Widening the circle: assuming differentiated responsibilities in the Indigenization of university education

Abstract

Since Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Canadian universities have pledged to Indigenize education and hired Indigenous Curriculum Specialists to implement this commitment. These new higher education employees, however, face limited resources for, and resistance to, their work. To move forward, Indigenous Curriculum Specialists are calling for fruitful dialogues between them and their interlocutors at all levels of decision and policy making. This article exemplifies and promotes such dialogues, by presenting a written version of the sharing circle the authors had about their experiences with implementing an Indigenous Curriculum Specialist-led Indigenization initiative. Readers are then invited to draw on the circle’s main themes—positionality, responsibility, and Indigenized practices—to reflect on the differentiated responsibilities they are themselves called upon to assume in Indigenizing post-secondary education from their own position. It is only through engaging all beings in this conversation that we will contribute to shared understandings and responsibility for the world.

Introduction

This article critically examines the differentiated responsibilities Indigenous Curriculum Specialists (ICSs) and their Indigenous and non-Indigenous interlocutors on campus are called upon to assume when attempting to Indigenize and decolonize post-secondary education. Indigenous people have never lacked higher education, when we employ this term beyond the confines of European tradition. Settlers, however, have long ignored not only the value and validity of their knowledge since they were established on Turtle Island, otherwise known as North America (Stein, 2020), but also more recently their calls for equitable access and presence in post-secondary education institutions (Battiste, 2013). To address this educational injustice, a call to Indigenize the academy emerged in the early 2000s, summoning universities to expand the academy’s narrow conceptions of knowledge to allow the transformative inclusion of Indigenous contents, pedagogies, and philosophies (Mihesuah & Wilson, 2004). In Canada, this call became stronger following the release of its Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) 94 Calls for Action in 2015, which included calls that post-secondary institutions integrate Indigenous knowledge and teaching methods into classrooms (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015). Since then, most Canadian universities have pledged in their strategic plans to Indigenize education and hired ICSs to implement this commitment (Raffoul et al., 2022).

Indigenous Curriculum Specialists’ roles involve supporting faculty and staff in engaging respectfully with Indigenous people’s ways of knowing, doing, and being, as well as working with all levels of universities’ administrations toward decolonizing the academy (Garrick, 2023). Their focus, therefore, is on relationship-building on multiple fronts. They work with professors to change their course design and pedagogy beyond simply including Indigenous content to their curricula, with administrators and support staff to transform universities’ structures and procedures, all the while developing their own Indigenized work plan, so as to exemplify an educational learning journey that is grown from and with Indigenous knowledges. Indigenous Curriculum Specialists’ work, thus, raises many tensions and challenges, since most universities have approached Indigenization as “conditional inclusion” (Gaudry & Lorenz, 2018). From this perspective, Indigenous knowledge systems are to remain excluded, or forced into existing academic disciplines, so as to consolidate instead of disrupting Euro-Canadian philosophies’ claim to universality (Battiste, 2013) and institutional Whiteness (Ahmed, 2012). To thoroughly unsettle Euro-Canadian material and symbolic privileges in the academy, ICSs believe along with numerous Indigenization scholars (Battiste, 2013; Kuokkanen, 2007) that Indigenous perspectives ought to be valued according to their own standards. While this process of Indigenization and decolonization should be led by Indigenous actors, it simultaneously requires non-Indigenous academics to address their own enduring investments and complicity in reproducing White supremacy in their research, course curricula, and beyond (Daigle, 2019). This process, however, is hampered by the limited resources and focus generally dedicated to it. On the one hand, in most institutions, only one ICS is expected to carry the load of supporting the Indigenization of hundreds of programs (Raffoul et al., 2022). This type of expectation, combined with the emotional burden of daily interactions with non-Indigenous academics who might believe they have already adequately atoned for the sins of colonization (Howell & Ng-A-Fook, 2022), leads to enactments of Indigenous refusals (Brunette-Debassige, 2023), reconciliation fatigue (Stein, 2020), and burnout (Raffoul et al., 2022). On the other hand, there is no clear consensus around what Indigenization effectively is, nor how it should effectively be operationalized. Addressing that fundamental ambiguity, Dussault and Tolley dedicated the first weeks of their work as ICS at the University of Ottawa to come up with a working definition of Indigenization in the context of that institution. The Indigenization of higher education is under ongoing development in specific times and places and must always be understood in that context, which is to say, relationally. Yet, while the process of how we effectively Indigenize is contextual and local, it is still necessary to define what Indigenizing means, at least as a general statement. Very modestly, Dussault and Tolley ended up defining Indigenization as a process of inclusion, restoration, and promotion of Indigenous Peoples, Indigenous knowledge systems, lands, teachings, languages which must come with critical engagement, and serious commitment from the institution. In that sense, Indigenization feeds decolonization—and the other way around too. They both question the so-called universality of Western ways of thinking and doing by pluralizing social and scientific reality and by valuing Indigenous lives, and Indigenous ways of thinking, doing, and being in the world.

Indigenous Curriculum Specialists identify sustaining fruitful dialogues between themselves and their interlocutors at all levels of decision and policy making as one of the key ways to move forward (Raffoul et al., 2022). This article’s objective is to exemplify and promote such dialogues, by sharing our experience with implementing an ICS-led Indigenization initiative at the Faculty of Social Sciences (FSS), University of Ottawa, Canada, which was built upon the traditional, unsurrendered, and unceded territory of the Anishinaabeg. In 2019, Vanthuyne and Molgat, who are Francophone White settlers currently residing in Ottawa and Gatineau, respectively, founded the FSS Indigenization and Decolonization Committee (IDC) with colleagues. They did so on their own accord but with the moral and financial endorsement of the FSS Dean, with the goal of promoting and providing support for the Indigenization of the FSS course curricula, and in this way, answer the TRC education-related calls for action. Following consultations with Indigenous leaders on campus, this committee, which gathers delegates from each of the FSS departments, recommended the hire of an ICS to the Faculty’s administrators. Dussault, a member of the Wendat First Nation, and Tolley, a member of the Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg (Garden River People) First Nation, Quebéc, Canada, were appointed as the FSS’s part-time ICSs in October 2020. While Dussault served in that capacity until January 2022, Tolley is still employed as such. As co-coordinators of the FSS IDC, Vanthuyne (2019–ongoing) and Molgat (2019–2021) have provided administrative, moral, and political support to these two ICSs.

After briefly introducing this article’s methodology, we will share the asynchronous and collective written sharing circle we had between April and November 2022 on the Indigenization process at the FSS. We will then invite our readers to draw on the main themes of our circle to reflect on the differentiated responsibilities they are called upon to assume in Indigenizing post-secondary education from their own position.

Methodology

This article builds on an ongoing research collaboration between Dussault, Tolley, and Vanthuyne for a participatory action research (PAR) project led by the latter on the Indigenization initiative at the FSS. It is during a discussion with Molgat about how we could Indigenize the process of disseminating research results through writing academic articles together that we came up with the idea of employing a written version of the sharing circle as our principal methodology. What follows, therefore, does not draw on that PAR project directly. It is rather the space of (un)learning that the PAR project opened up that lead us to experiment with the written version of the sharing circle.

Indigenous peoples, and more specifically the Anishinaabeg First Nation, have developed and traditionally employed sharing circles as a tool for personal growth and collective transformation. Anishinaabe pedagogy is built on lifelong learning and the understanding that all beings are simultaneously teachers and learners, although they have different positions and responsibilities. Through active listening to one person at a time, the sharing circle method, when used in a research setting, provides a respectful and supportive environment, in which participants can express their perspectives and reflect on their experiences without interruption or questioning (Lavallée, 2009). In contrast to focus groups, which are geared toward collecting information from participants, sharing circles are “acts of sharing all aspects of the individual—heart, mind, body, and spirit” (Lavallée, 2009, p. 29), where facilitators are considered equal contributors. As such, they rebalance the researcher–participant relationship, by promoting a shared understanding of a research problem. As an Indigenous research methodology, they are also grounded in an ethic of shared responsibility for the world, including non-human persons (Kovach, 2009; Wilson, 2008). From this perspective, research is never objective in the most common apprehension of the concept, but necessarily framed by researchers’ and participants’ positionalities (Simon et al., 2023) and life experiences. It is also principally geared toward enhancing well-being, thus prioritizing relationship-building over the so-called collection of data.

Since the primary purpose of our work together has always been enhancing Indigenous students’ and faculty’s experiences at the FSS, Indigenous methodologies, and more specifically Anishinaabe (a group of First Nations people that live around the Great Lakes, Canada and the USA; otherwise known as Alonquin) methodologies, seemed the most appropriate to critically assess our collective efforts toward reaching our goals. Besides, given our contrasted positions—settler or Indigenous, full professor, associate professor, professional in residence, or PhD student—we found that the sharing circle was the most appropriate method for that purpose. However, instead of using it in its traditional, oral form, as a first step toward gathering knowledge for cowriting an article, we chose to employ a written version of that methodology as a way to directly cowrite—sequentially but collectively—our research results, based on the relationships we had built together and are continuing to build. This article, therefore, navigates from collective to individual voices, builds upon personal experiences and reflections, and critically engages with one another’s contributions to collectively reflect upon our differentiated positionalities in the Indigenization process. Writing asynchronously allowed us to meaningfully engage with our colleagues’ sharing, better understand their standpoint, and adjust our responsibilities consequently when needed. In other words, it allowed us to Indigenize the writing process by applying the principles of respect, responsibility, and relationality to it (Snow et al., 2016). We also decided that Tolley, as a knowledge keeper of this methodology, should facilitate our sharing, and as such, initiate it. Mona Tolley has received and facilitated sharing circle teachings under the guidance of Elder Peter Beaucage in the Certificate of Native Drug and Alcohol Counseling program at Canadore College.

We also agreed that participants would reflect on how they related to their predecessors’ words, as individuals differently positioned vis-à-vis the Indigenization of post-secondary curricula at the University of Ottawa. Positionality, therefore, emerged as a core concept of our conversation: to responsibly engage in the Indigenizing process and to honor our relationships, it became essential to deepen our understanding of our respective positionalities, and engage with our colleagues’ sharing. When one understands their positionality, they become aware of their role and, by doing so, it informs their responsibilities toward others while allowing oneself to nurture them because we know them. Positionality, as our sharing circle testifies, anchors us in our relationships to ourselves, to others, and to the world.

It might now seem contradictory that we nonetheless initiated our article with a conventional academic tone and content. After completing our sharing circle, we decided to revert it back, in a way, by weaving in multiple perspectives: Indigenous, academic, and experiential. It felt that our message would be better understood by a larger audience if we were to operate as “cultural brokers” (Pete, 2018, p. 176) by interpreting and translating between worldviews. Since our goal is to braid ways of knowing and being in the world, and to bring people in that circle, we have decided to create a path for others to come.

Sharing circle

Opening

Kwey Kakina—Greetings to All,

As per my Anishinabe protocols, I want to welcome you and say migwech—thank you—to you for taking your time to come and engage with our sharing. I want you to know that we, the authors have come together in a good way, with the intention to share our experiences, so we may be able to transfer knowledge about this process of decolonizing and in promoting the Indigenizing of the academy. I am providing this opening because the University of Ottawa, where this work is taking place, sits upon the unceded, unsurrendered land of my people the Màmìwininì Anishinàbeg (People living down the river; otherwise known as Algonquin). I would also like to take this time to focus a migwech to the Indigenous peoples whose territory upon which you are currently sitting as you are reading this article. Since time immemorial, Indigenous peoples have been the caretakers of their territories, and this special relationship is always noted in our ways. (Mona Tolley)

Mona Tolley’s sharing

Kwey Kakina—Mona Tolley nindijinakaz, Migizi nindodem, Kitigan Zibi nindondjiba, Anishinabekwe niin (—my name is Mona Tolley, Bald Eagle clan, I live in Kitigan Zibi, I am an Anishinabe woman). I greet you in the language of my people, to share my name, my clan and how I belong to the Nation I come from. This is important because it also informs you of my relationships and thus responsibilities and to whom I am accountable. I have a responsibility to my people, and this is the prime reason I accepted the position of ICS at the University of Ottawa. My focus has always been on Indigenous pedagogy, centring on the progression of lifelong learning, but I have also come to understand the importance of connections in Indigenous epistemology of what is comprised of a wholistic system. It is with this lens that I am doing my work. I wish I could just focus on Indigenizing, but we are not there yet. For that to happen, the decolonizing process needs to be moved further along; to create more space, to live and grow, and to truly value Indigenous Ways of Knowing and Doing. Decolonizing and Indigenizing is more than focusing on the curriculum. It also requires change of the connections of the system of the university. My focus, as the part-time ICS at UOttawa FSS, has been on relationship-building, to support an environment of decolonizing, as well as on providing knowledge about Indigenous people, which has been historically omitted or marginalized in the Canadian education system. My work has also been about building relationships with other Indigenous peoples doing this work because Indigenization is collaboration. It is to be noted that this is not easy work as an Anishinabe. I do not have the luxury of this work being an objective endeavour; the harsh realities that my people face are ones I am impacted by, either personally or by being connected through community. But just as I know how much we struggle due to colonizing practices, I also know that our teachings of wellbeing hold the answers in their practices. So, I have made it a priority to Indigenize my work plan, focusing on mino pimadiziwin (the good life)—my wholistic wellbeing, learning, and growth, both in Indigenous knowledges as well as the others.

A tension which surfaces in this work is situated in one challenging question: Is fully Indigenizing the academy even possible? I honestly do not know if it’s possible, but I do know that the process of trying is needed. This is upholding the “Truth” part, in the “Truth and Reconciliation Calls to Action.” And I do know that Indigenous people—with Indigenous knowledges—are the ones who should lead the process and assess how well the process is going. So, the notion of positionality and thus relationality informs responsibility and accountability. At the core of our connections, we should keep in mind that we are all interconnected; it is all—land, animals, plants, water, air, and people’s—whose wellbeing we are working towards. Navigating this work, with all its tensions, the positive changes and obstacles, the teaching and learning opportunities—which includes mistake making, as well as through purposefully putting into practice my people’s ways of knowing and doing, has been a cultivation of gathering of knowledge which I hope adds to the wellbeing of my people.

Marc Molgat’s sharing

Kwey Kakina—Marc Molgat nindijinakaz, Gatineau nindondjiba, migwech (—my name is Marc Molgat, I live in Gatineau, thank you) Mona for your opening words and sharing. I want to start out by stating, like you, where I am from and who are my people. This inevitably brings up tensions as I emerge from a White settler background. I grew up in Winnipeg and spent most of my youth in Saint-Vital and Saint-Boniface in Francophone communities. Growing up and in school, I was surrounded by Métis [a people of mixed European and Indigenous ancestry, and one of the three recognized Aboriginal peoples of Canada] children who for the most part did not speak of their identity. Looking back, this silence was even more telling that my high school was named after the historical Métis leader, Louis Riel. Silence was also part of the open spaces that I loved to contemplate and play in as soon as I set foot outside the city. On the way to my grandparents’ home, a three-hour car ride up north, we would pass field upon field of cultivated land: wheat, barley, mustard, and other crops growing on fertile lands. It was not until much later that I came to recognize these fields as the plains that have formed an important part of the geography of southern Manitoba since the Ice Age; plains that are the traditional territory of many Indigenous peoples and that have been conquered, tamed and made into fields through colonization. So, I have come to see these wide-open spaces as both beautiful, vast, and freeing (plains) and as symbols of colonization (fields). In a way, this is how I view my university where I am a professor and was for many years an administrator. It is both a beautiful and open place to free the mind from the shackles of ignorance and a hurtful place because of its historical relation to the Oblates who not only administered the university until 1965, but also ran residential schools in Canada, and because of its continued silencing of Indigenous voices and knowledges. My relationship with you, Mona, Catherine and Karine, is infused by this perspective, by my positionality as you aptly put it Mona.

As we worked together to try to set up the work of decolonizing and Indigenizing FSS, my point of view from the outset was that it was important that it be built from the ground up. As a Vice-Dean in the FSS, I was the administrative point person for our work and, before you—Mona and Catherine—arrived, Karine and I had already identified the process through which Indigenization would take place: each department in the Faculty would name a person to sit on IDC and each department would develop an Indigenization and Decolonization Plan with the help of the specialists that, once approved, would lead to a few course releases and a small budget allocation. This seemed to me to be the most appropriate way of ensuring not only that Indigenization and decolonization would not be “imposed” on colleagues and academic programs, but that the locus of power for curriculum changes would remain with those whose knowledge of their disciplines was the greatest. It is important to note that tensions and mistrust permeate relations with any upper administration levels in our university.

Defining this framework and a budget outline were essential to getting the ICSs positions and substantial funding approved. Although it has enabled Indigenization and decolonization work in many FSS units, my opinion as a mid-level administrator at the time is that this framework has also proved constraining: it imposed a program of work on the ICSs; the IDC and the Specialists have not been recognized formally within the FSS structure; Indigenization and decolonization have been linked to the Vice-Dean Undergraduate Office for resources and administrative support, although there is no budget to ensure it; funds must constantly be requested through special requests to the Dean’s office, despite a significant investment from the FSS, this is not a permanent feature of the budget.

This funding aspect seems particularly flawed and problematic. Because there is no guaranteed funding from the central administration for Faculty-level Indigenization and decolonization, the Dean has turned to private funding for many of the additional measures that Mona and Catherine have identified as essential for Indigenization to occur. I think there needs to be dedicated and stable funding for Indigenization and decolonization; otherwise, we will always be grasping at straws and limiting the depth and breadth of our plans and activities. Relying upon private donors who either have their own ideas about Indigenization and decolonization or agendas to legitimize their tenuous/exploitative relations with Indigenous communities [such as, extractive resource companies], only risks perpetuating the view of our university as a hurtful space.

In sharing my perspective, I have come to realize that at the outset of the initiative, I was working toward re-creating plains—the Indigenization and decolonization goals—where fields have been sowed, but by relying on the tools and processes of Western knowledge and institutions, that is, those that were meant for the fields. The relationships we have started to build will hopefully allow for collaborative work in order to change academia. Mona, in direct response to you, it has been difficult to ensure that Indigenous people and Indigenous knowledges lead the process. This was not how the process started out (as I described above), despite our efforts, Karine’s and mine, to consult with Indigenous leaders on campus on how to start it, how to develop the ICSs positions and how to do the hiring. But I am hopeful because you are here, Mona and Catherine, because there are strong allies in the FSS and because we are developing more relationships with Indigenous communities. Am I naïve to think that Indigenous tools and processes will surely enable us to do the much-needed decolonizing work?

Karine Vanthuyne’s sharing

Kwey Kakina—Karine Vanthuyne nindijinakaz, Ottawa nindondjiba, migwech (—my name is Karine Vanthuyne, I live in Ottawa, thank you) Mona for your opening words, and Mona and Marc for your sharing. Like Marc, I am also a Francophone White settler, but born and raised in Kanyen’kehá:ka (People of the Chert; an Indigenous people of southeastern Canada and northern New York State, USA; otherwise known as Mohawk) territory, Montreal, with roots in Belgium and France as a second-generation immigrant.

I only started to realize I was a White settler growing up in an Indigenous, occupied territory the day I turned 17 years old, on July 11, 1990. That day, the Emergency Response Team of the Sureté du Québec (the provincial police force of Québec, Canada; literally, Québec’s Safety) violently attempted to dismantle a barricade that Kanyen’kehà:ka had set up to prevent the development of a golf course on one of their burial grounds. Thus began a historical 77 days-long stand-off between Turtle Island’s original caretakers and the settler state and population. As Indigenous peoples from nations throughout Canada and the USA joined the Kanyen’kehà:ka warriors at their barricade, the local non-Indigenous residents and the provincial and federal governments adopted increasingly violent measures to dislodge them. My lifelong learning/unlearning journey about the true history of “my” country was then launched. Like Marc, I had been conditioned through school, the media, as well as my settler social environment to not see Kanyen’kehà:ka (the plains) [not a translation for Kanyen’kehà:ka] behind Oka (the fields) [not a translation for Oka, which is a small village northwest of Montreal, Québec, Canada].

I have since then developed relationships with Indigenous friends, students and colleagues that have significantly sustained my gathering of the “Truth” part Mona mentioned above. However, I have simultaneously come to appreciate the tremendous obstacles to my own and my peers’ decolonization, including in a university context. On the one hand, and I share Marc’s optimism here, our institution’s recent adoption of an Anishnaabe-centred Indigenous Action Plan, combined with our Faculty’s important, although non-permanent, investment in our Indigenization and decolonization initiative, both signal a significant move away from the University of Ottawa’s assimilation-oriented, genocidal foundations. Yet, as Catherine and I have argued in an article we co-wrote about that initiative (Vanthuyne & Dussault, 2022), it remains to be seen if these key developments will contribute in the end to the restitution of Indigenous territories and knowledge, rather than to the reproduction of settler colonialism. Are these plans and initiatives tokenistic? Are they simply demonstrating the ability of neoliberal institutions to absorb criticism into their hegemonic project (Bilge, 2020)? Or are they rather allowing for a genuine redistribution of power and resources to the Anishinaabeg people, the traditional guardians of the land the university is settled on? To be sure, the issues you raised, Marc, around funding are seriously impeding that genuine redistribution to happen. And Mona, you shared not knowing if it is actually possible to Indigenize the academy.

When I hear you saying, Mona, that the process of trying, however, is needed, I am urged to reflect upon what exactly are my responsibilities as a settler in this process. It would be easy, and certainly more comfortable, to just remain critical of our work. That is what I’ve been trained to do as an academic. I could also let more qualified Indigenous colleagues like you and Catherine do that work—you definitely know best about the tools and processes that can dismantle the Eurocentrism at the heart of higher education. Yet, I have come to realize that, as much as I have to let you and the other Indigenous actors on campus lead this process, I do have to get my own hands dirty, so that the burden of decolonizing this university is not left on your Indigenous shoulders only. Nonetheless, in so doing, I have to recognize and embrace the unavoidable ambivalence White settlers like me end up feeling when challenging the status quo. So far, we have benefitted from it. While we, white settlers, may recognize the merits of decolonization, we cannot unambiguously celebrate the loss of our comfort, centrality, and relevance. And universities are especially challenging places to experience such loss. We don’t get closer to a university promotion by humbling up. Quite the opposite. So how do we create anew our accountability standards, ones that would centre our interconnectedness, and thus relationality and shared responsibility for all—land, animals, plants, water, air, and people’s wellbeing?

Catherine Dussault’s sharing

Kwe kakina—kwe aweti’(—hello everyone). I am Catherine Dussault, member of the Wendat First Nation. I was hired with Mona as an Indigenous curriculum specialist at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Ottawa. After briefly introducing myself and sharing my positionality, I must still express the discomfort I experience with the practice, although I acknowledge its relevance since it exposes our responsibilities and to whom and what we hold ourselves accountable to. It forces us to reflect upon them and possibly engage in a critical discourse about them. My embarrassment comes from the feeling that such a practice might crystallize the identity one wants to share or feels they must share at a certain point of their life, with a certain audience. It may reduce the complexity of our entangled identities that are becoming increasingly complex. In a way, it reifies them. In the same vein, the possibility of being used as a token, or to be put “at the table and on the menu,” as Sirma Bilge (2020) brilliantly exposes, becomes even more plausible, especially for minoritized people. In this sense, Indigenous peoples might be called upon on the basis of an imagined identity that doesn’t correspond to their way of being, doing, thinking and feeling in the world, but that matches the expectation one might have of how their “identity” should be lived, experienced, and enacted.

Let me give an example. A few weeks ago, a reviewer of a paper I have submitted requested that I declare whether I am First Nation or not. He had “found” on the Internet that I am, indeed, Wendat. Yet, to his surprise, I was writing a paper without mentioning it anywhere. The reviewer didn’t ask me to explain what my theoretical allegiances are, nor what my sociocultural background is, nor to whom I hold myself accountable to and for. The question was reduced to its simplest form, in a dichotomic way: “Is the author a Quebecer [resident of the Province of Québec, Canada] or First Nation? It is not clear, and we should know.” And yet, I sensed that no easy answer could come out of that question. I am First Nation, and proud of it, as I made clear to them. However, I share settler ancestry; I am also a Quebecer. I have learned to live with—and against—that aspect of my identity. What the reviewer was asking me to do felt like I would have to discursively dissociate myself from myself. That was something I was not ready to do. Oversimplifying identities makes it easier, in my opinion, to use people as tokens and to “consume” their imagined identities in an extractive way. There are hardly ways to heal from the violence of this phenomenological dissociation and this is why, most times, I refuse to do it.

Don’t get me wrong, I am aware of the importance of positionality and, more generally, of the recognition of difference in society. In a similar train of thought, feminism, amongst other social movements, has also shown us how non-mixed groups or practices of positive discrimination are necessary in achieving goals of social justice and self-determination. For these reasons, I believe, following what Mona has said, that Indigenization is first and foremost a space created for Indigenous Peoples and that we must embrace and fully live in these spaces. However, one might argue that Indigenizing initiatives were developed within settler institutions, and therefore with a preset framework of the engagement for First Peoples within these institutions. Marc, you have exemplified this when sharing how the FSS Indigenization and decolonization initiative were initially set up. I guess this is where my discomfort comes from. It emerges from the difficulty of navigating these institutions that were shown to us as being “plains,” although they are “fields,” to pursue with the metaphor. Constraints naturally arise from the fact that our actions take place within an institution. But the institution itself is the condition of possibility of existence of our actions, and I truly believe we can use these spaces to induce transformative changes aiming for more social and epistemic justice. Our challenge is to learn how to work with and against these constraints, and this requires, in my opinion, a joint effort.

In that shared willingness to make our Faculty a safer place for Indigenous students and faculty, I think it is our mutual task to recognize the enormous weight that is being put on Indigenous peoples. Not only we, First Peoples, might have prior relationships outside the university that we hold ourselves accountable to, but it seems like we must nurture them on top of the new relations we are creating, even though no time is allotted to take care of them as part of our positions. Moreover, in the context where identity theft cases are becoming more and more numerous, we are more than likely to be asked by the institution to sanction who is Indigenous and who is not. This practice, although necessary, is potentially violent to us. It also adds weight on our fellow Indigenous colleagues, and takes them away from doing other important work.

Furthermore, once Indigenous Peoples are “included” in the institutions, it does seem like, at times, we forget their differences. In other words, once Indigenous Peoples have access to university, they are at most times treated by the institution as any other colleague—for better or for worse. However, these “differences” were in the first place the justification for their integration within the institutions. We forget that we might challenge the very nature of the position we were hired for, or that we might need guidance to navigate universities, that mentorship, access to Knowledge Keepers or other Indigenized forms of learning and sharing might be essential to make the transition manageable—if felt like needed, of course. We also forget that at times, we might want to use different methods or value distinctive epistemologies.

On another note, Indigenous Peoples are seen within the University as the experts of any topic related—near and far—to Indigenous realities. This makes the task almost unbearable for us since the expectations are impossible to meet. We might feel like we are constantly failing. It can be a problem if we want to share responsibility and feel accountable towards our common goal, which is to aim for more social justice and full recognition.

This is a wish that you all, Mona, Marc, and Karine, have expressed in different ways. We have worked together as a team—and learned to do it—in order to decolonize and Indigenize the FSS. I genuinely think that great conditions were offered by the Faculty to reach it, with great freedom. Mona and I were discovering the position of “Indigenous Curriculum Specialist” just as we were creating it. In other words, we had to define what this position would entail for us—and our successors, in a way—while navigating the expectations we had to meet and the prior work that had been done to create the position. This was a tension that was at times hard to navigate, although it was exciting and enriching. As Mona has said, we must learn to trust the process, or at least try our best to make academia a safer and welcoming place for minoritized people, including First Nation, Inuit, and Métis, who are the guardians of the land, a place where we live, experience, and grow.

Widening the circle: moving toward assuming differentiated responsibilities

There are several areas of shared views which we found to emerge from our perspectives. We present them below to engage you, the reader, in our conversation. Because we have chosen a written and asynchronous version of the sharing circle, we realize that this cannot respond to all of its principles. However, we believe that our experiences and reflections can be useful to others who are engaged in decolonization initiatives in post-secondary institutions. In this sense, we hope that beyond our own aims of personal growth and collective transformation locally, you will feel welcomed and inspired to continue these discussions with those around you. At the end of this section, we propose a few questions that may help braid (Kimmerer, 2013) your perspectives into our story, enriched by our experiences and positionalities.

Differentiated positionalities

All our sharing seem to point in the same direction: Indigenizing and decolonizing university education is a complex goal we all aim for, and a way forward is the rebalancing of relationships. Our actions stem from our different standpoints which are informed by both our positionality and by what we could call the structural position we occupy within academia: Indigenous knowledge keeper, administrator, professor—with or without tenure, student, or contractual specialist. Both elements, which share at the same time an epistemological, methodological, and structural nature, determine—at least partially—the way we will or we can engage in that project. For that reason, and as our sharing have demonstrated, teamwork between Indigenous knowledge keepers, administrators, professors, and students is relevant and gives us strength.

Responsibility

Despite our distinct sensitivities and positionalities, we saw that we share focus and methods. For instance, the first step we have all taken in the direction of Indigenizing, even though we have highlighted its difficulties, is to critically engage with our positionalities. We have seen how this methodological and epistemological exercise of transparency and reflexivity is not as simple as it seems. In the hope of decolonizing and Indigenizing, one must become aware of their (un)conscious biases to work with and against them. The approach becomes normative when the information acquired through this reflexive process is used to guide our actions and to hold ourselves accountable to all the relationships that determine who we are at a certain point in our lives. In the same vein, one must become conscious of the unintended effects of being socialized in a certain way and in particular institutions. Indeed, our opinions and interests may differ depending on the structural position we occupy in academia: even though we share work, intents, and ambitions, we all do it from differentiated structural positions that inform our representations and ambitions. However, despite these differences, we have demonstrated how we are all equally committed to Indigenizing and decolonizing academia and have shown that we all share responsibility in that project. In other words, acknowledging difference in positionalities does not necessarily lead to arbitrariness or confusion in the actions we take. It only allows us to build stronger relationships and reach more sustainable goals.

Indigenized ways of doing and processes

Finally, the approach that has organically emerged of our exchanges leans toward Indigenization, as it is Indigenized itself: our processes are based upon commitment to building relationships, humility and honesty, and reciprocity. It is also Indigenized in the sense that it is anchored locally, as a guiding principle of this work is to start below your feet. Not only do we build upon local knowledge, but our actions are made while being aware of the (im)possibilities offered by the institution we work in—and by our efforts to subvert them at times. To continue using and reinforcing the appropriate processes mentioned above, we must create the means of educating ourselves and developing these skills that we share at different levels and intensity. Ultimately, by training our skills, but also the skills of the next generation of Indigenous scholars, experts, and knowledge keepers, we want to make this approach something that is not only Indigenous-driven, as it is now by Mona—and Catherine in the past, but also something that is Indigenous-owned, in the sense that the processes would be fully Indigenized and that the funding would be managed by Indigenous Peoples and would come from a permanent income stream.

Weaving: building something new together

Weaving is a common metaphor used by Indigenous authors for the interconnectedness of lives, stories, and generations. It also calls upon the importance of weaving together different ways of knowing—scientific, cultural, experiential, and ecological (Kimmerer, 2013). In any case, the idea of interconnectedness and responsibility to all is of the outmost importance. We use it here to invite you, the reader, as you are now part of the story, to reflect upon these same three themes of (a) positionality; (b) responsibility; and (c) Indigenized ways of doing. How could you engage in an Indigenizing approach following these three anchors? How would it be enacted in your institution?

Conclusion

In a recently published volume on the place of non-Indigenous academics in researching, writing, and teaching about Indigenous cultures and legal orders, the editors, John Borrows and Kent McNeil (2022), claim that “the more appropriate question may not be what is their place, but rather what are their responsibilities” (p. 10, emphasis in original work). To lessen the burden on Indigenous peoples of undoing colonialism and racism, and creating more respectful and just relations, all professors have a responsibility to teach Indigenous contents and perspectives. As one of their contributors put it, “Sharing this task underlines its importance, and sends the message [to Indigenous and non-Indigenous students alike] that ‘setting things right’ is important enough to be everyone’s job” (Hoehn, 2022, p. 105). To foster “cultural collaboration” in lieu of “cultural appropriation” (Craft, 2022, p. 62), however, as this volume reckons, all parties must commit to an unsettling, Indigenized form of accountability anchored not in objectivity or neutrality, but in respect, reciprocity, and humility.

In this article, we have aimed to modestly contribute to this unsettling in two ways. First, we chose to present our data not as it is traditionally produced, mediated, and consumed in academia, but rather as our unfiltered first-person voices, experiences of, and views on the FSS’s Indigenization initiative. As persons differently involved in Indigenization as decolonization, we showed how we dialogued with each other, and what outcomes such dialogues may produce. Second, we hope that our written sharing circle demonstrates some of the concrete ways by which we can unsettle the academy to create spaces for Indigenization to occur, when engaging fully with our differentiated responsibilities. Just as the sharing circle is an iterative process of learning and transformation, we believe that by engaging in this conversation more widely, with people locally and globally, we are contributing to shared understandings and responsibility for the world.