First Peoples, Indigeneity, and Teaching Indigenous Writing in Canada

We begin with a land acknowledgment because of our responsibility to locate ourselves. We signal our relationship with the people on whose land we live as guests. Acknowledging this relationship is the foundation of decolonial practice in classrooms and universities sitting on Indigenous land. Most people’s experience, family, and education in Canada has contributed to their “epistemic ignorance” about Indigenous worldviews. Those educated in universities are situated as experts; Indigenous people as objects of knowledge. Our recognition of ourselves as guests entails a responsibility to learn from the traditional owners of the land with critical humility. In Canada, university literary study began in the 1890s with British literature; Canadian literature was admitted only in the 1970s, a change propelled by nationalism and an origin myth of an “empty wilderness.” When Indigenous literature began to be taught in the 1990s, it was added to the existing framework. Now after the Indian Residential School Truth and Reconciliation Commission report (2015), the desire for a speedy reconciliation risks leaving that frame intact. Indigenous pedagogies, land-based and urban, are proposed as a way of rethinking how we teach literature and Indigenous literatures.