between Indigenous and western understandings of innovation. One commonality was the association of innovation with creativity. In both worldviews, creativity is grounded in combining existing knowledge in ways that may lead to unexpected but valuable outcomes and better lives. Another closely associated idea linked to innovation was transformation. A research participant summarized innovation as follows: “Innovation, to me, is trying to take something that is old, whether it be an idea or maybe something material, and then trying to transform it into something different” (Larry, assistant professor in social sciences). Creativity and transformation can occur when knowledge crosses disciplinary boundaries. The idea of interconnectedness, not only of knowledges but also of ecosystems, peoples, places, and multiple knowledge sources, forms the foundation of the Indigenous worldview. Similarly, the idea of crossing the traditional disciplinary boundaries for innovative outcomes has been increasingly highlighted in western scientific knowledge. Interdisciplinarity as an emerging institutional goal for higher education has been highlighted across institutional strategic plans (Dalhousie University, 2015; McGill University, 2017; University of Waterloo, 2013; University of Western Ontario, 2014). These are important connections that help to form a starting point for conversations around institutional excellence through innovation in higher education contexts.

Nevertheless, there is a profound epistemic barrier that must be addressed first. The findings clearly suggested that innovation on Indigenous terms is not about gaining monetary benefits through new processes or products but about healing and recovery from the colonial past. The idea of restoration of Indigenous knowledges, lost due to colonialism, was strongly associated with innovation outcomes. Creativity and transformation were associated with repairing knowledges that are lost, cultural traditions that need to be reinvented, and languages that must be protected. This finding corroborates those of Hindle and Lansdowne (2005, p. 133), who argued that innovation in Indigenous contexts is understood rather as “looking back” and not necessarily as “looking forward.” A research participant shared that

Innovation is almost everything that we do today to retain, or restore, our traditions, our cultures, and our languages . . . . So, innovation is finding new ways, outside of the context of a traditional lifestyle for Indigenous people, of restoring those things . . . . It’s how we restore and retain knowledge, language, and cultural systems, you know, in this contemporary setting. (Laura, professor in health sciences)

Indigenous innovation flows directly from Indigenous knowledges to address Indigenous interests—active protection of Indigenous ways, views, and practices resists the misuse of sacred knowledge and pedagogies. Furthermore, it is important to make this distinction, as Indigenous knowledges are sought by Indigenous groups to build resilience against the status quo and bring forward systemic transformation through processes of decolonization (McGregor et al., 2010). This perspective of broader transformation of human behaviours and values was expressed by two faculty members. One commented,

[For innovation] I would use words like initiatives that transform, would be more . . . would fit more . . . because innovation, to a certain extent, I would see it as you do this and then it stops, versus transformation, which is a long process. (Mary, assistant professor in social sciences)

Decolonization as a core premise emerged among participants’ perspectives on innovation in the higher education context. A faculty member shared that, to them, innovation is connected to decolonization in higher education and would constitute to a shift in the way higher education institutions currently operate: “If they [higher education institutions] want to include us, then that’s going to require innovation on their part. Do they really want that? I don’t know” (Tim, assistant professor in social sciences). Indigenous innovation from a decolonial perspective was seen creating shifts in power dynamics in universities, which would help leading to a society based on more equal premises. Most participants agreed on the idea that transforming higher education through a decolonial lens is innovative. Several participants brought specific examples of how Indigenous knowledges in a higher education context would push the boundaries of what counts as valid knowledge. Examples included incorporating alternative ways of gaining knowledge into research practice through spiritual encounters, ceremony, or featuring land-based pedagogy in teaching practice. One participant mentioned how they considered the restoration and application of traditional knowledges in higher education spaces through curriculum changes an innovation. Those practices were seen to help centre Indigenous knowledges in academia and gradually shift the power dynamics between the two knowledge systems. A contradiction emerged when analysing the institutional documents. Innovation associated with decolonization was a theme that was visible only in one institutional strategic plan—that of the University of Saskatchewan (2018). Consequently, while Indigenous and western understandings of innovation share commonalities, there will be no change in higher education organizations unless the institutions accept decolonization as their core premise. There is no clear sign that decolonization has been widely accepted by higher education institutions yet. Nevertheless, there have been a series of developments that have created pressure points for universities to actively engage in Indigenization initiatives centred around Indigenous knowledges.

Explaining the change in Canadian higher education

The emergence of increased institutional attention towards Indigenous knowledges and the intent to include them into larger innovation narratives has become common. Gaudry and Lorenz (2018) pointed out that Canadian universities and colleges have felt pressured to Indigenize their institutions without a common understanding of or approach to these initiatives. This research has demonstrated that these organizational pressures on mainstream cultural norms have occurred through the influence of bottom-up advocacy work by Indigenous peoples. Following the institutional theory outlined above, political, functional, and social pressures are explained as follows.

Political pressures have gradually accumulated over decades of community-driven work that has centred around articulating the core principles and values of Indigenous participation in higher education. Engagement in the larger political scene with the federal government has served as an important mechanism for applying normative political pressure. Education and higher education as a path for Indigenous self-determination and self-governance have been consistently articulated in a series of policy documents. For example, as part of an early example of political activism, the Wahbung position paper (Manitoba Indian Brotherhood, 1971) by the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs centred a rights-based perspective in education. Indian Control over Indian Education (National Indian Brotherhood, 1972) marked another important development featuring education. It specifically articulates a vision for post-secondary education and the need to assist with supporting the success of Indigenous students in Canada. At the beginning of the 1990s, several other high-level reports around education were put forward, including the Ethical Guidelines for Research (Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, 1993) report and the First Nation Control of First Nation Education (Assembly of First Nations, 2010) report. The strongest political pressure for organizational change came from the most recent work of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee (2008–2015). The Committee’s final report provides a set of specific recommendations for higher education that have been taken up in institutional strategic plans. In 2018, the Canadian federal government committed $3.8 million to supporting new ways of doing research with First Nations, Métis, and Inuit communities (Government of Canada, 2021).

Participants in this research attested to various other, more recent socio-political events that have had an impact on their lives and have influenced their work. Increased concerns over missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, with most recent public attention created by the case of Tina Fontaine, a teenage girl murdered by a white man in 2014 in Manitoba, was cited (CBC, 2018). This case was seen to raise renewed awareness of the need for a national-level enquiry into systemic racism towards Indigenous peoples. The case of Colten Boushie, an Indigenous man who was fatally shot on a rural Saskatchewan farm by its white owner, was mentioned in association with inherent bias towards Indigenous peoples in the justice system in Canada (Graveland, 2018). Cathy, an assistant professor in social sciences noted: “There can’t be reconciliation without justice—I am referring to Colten Boushie and Tina Fontaine. You can’t talk about reconciliation when there is so much to do.” Both cases were seen to influence more critical work around racial discrimination against Indigenous peoples. The remains of Indigenous children found on various residential school sites across Canada were viewed as an additional driver towards revealing the extent of injustices committed against Indigenous peoples.

Functional pressures were detected when economic criteria of efficiency and effectiveness begin to conflict with institutional long-term survival. These pressures are associated with changing demographics and access to higher education. The demographic data show rapid expansion of Indigenous populations in Canada since the 1950s, a trend that continues today (Romaniuc, 2003; Statistics Canada, 2016). Furthermore, the population of Indigenous peoples is nearly a decade younger compared with that of the rest of Canada (Statistics Canada, 2019), meaning a stronger representation in and demand for the higher education system. A participant commented,

Indigenous people are the youngest and fastest growing population, and there is certainly a broken relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people centring around institutions. (Tim, assistant professor in social sciences)

This trend has been reflected in higher education by universities’ starting to develop access programmes for Indigenous students, differentiated admissions policies, and new scholarship opportunities to alleviate some of the financial problems that Indigenous students often experience (Preston, 2016).

Still, other types of functional pressures exist around effectiveness when Indigenous students are involved. For example, Indigenous students demonstrate their degree preference by choosing certain degrees over others such as Indigenous or Native studies or Treaty Law. There is also documented evidence of Indigenous students dropping out of higher education because of the lack of cultural relevance in its curriculum; Indigenous peoples may also be reluctant to seek university admission at all (Beitman Brener, 2017; Kristoff & Cottrell, 2021). Loss of graduate students and their resource contributions can be particularly detrimental to research excellence, pressuring universities to shift their practices and underlying norms and values. To access funds, the federal government requires institutions to comply with performance indicators associated with equity and diversity. Universities must annually collect and present data on Indigenous hires and research projects. A research participant reflected: “I think part of hiring us [Indigenous faculty] is to say that we’ve succeeded to some degree, because they are good organizations, right?” (Maggie, assistant professor in social sciences). Linking resources to demonstrated performance indicators is often a path to surface-level change in which universities are simply counting heads to tick the diversity box, while deeper-level systematic shift remains a distant goal.

Ahmed (2012) described how institutional commitment to inclusion may paradoxically be used to prevent the transformation of systemic racism. Giving small amounts of dedicated resources generates competition among Indigenous groups, creates debt for diverse Indigenous bodies and, thus, allows avoiding talking about structural, systemic issues within institutions that need to be addressed.

The findings also suggested that functional pressures may hold post-secondary institutions back from supporting decolonial approaches to innovation. For example, as Indigenous innovation is not always associated with direct economic benefits but with safeguarding cultural heritage, this is when the surface-level institutional support becomes apparent. It is difficult to justify the resources spent on structural and systemic changes in higher education organizations without showing how this might have a positive impact on competitiveness or institutional excellence by western terms.

Social pressures are associated with the critical research emerging from Indigenous scholars and faculty members. The active work of advocating for new norms began around the 2000s when critical works published by various Indigenous scholars (Battiste, 2000; Cajete, 1999; Smith, 1999) became a foundational body of literature around Indigenous knowledges. Since then, the norms around Indigenous knowledges from strength-based perspectives have started to advance and be more strongly linked to Indigenous empowerment and self-determination. Problematizing western norms and worldviews led higher education institutions to create Indigenous advisory committees and Indigenous councils for consultative purposes starting in the 1990s. Policy documents and strategic plans were followed in the late 2000s, with Simon Fraser University establishing their First Nations University-Wide Strategic Plan in 2007 (Simon Fraser University, 2007) and the University of British Columbia introducing its Aboriginal Strategic Plan in 2009 (University of British Columbia, 2009). These documents grounded institutional efforts towards more formal policy shifts in norm-advocacy work.

Furthermore, individual efforts from Indigenous faculty members have had an important impact on organizational change. Most participants commented on their experiences with challenging western assumptions and norms during faculty councils, department meetings, their classes, or informal conversations colleagues with students, staff, and colleagues. As a result of the work by Indigenous peoples as a collective, the taken-for-granted attitudes and institutional practices that have characterized Canadian higher education institutions for decades are starting to change. A participant commented on the normative change:

I think we’ve pushed people to think, we’ve pushed people . . . . We’ve been the consciousness. We’ve been the environmental consciousness. We’ve been the spiritual consciousness. We’ve been the cultural consciousness. We’ve been the consciousness of what happened through colonization, decolonizing consciousness. Those are all . . . if you want to call it, creativity. (Linda, associate professor in social sciences)

Still, these conversations require a lot of emotional investment and readiness to engage in conflict, potentially hurt feelings, and discomfort. As a result, there is a large emotional burden and personal time investment associated with these contacts that put pressure on Indigenous faculty members as they attempt to create broader awareness by educating others. This finding aligns with previous research in which scholars have described the uneven interface between Indigenous and non-Indigenous worldviews, have emphasized how Indigenous peoples face conflicting demands while living in multidimensional worlds (Ahenakew, 2016; Ahmed, 2012), and have underlined the emotional labour that leaves Indigenous peoples with feelings of frustration and tiredness when teaching a different way to people who are often resistant to being taught something new (Jimmy et al., 2019). Critical decolonizing approaches to teaching others require significant emotional labour and take a toll on Indigenous faculty’s physical and mental wellbeing.

Conclusion

There were two research questions that guided this article. The first research question asked, What constitutes Indigenous innovation, and does it have connections with western perspectives of innovation? The findings suggest that, while innovation is largely a western concept grounded in the narratives of scientific technological progress and excellence, there are characteristics of the western view of innovation that Indigenous peoples share. Those are creativity, transformation, and the flow of knowledge across disciplinary boundaries that lead to a betterment of life. The purpose of innovation for some Indigenous peoples is decolonization—emphasizing First Nations, Métis, and Inuit cultural values and creating shifts in the power dynamic through Indigenous knowledges. As this way of thinking is profoundly challenging and new to higher education institutions, it constitutes an organizational innovation where new norms are becoming recognized and constituted into the institutional structures. This development has become a new standard for innovation that universities are gradually becoming more aligned with.

The second research question asked, What environmental pressures have made higher education institutions in Canada consider Indigenous innovation in higher education planning?

Creating normative change in universities has been considered an almost impossible task (Brunette-Debassige, 2021). Established university policies and practices are so deeply ingrained in traditional western norms that challenging those standards often results in defeat. Still, institutional theory conceptualizes higher education institutions as open systems that have direct interactions with their internal and external environments, share information, and are receptive to various socio-economic pressures. Conceptualizing higher education institutions as living, multilayered organizations that serve multiple and sometimes conflicting purposes allows the assumption that change is actually an inherent and normal part of organizational development. The findings indicate that Indigenous peoples have become a powerful stakeholder group in the Canadian higher education system. While significant outside pressures have come from Indigenous groups, there are many complexities and limitations associated with the long-term sustainability of such change. There are still many continuous challenges that come with the push towards systemic change in universities—competition for resources between Indigenous groups, activities accommodated only when they converge with the interests and accepted norms of the dominant cultural group, expected gratitude from Indigenous groups for being accommodated. Indigenous activities in universities often have a projectified approach to institutional change, where short-term programmes or single initiatives are used to avoid the long-term work necessary to address systemic racism and create foundational shift in institutional norms and values. All these issues create potential barriers to the long-term sustainability of change.

Indigenous peoples’ active engagement in the larger political scene, particularly with the Canadian federal government, has served as an important mechanism for applying normative pressures. Education, including higher education, as a path for Indigenous self-determination and self-governance has been consistently articulated in a series of policy documents. Socio-political events emphasized by the media have created an opportunity to broadly draw attention to racism and systematic inequities in the justice system. The functional pressures involved in changing demographics and access to higher education are important. Social pressures emerging from critical research work have been another significant factor driving organizational change. Mobilizing forces over several decades and applying political, functional, and social pressures against hegemonic and imperial approaches in higher education have made Canadian universities engage in equity, diversity, and inclusion agendas, develop strategic documents on Indigenous issues, apply cluster-hire approaches to the employment of Indigenous faculty members, and develop new research grants to support Indigenous research.

Overall, these developments demonstrate that organizational change has not been driven by the altruistic commitments of higher education institutions to support equity, diversity, and inclusion. The change has been driven by many Indigenous communities grounded in Indigenous knowledges and applying various pressures over decades on our institutions, including universities. There have been decades of community-based work driving this change. However, when pressured to change, institutions are now eager to capitalize on this work and frame it as their efforts to achieve innovation and institutional excellence. More importantly, the main question becomes: How can these currently unfolding processes can be sustained? Isolated events may sometimes trigger cascading effects on an organizational scale, but the long-term sustainability of these efforts needs strategic undertakings and support from non-Indigenous groups. Significant work has been already accomplished by many Indigenous communities; now it is time for non-Indigenous individuals to take an active role in securing the continuous sustainability of this momentum. An important work by Jimmy et al. (2019) provides a starting point for universities and non-Indigenous individuals in terms of their roles and responsibilities in this journey towards institutional change. The authors highlighted braiding as a promising approach that would help to establish the harmony between two epistemologically and ontologically different knowledge systems. Braiding is premised on respecting the continued internal integrity of both sides and would open up opportunities for a continuous journey towards engagement and collaboration. Yet, before braiding can happen, preparation work must be done by non-Indigenous peoples. The authors emphasized the importance of facing and digesting the implications of historical and systemic harm, committing to action-oriented activities, and investing time, energy, and resources in systemic harm interruption in all institutional activities. The authors also mentioned the importance of developing the stamina, flexibility, and humility to sustain collaborations and relationships through difficulties associated with long-term work on colonial legacies from both sides. Thus, a starting point to having a stronger knowledge of the history of colonial practices is crucial. A willingness to notice and question the established beliefs and standard norms held in higher education in relation to Indigenous knowledges is important. It is also essential to re-evaluate the core norms and values that have worked so well for some, understanding that the norms underlying our higher education systems and institutional structures have been deeply oppressive and inequitable to Indigenous peoples.

This article focused on the perspectives of Indigenous peoples on innovation in the Canadian higher education context. Yet, there are important implications of this study that would be relevant to global audiences. First, the article draws attention to alternative ways of experiencing the concept of innovation. Examples from Indigenous experiences in higher education demonstrate that innovation means decolonization, shaking established power dynamics from within, and building spaces that are more equitable for marginalized groups. Second, the article demonstrates the powerful role of bottom-up initiatives on the part of Indigenous groups that have significantly pressured rigid academic institutions for change. Finally, the article also emphasizes the crucial role, responsibility, and work that non-Indigenous groups must engage in, to support the sustainability of the organizational change achieved by Indigenous peoples.