Killing the Indigene: Interrogating the Support of First Nations’ Diversity in the Modern University

Abstract

As an ongoing challenge to colonial incursion, many First Nations’ Communities and Peoples have centred education as a cornerstone to greater agency and self-determination. The difficulty for many Indigenous Peoples is that the engagement with the formal, mainstream academy contributes to reductive ideas of what constitutes Indigenous Peoples and cultures, and their ongoing engagement risks them being inculcated in diminishing understandings of the diversity of the First Nations’ experience. While the nineteenth century North American directive to ‘kill the Indian, save the man’ clearly constituted cultural genocide, the current higher education imperative encouraging homogenous knowledge acquisition fails to acknowledge and support diverse experiences and aspirations. In challenging practices that can result in an assimilationist approach to the Indigenous learner, this chapter will examine these problematic directives, as well as exploring practices and programs that centre First Nations’ learning, Knowledge(s) and strategies, and that reassert the diverse experiences and needs of both First Nations’ learners and their Communities.