Abstract
This chapter takes on the colonial baggage that non-Aboriginal teachers must unpack when engaging in educational activities in Indigenous communities. Through narratives and critical reflection on her own six-year engagement with music teaching in Iqaluit, Canada, the author examines the possibilities for decolonizing the work of teaching in Indigenous communities. Personal narratives are placed in dialogue with literature about teachers teaching in remote areas. This allows the author to reimagine a practice that moves beyond re-inscribing colonial, racist and ethnocentric practices to a practice that gives authority to local truths and Indigenous tradition. Implications for teacher education are examined through the experiences of two graduate students who engaged in a residency in the community along with the author. The students reported transformation of ethnocentric and preconceived stereotypic perspectives, leading them to critically examine their own teaching practices. This work is presented as a model for engaging in critical examination of personal teaching practice.
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Notes
- 1.
“Frozen in Frobisher Bay” was written by James Gordon (1992) and has been recorded extensively, arranged for choirs and used as an audition piece for “Canadian Idol”.
- 2.
Qallunaaq (pl. Qallunaat) is the Inuktitut term for a white person used in South Baffin dialect.
- 3.
A group of Canadian landscape artists from the 1920s: see http://www.groupofsevenart.com
- 4.
Taken from the title of Theresa Strong-Wilson’s, 2005 provocative article, “White female teacher arrives in native community with a trunk and a cat.”
- 5.
“Aleut” refers to the Indigenous peoples of the Aleutian islands off Alaska, U.S.A. Harriet Breece also worked with the “Eskimo” a related group of Arctic peoples.
- 6.
I began working with Inuit friends to co-create resources that would underscore the learning of Inuktitut with music. This is an on-going project.
- 7.
“Gina” is a slang term for a female of Italian ancestry.
- 8.
The band was the “Jerry Cans”, young people, both Inuit and Qalunaat who had grown up in Iqaluit (Pinguaq, n.d.).
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Dolloff, LA. (2016). A Qallunaaq on Baffin Island: A Canadian Experience of Decolonizing the Teacher. In: Bartleet, BL., Bennett, D., Power, A., Sunderland, N. (eds) Engaging First Peoples in Arts-Based Service Learning. Landscapes: the Arts, Aesthetics, and Education, vol 18. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22153-3_9
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