Responding to survivors: confronting epistemicide within genocide education in Canadian post-secondary institutions
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Date
2024-08-15
Authors
Humphreys, Denise
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Abstract
This thesis promotes Indigenous-led education to address genocides by Canada against Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island and aims to advance supportive, equitable, and liberatory community relationships. My focus is on how genocide educators, the Canadian post-secondary institutions they work in, and the wider community connected to them are practicing relationality and might build on the practices examined.
This desire to learn comes out of the knowledge that better responses to Survivor redress are needed. Genocide education in Canadian post-secondary institutions has a colonial problem that needs further unsettlement. This colonial problem includes an attempt to violently erase Indigenous Peoples both inside and outside of the academy in both material and symbolic ways. A significant part of this colonial problem in the educational context is epistemicide which involves the destruction of Indigenous knowledges and existence, which are inextricably intertwined. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA+ people (NIMMIWG2S +) have helped bring the discussion of settler colonial genocide in Canada to the forefront. These bodies have called for improved education that centres Survivors on the violence of Canadian settler colonialism, giving impetus to the need for assessment of the progress to date in genocide education in Canadian post-secondary institutions. This thesis explores the question: How are Canadian settler colonial genocides included in or excluded from post-secondary genocide education? It does so with the intent to inform future educational practice. Through my assessment of genocide program and course curricula related to genocides as used in Canadian higher education, I look for patterns and meaningful practices that form relationships with the territories in which it is being taught, as well as the Indigenous Peoples who have lived there since time immemorial. I then draw on theories of settler colonialism and Indigenous methodologies to better understand how these observations might connect to relational accountability. My results show that some practices are connected to ethical relationality, yet overall, much change is needed to confront epistemicide and centre Survivors.
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Genocide, Higher Education, Knowledge Systems, Survivors, Decolonization, Canadian Institutions