Education Law

"The Sacred Circle, or medicine wheel, provides a powerful Aboriginal symbol for reconceptualizing Fist Nations education in Canada. Since 1972, when the Indian Control of Indian Education policy was formally adopted by First Nations peoples and accepted by the government of Canada, the circle has unfolded. In this volume, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal experts examine various aspects of the schooling of children and adults.

"For over 100 years, thousands of Aboriginal children passed through the Canadian residential school system. Begun in the 1870s, it was intended, in the words of government officials, to bring these children into the “circle of civilization,” the results, however, were far different. More often, the schools provided an inferior education in an atmosphere of neglect, disease, and often abuse.

"Education is at the heart of the struggle of Aboriginal peoples to regain control over their lives as communities and nations. The promise of education is that it will instruct the people in ways to live long and well, respecting the wisdom of their ancestors and fulfilling their responsibilities in the circle of life. Aboriginal Education documents the significant gains in recent years in fulfilling this promise. It also analyzes the institutional inertia and government policies that continue to get in the way.

"The worldview of the Siksikaitsitapi is a journey into the heart and soul of Blackfoot Culture. In sharing her personal story of "coming home" to reclaim her identity within that culture, Betty Bastien offers us a gateway into traditional Blackfoot ways of understanding and experiencing the world. As a scholar and researcher, Bastien is also able to place Blackfoot tradition within the context of knowledge building among indigenous peoples generally and within an historical context of precarious survival amid colonial displacement and cultural genocide.

"We are narrators narratives voices interlocutors of our own knowings we can determine for ourselves what our educational needs are before the coming of churches residential schools prisons before we knew how we knew we knew

"Multicultural Education Policies in Canada and the United States uses a dialogical approach to examine responses to increasing cultural and racial diversity in both countries. It compares and contrasts foundational myths and highlights the sociopolitical contexts that affect the conditions of citizenship, access to education, and inclusion of diverse cultural knowledge and languages in educational systems.

"This book proposes a new pedagogy for addressing Aboriginal subject material, shifting the focus from an essentializing or "othering" exploration of the attributes of Aboriginal peoples to a focus on historical experiences that inform our understanding of contemporary relationships between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples. Reflecting on the process of writing a series of stories, Dion take up questions of (re)presenting the lived experiences of Aboriginal people in the service of pedagogy.

"Despite the enormous resources and thought that has been put into improving our educational systems, there has been little success in reducing the gap between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal educational success. This book reviews the actual situation in terms of Métis, Inuit, and First Nations peoples in Canada using the most recent data available.