Indigenous Teacher Education in Neo-Liberal Settler Societies

A study examined the extent to which Canadian Indigenous teacher education programs (TEPs) reproduced the values and practices of a settler state or, postcolonial indigenousness. Data were gathered via surveys of 14 TEPs and site visits at 10 of them. Findings were contradictory. There was evidence of settler culture embedded in documents such as course outlines and university calendars that laid out the administrative process through which the unequal social relations of the state forced individuals to manage the state apparatus on a day-to-day basis. The structural limitations to developing a non-Eurocentric, anti-racist, culturally affirming technology were evident on an everyday basis. Despite glaring evidence of racism, there was no general effort to incorporate anti-racist education into the core of TEP curricula. Changes that TEPs have made recently help to ensure the creation of mainstreamed Indigenous teaching corps. Nevertheless, it was found that TEPs were programs with some autonomous cultural space and the extent of opposition to settler dominance lay in the people who staffed them. Examples are given of 10 programs that are working systematically to incorporate indigenous knowledge systems into their curricula and pedagogies. Yet all of these initiatives maintained an unequal relation to the dominance of mainstream teacher education curricula. It is recommended that those historically subordinated by settler regimes work together and with non-Indigenous critical teacher educators to effect change. (Contains 62 references.) (TD)