Decolonize Me

  I'll return now to exploring my relationship with land and how that contributes to my effort to decolonize my mind.   This is a way-back exercise.  Since childhood I have approached my exploration of new places by putting my bare feet on the earth and my hands on a plant or a tree.  As I mentioned in a previous post, I spent a lot of my time as a kid outside; the outdoors was a place where I forged friendships, in the spots where we ambled and ran and hid and sat to talk.  Connection to the land was also a consistent part of my family life.  I grew up on a farm, which meant I helped with the gardening, weeding, and harvesting.  I picked rocks in the fields and hauled bales of hay.  We always had an eye cast to the weather--wondering what the clouds, wind, rain, and snow had in store for us.  And, when we vacationed, we most often camped.  Some of my richest childhood memories are of walking the beaches of Hornby Island for hours o...

In " Decolonizing Educational Relationships ," the authors dedicate a chapter to exploring the western notion of modernity and how it relates to what they call colonial desires.  This has been a particularly enlightening piece for me to work through, though fraught with a fair amount of emotional rollercoaster-ing.  Let me try to explain.   Attempts to decolonize (ourselves and others) can only be successful if we are aware and critical of the specific ways that coloniality plays out in our own locations and personal contexts. Coloniality is a kind of logic that is based on binaries and hierarchies of value.  This means that settlers (colonizers) like myself tend to align with structures and processes that privilege our ways of doing things--including education, labour, spirituality, and enactment of the social norms that are perpetuated.  We are conditioned to view our modern, capitalist, colonial systems as superior to others, or at the very least we rema...

I've recently been thinking a lot about the moments that led to my explicit understanding of my own privilege.  This understanding started to grow while I was a student at the University of Saskatchewan, when I was in my early twenties.  I was taking a group dynamics class where the central activity was, well, working in a group.  One of the group members I worked with was an Indigenous woman from northern Saskatchewan - I'll call her Jane for now.   A couple of weeks into the term I learned that Jane was commuting from Prince Albert to Saskatoon to attend her classes.  It's about an hour and a half drive each way, and much more when the weather is bad (as it frequently is in that part of Saskatchewan).  I asked her if she had considered moving to Saskatoon while she was a student to make life a little simpler.  Yes, she said, but I haven't been able to find a place to live.  Any time I call up a landlord who has a rental posting they turn me...

  I will refer frequently to a new book throughout this journey,  Decolonizing Educational Relationships,  by fatima Pirbhai-Illich, Fran Martin, and Shauneen Pete. They offer a plethora of practical exercises for readers to engage in or use in their teaching practice, and I'll work my way through many of them here.    One of the first I'll try is called Locating Yourself , and involves a deep consideration of these questions: "Who are you?  How would you describe yourself, your identity?  Where were you born?  How would you describe your nationality?  Is it the same as where you were born?  What aspects of your family histories have contributed to your identity?  What are your family's relationships with colonialism?" (p. 18). This activity reminds me of one I encountered several years ago, called Belly Button Teachings , a Cree process for introducing yourself in an Indigenous way, that asks you to articulate who and what you are ...

I think the approach I'll take with this blog is to first reflect on what has past (in my life), establish where I am now, and then work forward.  Maybe a good place to start is with a question my colleague and mentor Shauneen Pete often poses to her students: How did you learn about Indigenous people?  She prompts students to dig back in their memories to identify how their opinions, thoughts, and feelings about Indigenous people were formed during childhood.   I grew up on a farm north-west of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, in Treaty 4 territory (though I definitely wouldn't have called it that as a child).  Interestingly, I can only recall a couple of times that I was explicitly taught anything about Indigenous people, and I think that was largely by accident.  My dad, who was a farmer, used to come across Indigenous artifacts - arrowheads, stone hammers, and the like.  He would bring these things home and show them to us, and inevitably shared a brief l...

Hi there - I'm Robin, and my blog is called, "Decolonize Me."  A quick glance at my photo might tell you why this blog is necessary.  I am a settler Canadian with mixed European ancestry stemming from England, Norway, Germany, Scotland, and Ireland.  After I commissioned my DNA profile from ancestry.ca it became clear, in addition to my translucent skin color, that I'm about as white as it gets. Prior to receiving my ancestry results I was cognitively aware of my whiteness, but the confirmation of my genealogy shifted my consideration of whiteness from my head to the emotional domain of my heart.   In the past decade or so I've become increasingly aware of my situated-ness as a white person and settler in the North American colonial project.  I have done a lot of learning about the colonial history, structures, and processes that I have been complicit in.  I am a scholar of higher education and I have a keen interest in exploring decolonial approaches ...