Confronting colonial violences in and out of the classroom: Advancing curricular moves toward justice through Indigenous Maternal Pedagogies

Abstract

This article documents ongoing encounters with colonial violence throughout education by offering a glimpse into the ways I experience this as a racialized faculty member who teaches courses related to anti-Indigenous racism. It extends Indigenous Maternal Pedagogies and engages theorists who identify colonial violence as structurally embedded throughout education. This article advances curricular moves toward justice through Indigenous Maternal Pedagogies to explore the lessons that can be gleaned from teaching a graduate seminar on colonial violences in education. The course served as a pedagogical site for critical and unsettling conversations as students were prompted to reckon with their own positionalities as they relate to settler colonialism, consider how violence happening outside of classroom spaces is manifested and reproduced in schools, and think critically about educational responses to ongoing colonial violences. By enacting Indigenous Maternal Pedagogies, the course also became a site for liberatory praxis through the co-creation of an ethical space for engagement. The intention of the course was to prompt socio-political action beyond the classroom. Moreover, extending bell hooks’s sentiment that the classroom, despite its limitations, remains a site of possibility, Indigenous Maternal Pedagogies transcend classrooms spaces, as sites of resistance, to call for the change our current political moment demands.

Keywords:

• Student and teacher experiences
• decolonization
• social justice
• education
• Indigenous studies
• curriculum studies

The year 2018 marked the back-to-back trials for the white men convicted of killing Colten Boushie and Tina Fontaine. Colten Boushie was a 22-year-old Indigenous man of the Red Pheasant Cree Nation who was killed in August 2016 in Saskatchewan. Tina Fontaine was a 15-year-old Indigenous girl of the Sagkeeng First Nation who was killed in Winnipeg while in state care. The trials took place only weeks apart. In both cases, the accused were declared not guilty by all white juries. This served as a heart wrenching moment for Indigenous peoples across Turtle Island as the verdicts sent a clear message about the value of Indigenous lives in the eyes of the settler colonial state, Canada. This was my first year as a faculty member teaching a mandatory course designed to address Canada’s troubling relationship with Indigenous peoples in teacher education.

The murders of Colten Boushie and Tina Fontaine must be understood within the context of a long history of state oppression and genocidal violence. This violence has been well documented in Canada’s Royal Commission on Aboriginal People (RCAP) and Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). While both commissions outlined this deep history, the TRC made clear links to the genocidal violence that predated the residential school system that operated between 1831 and 1996 in Canada. The TRC shared survivor and family testimonies of the horrific abuses that took place in residential schools and called for national accountability. The continued colonial violence against Indigenous peoples today is deeply intertwined with this history, highlighting the urgency of the demand to develop curricula that reveals the truths of Canada’s past before we can map out pathways toward reconciliation and resurgence (Asch et al., 2018; Talaga, 2017). With this sentiment in mind, the commission convened a series of reports including a 535-page executive summary entitled Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future. Included in this summary were 94 calls to action, and calls 62–65 are aimed at reconciliation education. Newly developed mandatory courses in teacher education are direct responses to calls for reconciliation education. In these courses, teacher candidates eagerly await lessons on cultural celebrations and traditions but instead learn about settler colonialism and anti-Indigenous racism. My course involves supporting students as they embark on a process of unlearning what Dolores Calderón (2014) called the settler grammars that students have come to know throughout education. As an educator with a commitment to reconciliatory praxis, I experienced significant tensions with my curricular commitments amidst the racial tensions and resistances in the classroom following a historical moment that demanded educational as well as material and social redress.

The emotional turbulence that followed the not-guilty verdicts was not missed by Indigenous students, faculty, and staff, and I felt a responsibility to ensure it was not missed by my teacher education students who were predominantly white. The not-guilty verdicts fuelled racism and hate comments on social media including a post by an RCMP officer who wrote, in reference to the death of Colton Boushie, “too bad the kid died but he got what he deserved.” As a result of the seemingly acceptable racialized messaging that followed the not-guilty verdicts, Indigenous peoples and allies rallied and organized vigils across Canada to demand justice for Colten Boushie and Tina Fontaine. Moreover, several universities across the country released statements expressing sympathy (Mertz, 2018). An open letter from university professors also called upon university presidents to address the racism that has heightened since the acquittals and acknowledge the systemic violence that fosters anti-Indigenous racism (Ge, 2018). An increase in anti-Indigenous racism was experienced on campus as well, and like many universities across Canada, the University of Manitoba campus where I worked suddenly became a hostile place for Indigenous peoples. The kind of violences that accompanied the not-guilty verdicts in 2018 are not exceptional, as incidents of anti-Indigenous racism have been unacknowledged over the years, and it is often community calls for justice that bring some awareness. This is evident in the tireless efforts of Indigenous communities who have called for accountability and justice into the deplorable rates of racialized and sexualized violence for decades. These moments also mark the classroom in different ways as racial tensions are either completely ignored, expressed in micro-aggressions, or manifest in settler moves to innocence (see Tuck & Yang, 2012).

In the days following the not-guilty verdicts, Indigenous staff at the Migizii Agamik–Bald Eagle Lodge, University of Manitoba, held healing circles and space for the collective grief that was felt across campus and within our communities. As a faculty member at the University of Manitoba, I attended these circles and was grateful to be in a space of togetherness with Indigenous students and colleagues. The ceremony, medicines, and conversations were important as we collectively faced the hostilities following the trials. The heightened racism in the days that followed the trials exposed the hidden truths of racism, injustice, and structural violence that are rooted in the very institutions that express commitments to student safety and wellbeing. The moments also serve as stark reminders that colonial violence is structurally embedded throughout education. It is within these moments, however, that our creative curricular and pedagogical responses to colonial violence, fuelled by rage and fury, are nurtured and we can work with our colleagues, communities, and students to collectively name injustices. Indeed, these continued acts of violence demand curricular and pedagogical spaces that advance justice.

My experiences in education and the experiences of my students are situated within ongoing colonial narratives that are continually manifested in schools. Indeed, some of the settler students I teach come from families and communities that foster these problematic narratives. Some of my Indigenous students will have experienced the same micro-aggressions and violent encounters that characterized my educational experiences. Other students will learn that they are beneficiaries of these violent encounters. Teaching a course on colonial violences involves difficult and necessary conversations about epistemic ignorance and white settler denial (Rice et al., 2022) to identify and dismantle the anti-Indigenous racism, sexism, and gender-based violences that are supported by nationalist colonial narratives and continue to be advanced throughout education.

These conversations also prompt students to engage in particular dialogue that can be unsettling. I encourage them to embrace a vulnerable exchange as they are called to reckon with their complicities with troubling narratives. This can mark the classroom as an uncomfortable site and in turn produce student resistance; although it is important to note that these conversations are necessary and can be affirming for students whose realities are often silenced in mainstream classes. The presence of a racialized instructor exacerbates this resistance in some students and adds another layer of complexity that simultaneously marks the classroom as an uncomfortable site for some and an affirming site for others. The teaching context, both the content and who the teacher is, is extremely salient in these moments of national reckoning when truth must come before reconciliation. For this reason, I start with my own positionality as a Haudenosaunee scholar by offering an oppositional standpoint to the paternal nature of western education (see Henry, 1996). I extend the work of Maternal Pedagogies (O’Reilly, 2021), and I specifically centre Indigenous Maternal Pedagogies (Brant, 2017) in support of reconciliation education and anti-racist praxis.

This article is directed at scholars who are looking to take up anti-racist pedagogies in ways that affirm heart-mind connections and those grappling with how to effectively support reconciliation education. Presenting this work from my own positionality opens up possibilities for cross-cultural and cross-epistemic engagement. Moreover, it supports the work that calls on others to start from their own positionalities. In this article, I propose Indigenous Maternal Pedagogies as an approach to use in teacher education and social justice classrooms by centring my teaching experiences and documenting the lessons gleaned from teaching a graduate seminar entitled “Structural and Colonial Violence: Educational Response(abilities) and Complicities.” I propose the course as a site of liberatory praxis that: 1) reframes learning spaces as ethical and relational; 2) requires vulnerability from both teacher and student relational to their positionality as Indigenous or settler; and 3) positions curriculum as a space for emotional learning.

Indeed, confronting colonial violences in the classroom rests on pedagogical grounding that calls upon emotion and vulnerability as a pathway for working through difficult knowledge. My intention in the course and in this article is to unpack the way colonial violence is manifested in schools and sustained through settler grammars (Calderón, 2014) and settler moves to innocence (Mawhinney, 1998; Tuck & Yang, 2012) as well as to document the resistance to anti-racist and decolonial curricula. In this article I explore how this resistance contributes to the violent encounters within classrooms. By weaving my narrative of teaching about colonial violence in education throughout, I share lessons from my own knowledge bundle to advance Indigenous Maternal Pedagogies as a framework for disrupting colonial narratives (Masta, 2016). This framework attends to the ethical space of engagement (Ermine, 2007), provides a racial literacy that embraces emotion (Grosland & Matias, 2017; Tarc, 2011) and vulnerability (Wang, 2016), and offers curricular moves for embracing difficult knowledge as liberatory praxis that propels students to imagine social change.

Advancing Indigenous Maternal Pedagogies

Integral to anti-racist praxis are critical questions that disrupt the white supremacist, individualistic, and patriarchal foundations of western-centric thought. Aligning with anti-racist praxis, Indigenous Maternal Pedagogies offer a communal approach that aims to build bridges between academia and wider society. By extending curricular work beyond our classrooms, the intention is for students to imagine ways to create meaningful change in the communities, spaces, and places they call home. Recognizing that change might not occur immediately (Guthrie, 2016), my praxis is rooted in the Indigenous understanding of learning as relational, ongoing, and non-linear. My goal for transformative learning is to propel students toward justice-oriented praxis, to become uncomfortable in their comfortability (Brant, 2021), to imagine altered possibilities (Tarc, 2011), and to embrace the complexities of teaching and learning (Henry, 1996). Thus, I strive to create a bridge that crosses divergent worldviews through the ethical space of engagement (Ermine, 2007) so students might map out liberatory ways of engaging in educational spaces.

Indigenous Maternal Pedagogies offer a pedagogical framework that encourages anti-racist and ethical dialogue as a way to encounter difficulty, embrace vulnerability, and foster the emotional learning required to promote meaningful and transformative engagement. Indigenous Maternal Pedagogies can be defined as Indigenous women-centred learning engagements that establish safe and ethical space for contentious dialogue, including heart-to-mind and emotional learning through intentionally curated resources and facilitation (Brant, 2017). I share this as a decolonial feminist standpoint that opposes the paternalism embedded in mainstream education. Indigenous Maternal Pedagogies involve synthesizing the work of Maternal Pedagogies (O’Reilly, 2021) with Indigenous ideologies of maternal theory (Brant, 2017). Indigenous ideologies of maternal theory rest within a matrilineal worldview and cannot be understood from a patriarchal heteronormative lens (Brant & Anderson, 2021). Likewise, I engage in maternal scholarship that is foregrounded in the understanding that the institution of motherhood is a patriarchal construct and that western education itself is paternal (O’Reilly, 2021).

Maternal theory resists the essentialist notions of the very word maternal, what it means to mother and to be mothered. In this way, maternal theory speaks back to education as a patriarchal site by advancing feminist praxis. To be sure, it is not to be taken as a praxis that is about the institution of motherhood but rather as an orientation that disrupts the paternal nature of western education. My work engages that of other feminist scholars who provide a genealogical map for embracing maternal as embodied pedagogies for liberatory work. For example, I extend the work of folx who theorize queer mothering as radical praxis (Gumbs, 2016), oppositional standpoints to child centred praxis (Henry, 1996), Afro-Indigenous Maternal Pedagogies (Mogadime, 2021; Onuora, 2012), Anishinaabee Maternal Pedagogies (Bédard, 2021; Simpson, 2006), Indigenous maternal theory (Brant & Anderson, 2021), and Black feminist theorizing for liberatory praxis (hooks, 1984, 1994, 2007). Collectively these writings refute the patriarchal, heteronormative, and divisive binary that dominates western-centric thinking about the maternal and about teaching and learning.

Beyond talking back to the paternal nature of western education, I delve into Indigenous epistemologies that are rooted in connections to land, kinship, and our more-than-human relations (Cook, 2004; Justice, 2018). Moreover, if we understand western education as inherently paternal, advancing Indigenous maternal theories offers ways of imaging a pedagogical site as one of being in good relation with the collective, including new generations of students, our communities, and our relations beyond the confines of the concrete walls of educational institutions. By offering oppositional standpoints to the paternal nature of education, my work engages Maternal Pedagogies by asserting Indigenous maternal theory—my focus is on the resonance and complementary nature of Maternal Pedagogies with my own theoretical orientations of Indigenous maternal theory. I am also well versed in how Indigenous women have been erased from white feminist theories including those of early maternal theorists and am therefore intentional about the body of maternal scholarship that informs my work (Brant, 2022). With this in mind, I connect Maternal Pedagogies with women-centred Indigenous epistemologies and critical race feminist theories that embrace the “whole student” to establish a teaching and learning environment that fosters students’ heart-mind-spirit connections (Archibald, 2008).

Indigenous Maternal Pedagogies are foregrounded in cultural identity theories (Anderson, 2016) and the ethical space of engagement (Ermine, 2007) to foster agency, advocacy, and activism through shared Indigenous maternal teachings. As a Haudenosaunee scholar, I model the practice of identity theory by bringing my whole self into the teaching and learning engagement as an invitation for students to do the same. It is from this orientation that I enact the classroom as a site for initiating conversations about racialized, sexualized, and gender-based colonial violences (Brant, 2021). This practice is also particularly important in teacher education, especially if we consider the ripple effect of developing critically conscious, politically informed, and justice-oriented teachers (Wilson et al., 2019).

Identifying Colonial Violences in the Classroom

Racism is perpetuated in many ways in the classroom, for instance, through student resistances to learning material that brings them out of their comfort or sheltered zones (Poitras Pratt & Danyluk, 2019; Regan, 2011). Resistances to anti-racism courses stem from denial, guilt, and anger related to content that challenges white nationalist ideas or documents histories and contemporary realities of anti-Indigenous violence (Rice et al., 2022; St. Denis & Schick, 2003). Moreover, these resistances often manifest as micro-aggressions against racialized instructors and students (Schick & St. Denis, 2005; Tarc, 2011). The course on structural and colonial violence in education was inspired by my own educational experiences and informed by Indigenous and critical race scholarship that provided me with the language to identify and name the racist injuries that I personally encountered (Yosso, 2005). The colonial violence course is also a response to the different encounters I experienced as I moved from the role of a graduate student teaching Indigenous content courses where I theorized Indigenous Maternal Pedagogies to a faculty member teaching mandatory anti-Indigenous racism courses in teacher education.

As noted earlier, I began teaching mandated Indigenous content courses in teacher education as faculty member in Winnipeg—a city known to have a heightened social climate of anti-Indigenous racism. Here, my experiences were similar to that of Verna St. Denis and Carol Schick (2003) who wrote about the challenges of teaching a compulsory Indigenous teacher education course in a prairie province with a “stable population of mainly third and fourth generation families of European descent” (p. 297). As they wrote, teaching courses on anti-Indigenous racism in Saskatchewan for almost exclusively white-identified students involves unpacking racial hierarchies where whiteness is both invisible and understood as the norm. However, St. Denis and Schick’s concern is not entirely tied to a geographic location or even the education context. Rather, the whiteness that permeates teacher education sustains and is sustained by the nationalist discourses that permeate schools, the criminal justice system, and human services. Like St. Denis and Schick, I found that student resistance to the courses stemmed from the idea that the course was “an infringement on their liberty even before they enter the class” (p. 2). Moreover, St. Denis and Schick noted that some resist because they do not find the course relevant to their professional goals as future educators and hold the assumption that they will not teach Indigenous students in their own classrooms. While my courses in Winnipeg were mostly comprised of white students, my current teaching context in a larger urban setting is composed of a more diverse student population, including white and racialized settlers and settlers who are newcomers to Canada. Few students have a solid understanding of Indigenous realities in the Canadian context. In both teaching contexts, Indigenous students were highly underrepresented in the teacher education programs. I can count on one hand the number of self-identified Indigenous students I have taught in my teacher education courses in the last five years.

Encountering Student Resistances

Within these mandatory courses in teacher education, reactions range from a willingness and eagerness to learn to a resistance to learn. The willingness and eagerness to learn is often accompanied by a desire for “the beads and feathers” approach; students enter the course eager for a “how to” manual for teaching Indigenous content, one that is celebratory but presents Indigenous peoples as frozen in time (Dion, 2009). Others have expressed frustration with the lack of support to “get it right” in one mandatory course in light of the new demands for reconciliation education. This presents a larger structural issue in teacher education. Teacher candidates have expressed unpreparedness and anxieties related to teaching Indigenous content across K–12 curricula in response to the TRC’s Calls to Action. The students who are interested in learning from a justice-orientated lens tend to be ones who enrol in graduate seminars and seek out additional professional development opportunities related to Indigenous content. For others, the resistance is often accompanied by micro-aggressions that disrupt the teaching and learning engagement; some students will disengage through non-participation and others might engage in denialism and openly dispute some of the claims stated in course discussions. Other forms of resistance present themselves in more subtle or passive ways such as harmful comments on teacher evaluations.

In their study on working through settler ignorance, Carla Rice et al. (2022) defined resistance by focusing on students who position themselves in relation to Indigenous peoples and attempt to work through their own resistances. They described this engagement as follows:

We define “resistance” as a move by settlers to dis/engage themselves from their responsibilities in re-dressing colonization, a move informed by the complex knot of emotions—fear, anxiety, guilt, terror, confusion, anger, sadness, and shame—that is tethered to and helps to sustain and entrench settler-colonial knowledges and narratives. (p. 15)

It is important to note that the above definition is focused on students who express a willingness to work through their resistances, rather than those who remain entrenched in their denialism. In this article, I take up resistances by including the varied responses and levels of engagement with anti-racist praxis that I see in my students. My approach foregrounds a commitment to dismantling colonial narratives that manifest “indoctrinated ignorance” and “historical amnesia” and incorporates Indigenous literatures to combat the “cheap reconciliation that is the hallmark of denial” (Regan, 2011, p. 185). It is important to note that in these courses, I tend to have only one or two self-identified Indigenous students. While the underrepresentation of Indigenous students in teacher education programs is an ongoing concern itself, these small numbers exacerbate colonial violences in spaces where Indigenous students have gone from being erased to suddenly experiencing historical traumas and contemporary injustices by becoming hypervisibilized across mandated courses. This raises further concerns about the cultural safety of Indigenous instructors and students who are now “mandated to engage with unsettling material in a potentially hostile and unsafe space with people who either don’t want to be there, or aren’t ready to acknowledge their own privilege or self-location” (McDonald, 2016, para. 2). As I navigated this hostile teaching and learning engagement, marked by a deep history of colonial violence, I became more aware of the need to revisit the ethical and relational elements of Indigenous Maternal Pedagogies. Thus, the curricular and pedagogical underpinnings of Indigenous Maternal Pedagogies continue to evolve and emerge in response to classroom practice. Attending to the classroom environment and relating to the socio-political moments that shape the classroom are integral to Indigenous Maternal Pedagogies.

Pedagogical Ruptures: Teaching a Graduate Course on Colonial Violences in Education

If our ethical and pedagogical response to students’ emotive responses is to minimize them by silencing narratives of colonial violence, we become complicit in that very violence. Sheila Cote-Meek (2014) expressed this sentiment in Colonized Classrooms, in which she wrote:

[If] we choose not to introduce historical material that may invoke strong emotive responses in students, we could also be contributing to the marginalization and suppression of that narrative. In these instances, the memory of particular histories is then placed in a space of the forgotten, effectively removing any burden of responsibility from colonizers. (p. 34)

Silencing these narratives must not be understood only in terms of historical material that might be “traumatic” to students but also in terms of everyday experiences of racism and violence. Not acknowledging these contemporary occurrences can further traumatize students (Masta, 2016). This silencing implies that contemporary violences can go unacknowledged and are not relevant enough for classroom discussion. To add to Cote-Meek’s work on colonized classrooms, I connect complicity with colonial and structural violence to the silencing of the injustices that continue to take place in the communities in which we live, the broader society, and global communities. Indeed, the heightened racism, sexism, and gender-based violence we have witnessed throughout the current pandemic have revealed and exacerbated the international connections of white supremacy. My course serves as a pedagogical site that confronts the ruptures that arise when teaching settler teacher candidates about colonial violence.

When the ideology of racism is examined and racist injuries are named, victims of racism can often find their voice. Those injured by racism and other forms of oppression discover that they are not alone and moreover are part of a legacy of resistance to racism and the layers of racialized oppression. They become empowered participants, hearing their own stories and the stories of others, listening to how the arguments against them are framed and learning to make arguments to defend themselves. (Yosso, 2005, p. 75)

To draw attention to the aforementioned challenges and explicitly acknowledge and name racist injuries, I begin the colonial violence course with the following list of examples that contribute to the classroom as a violent space for Indigenous students. I ask students to consider what it means when:

1. your lived experience is not reflected in your educational journey;

2. your studies conflict with your racial and cultural identity;

3. your worldview, community knowledge, ways of knowing and being, ceremonies, and customs are excluded from your educational experience;

4. your truth is refuted and denied through inaccurate portrayals of history;

5. justice is not served for Colten Boushie and Tina Fontaine;

6. education becomes an inherently violent space characterized by daily experiences of racism;

7. the final report of the national inquiry names the violence against missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls as genocide and this is not mentioned in class.

I share the above list with students to set the tone for the ways in which structural and colonial violences are manifested and experienced in classrooms. As I generate this list from my own experiences, I model the way I personally encounter racist injuries and micro-aggressions, and invite students to add to the list from their own experiences. The list is certainly not exhaustive and this introduction is followed by reflective activities that prompt students to add to the list from their own vantage points. I ask students to consider this list by reflecting on their positionalities and exploring their relationship to colonial violence in our classrooms. Some students might be beneficiaries of racial injustices or might not have considered the settler grammars that shape ideologies of Indigenous erasure and silence the lived realities of their peers (Calderón, 2014). Prompting students to add and reflect on the list sets the tone for the transformative learning engagements that follow. This also sets the tone for the pedagogical work of unpacking and unlearning that will take place throughout the course. Students are asked to sit with this as they become part of a classroom community that will collectively imagine anti-racism work in their own lives and work beyond the course. As an initial activity, students are asked to be open to recognizing and acknowledging the different trajectories and experiences that they carry with them into the course. This is also an initial nudge toward a “critical awareness of how place intersects with race, gender, and colonialism” (Seawright, 2014, p. 556) in preparation for the unsettling of the practice of acknowledging what it means to live on stolen land.

Ethical Engagement with Communal Funds of Knowledge

By naming my experiences in this opening exercise, I invite students to embrace the communal funds of knowledge they carry with them (Yosso, 2005). For example, I centre my knowledge and identity as a Haudenosaunee cisgender woman and mother-scholar, and the course materials are intentionally curated to build theory starting from my own positionality. Thus, an intentional decolonial feminist voice is threaded throughout the course, and I invite students to centre their knowledges and identities within the learning space by bringing their whole selves into the engagement. This relational encounter lays the groundwork for entering into the ethical space of engagement—a space where disparate worldviews can come together (Ermine, 2007). According to Willie Ermine, central to the ethical space of engagement are an awareness of one’s own actions and a commitment to ensuring one is not violating or causing harm to the wellbeing of others.

By introducing the ethical space of engagement, I co-construct a classroom set of ethics with the students that will govern our conduct throughout the course. This involves becoming vulnerable with the students by entering the learning engagement and positioning myself as an Indigenous mother-scholar with personal connections to a course that is rooted in my own experiences. I enact the ethical space of engagement by sharing the Haudenosaunee teaching of Ka’nikonhrí:io, which emphasizes the importance of bringing a “good mind” to all that we do, and the Anishnaabee practices of Mino-biimaadiziwinan: living the “good life” through a good mind that involves a harmonious balance of the mind, body, and spirit (Anderson, 2005). For example, the idea of the “good mind” can be applied in the classroom by encouraging students to be respectful of one another’s worldviews and ways of being. This process serves as a demonstration of the application of Indigenous Maternal Pedagogies to foster cultural safety by reasserting the pedagogical approaches of Indigenous teachings. Moreover, to align with the Indigenous maternal understanding that learning comes through practice, I position myself as a facilitator engaged in the practice of co-learning/unlearning and embrace the relational and ethical encounter of the course as an opportunity to learn alongside students who share their own communal funds of knowledge. To this end, I share with students the ways in which the theoretical and practical will converge with emotion as we work through the course material and engage in interactive discussion.

The connection between the theoretical and practical is eloquently captured in the following excerpt by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2014):

Theory isn’t just an intellectual pursuit. It is woven within kinetics, spiritual presence, and emotion. It is contextual and relational. It is intimate and personal with individuals themselves holding the responsibilities for finding and generating meaning within their own lives. (p. 7)

I thread this sentiment into my knowledge bundle to enact the ethical space of engagement as a way to open and prepare students for the emotional work required to engage in racial literacy. Tanetha Grosland and Cheryl Matias (2017) defined racial literacy as “understanding the contextuality of race and the relationship between race and power, while continually learning about race from a learner stance rather than a knower stance, and taking appropriate antiracist action” (p. 75). They contended that fostering emotional responses can serve as a pathway toward anti-racism and called for a curricular shift that embraces the emotionality of racial literacy.

Embracing Emotion as a Pathway toward Anti-Racism

Following the co-created ethical space of engagement that governs the class, students delve into course material that connects historical and contemporary injustices through literary testimonies along with thematically curated resources including scholarly journals, TED talks, and poetry. For instance, I start with Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death, and Hard Truths in a Northern City, by the award-winning author and journalist Tanya Talaga (2017). This book incorporates both literary testimony and storytelling in a manner that powerfully bridges and connects historical injustices to contemporary injustices. Indeed, reading this book and bearing witness to recent human rights injustices “in their own backyards” is difficult for students to grapple with, and it engages them in a complex set of emotions such as anger, horror, guilt, and sadness. Talaga’s storytelling and investigative journalism are also invitational, and she weaves in stories of place and relationship to land. Thus, I have students read her work alongside Margaret Kovach’s (2015) work on treaties, truths, and transgressive pedagogies and Yvonne Poitras Pratt and Patricia Danyluk’s (2019) writing on reconciliatory education.

Thematic scaffolding of assigned readings, guided discussion, and assessment throughout the course offer students an opportunity for reflexivity, staying with and embracing difficult knowledges, and working through emotion as a call to action. Critical to the course is understanding that terrible human history and contemporary social injustices must be remedied. Social injustices are ongoing and daily experiences of racism occur from layers of micro-aggressions and unequitable opportunities for social wellbeing and security to commonplace acts of police brutality and violence. As José Medina (2013) wrote, we need to theorize by reflecting on the injustices that surround us before we can imagine justice. Likewise, we must name colonial violence and genocide before we can enact reconciliatory praxis. These are hard truths for students to grapple with, but the ethical space of engagement fosters a site for emotion as a call to action and pathway toward anti-racism.

Sharing traumatic stories in our classrooms might open up new wounds for students that call for a “pedagogical mourning space” (Tarc, 2011, p. 369). This is the space in which deep learning and transformation occur. It is a space that also embraces the whole student and prompts creative acts of resistance to injustices and human rights abuses. To this end, a final assignment for the course is a creative assessment piece. This open-ended assignment allows students to grapple with the material in a mode that is meaningful to them. For example, some students have worked with textile craft to document their journey throughout the course, some have developed podcasts as calls to action, and others have curated photo essays to document new relations to land through a social justice lens. For some this involves activism and community engagement and for others this involves the development of curricular material that can be used to advance awareness and change. This action-oriented process aligns with Simpson’s (2014) notion that theory is more than an intellectual pursuit. The assignment offers a pathway for students to textually weave spirit and emotion through a process that is inherently contextual and relational. For all students, this creative assignment is an engagement with social justice work and allows them to work within a pedagogical mourning space to “imagine altered possibilities” (Tarc, 2011, p. 369).

Disrupting Colonial Narratives Through Altered Possibilities

Talaga’s (2017) book intricately documents educational institutions as inherently violent spaces for Indigenous learners. Indeed, ongoing racism and colonial violence continue to be perpetuated throughout education in myriad ways. One way this violence continues to manifest is through settler grammars of Indigenous absence and presence (Calderón, 2014). The absence/presence dialectic extends the violent erasure of Indigenous peoples that simultaneously marks Indigenous peoples as frozen in time, conquered, or relics of the past and at the same time as inferior peoples who were either in need of assimilation or in the way of progress. As Calderón argued, these grammars are threaded throughout the social studies curriculum and thus are situated within the settler imagination.

Susan Dion (2009) also documented this as the perfect stranger phenomenon, a position that teachers take to claim their lack of knowledge about Indigenous peoples. The perfect stranger phenomenon is often used as a rationale for the ongoing erasure of Indigenous content across the curriculum. Ongoing Indigenous erasure throughout the curriculum is also associated with the erasure or normalization of colonialism (Masta, 2016) and the invisibility of whiteness (Schick & St. Denis, 2005). Cote-Meek extended the work of Schick and St. Denis (2005) to call for the widespread teaching of critical and anti-oppressive education. As Schick and St. Denis argued, “without acknowledging racism and race privilege in curricular practices, the effects of colonization continue” (p. 296).

Schick and St. Denis’s research examines how and why race matters in anti-racist curriculum, and they articulate the importance of talking about racism in Canada by advancing an anti-supremacist pedagogy. St. Denis and Schick (2003) identified three ideological assumptions “embedded in the social fabric of our schools, communities, and the history of our nation” (p. 10) that fuel resistance to anti-racism curricula: Assumption 1—Race Doesn’t Matter (culture does); Assumption 2—Meritocracy—Everyone has an equal opportunity; Assumption 3—Goodness and Innocence.

The assumption that race does not matter is rooted in the “denial of unequal power [that] normalizes and makes invisible both historical and current relations of inequality” (St. Denis & Schick, 2003, p. 62). Moreover, the “denial that one has a racial identity trivializes and makes invisible the effects of power” (p. 63). St. Denis and Schick have also contended that the notion of culture (but not race) mattering fails to challenge the status quo by interrogating the ways in which racial identities operate to create advantages for some and disadvantages for others. These advantages produce the second ideological assumption about meritocracy and the idea that everyone has an equal opportunity. As St. Denis and Schick explained, the false notion of meritocracy is upheld by students who express the belief that Canada is a land of endless opportunity. This fundamental idea of capitalism fails to unpack the myth of meritocracy with the lens of myriad social constraints associated with racism, classism, sexism, etc. The notion of meritocracy is also symptomatic of a deficit mindset that positions racialized students as the problem rather than addressing the inherent deficiencies in the education system itself (Battiste, 2013). The third assumption calls for curriculum that challenges “the assumption of superiority that Whiteness permits” (p. 65). Indeed, ideas related to goodness and innocence depend on the marginalization and subjugation of racialized and sexualized bodies. St. Denis and Schick explained how this third assumption becomes evident in their courses with students who assume the course is an opportunity to learn about Indigenous peoples and how they can become helpers but instead are called on to reckon with their complicities in the marginalization of Indigenous peoples.

Ideas related to goodness and innocence are historically rooted and sustained through the white saviour complex, a position upheld by ideas of savagism and inferiority that renders the settler as superior (Stevens, 2020). These ideas are reproduced throughout curricula as “Canadian public schools are sites where white settler superiority is nurtured through the cultivation of nationalist colonial narratives that position white settlers as ethically, socially and economically advanced reformer-saviours of Indigenous peoples” (Rice et al., 2022, p. 6). Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (2012) extended the concept of the white saviour complex by drawing attention to settler moves to innocence, a series of strategies that work to eliminate feelings associated with guilt and complicity in the ongoing colonial project. As Janet Mawhinney (1998) explained, a move to innocence can be understood as the self-positioning of white people that erases their involvement in systems of subjugation. By rendering settlers as the helpers, these moves to innocence enable the production of an innocent self and align with the deficit view noted above. These ideological assumptions are deeply engrained values interwoven into the fabric of western education that is rooted in settler colonialism (Battiste, 2013). Thus, the education system itself and the associated curricular and pedagogical foundations support structural and colonial violence. It is this sustained system that renders conversations about anti-racism difficult. As students work through critical analyses of settler colonialism, they are urged to examine their own racial identities as they relate to the overarching systems of power that sustain colonial violence.

Indigenous Maternal Pedagogies as a Theory of Change Amidst the Unteachable Moment

The difficulty that arises alongside conversations about racism is explained by Hongyu Wang’s articulation of unteachable moments. Wang (2016) defined unteachable moments as ruptures in the pedagogical relationship: “It can be related to the content of teaching; for instance ‘difficult knowledge’ in social justice education often has an unsettling effect, with the potential to provoke disruptive responses” (p. 456). As Wang explained, an unteachable moment is when a pedagogical relationship falls apart because of students’ refusal to engage:

I choose the word “unteachable” not to refer to any person or any topic as unteachable, nor to the inability of educators to teach (or students to learn), but rather to refer to the particular nature of relationality that polarizes teacher and student to the degree that what the teacher teaches cannot reach students, who are resisting learning at the moment. An unteachable moment calls for the teacher’s critical self-consciousness in order for her to transcend difficulty. (p. 457)

Wang reflected on the unteachable moment by sharing an experience that prompted further examination of educators’ responsibilities in transforming unteachable moments into teachable moments. For Wang, realization of how to transform the unteachable moment into a teachable moment came long after the course ended and involved attending to inner emotional work and confronting loss. Thus, particular pedagogical strategies must be employed to move both teachers and students through “difficult knowledge.” Alice Pitt and Deborah Britzman (2003) described engagement with difficult knowledge as a complicated interaction when feelings precede knowing. The felt experience of encountering a history rooted in violence and the recognition of emotion as embodied knowledge (Million, 2009) must be embraced to move unteachable moments into teachable moments. By calling upon both teacher and student to become emotionally invested in conversations about race (Grosland & Matias, 2017), I extend Indigenous Maternal Pedagogies to generate an ethical space for walking with knowledge that is unteachable. An ethical engagement is crucial as some students will embody the felt experiences of encountering difficult knowledge, and some will be new to the encounter. To enact an ethical space of engagement (Ermine, 2007), Indigenous Maternal Pedagogies offers ethical and relational strategies for students to acknowledge and honour the emotional and affective aspects of the learning process. This embodied engagement with curricular material and classroom dialogue is essential to support racial literacy. As an example, bringing in poetry and other artifacts alongside teachings about humility and vulnerability offer strategies for the emotive and affective engagement of students. These defining features of Indigenous Maternal Pedagogies foster the necessary ethical and relational engagement of emotionally charged conversations about racism and colonial violences to move students through the unteachable moment. This is an important intervention in the understanding of curriculum as beyond content and even words toward understanding curriculum as making an appeal to our felt sense of one another’s experiences and lives. It is when reckoning with that which cannot be taught through western-centric modes of knowledge transfer that teachers and students produce new knowledge, and this new knowledge is potentially restorative and reparative.

As an example, the reading of Talaga’s (2017) Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death, and Hard Truths in a Northern City works alongside conversations of land and territory—and the related emotional investments of myself and students. These conversations are crafted in ways that prompt students to work through their emotional investments in ways that call for social justice. Thus, as they witness traumatic realities through literary testimony, they are not simply stuck in the tangled knot of emotions that fosters resistance (Rice et al., 2022). Rather they collectively engage in liberatory praxis through interactive discussions and individually showcase and imagine their role in social change through textured analysis and creative thought. The final creative piece that I described earlier is the manifestation of their emotional investment in racial literacy.

It is also important to consider unteachable moments within the context of whiteness’ prevalence throughout all levels of education including curriculum and pedagogy. Whiteness is threaded into perceived power relations and a sense of superiority, and this exacerbates the resistances experienced by racialized instructors, particularly those who are teaching about racism and social injustices. Knowledge transfer, within a Eurocentric educational setting, is associated with power imbalances that position instructors differently based on social identifications such as race, gender, et cetera. For example, St. Denis and Schick (2003) articulated that in their experiences teaching courses on anti-racism, Verna St. Denis, who is a Cree and Metis woman, “experiences the skepticism that students reserve for ‘racial minority women teachers’” and Carol Schick, a white woman, faces skepticism about what she “could possibly know about anti-racist pedagogy” (p. 2).

As St. Denis and Schick (2003) pointed out, these negative reactions to content on anti-Indigenous racism are upheld by settler denialism and white supremacy. When the content is delivered by racialized instructors, negative reactions tend to be heightened and displaced angered is aimed at the instructor. This anger has harmful implications for the cultural safety of the instructor as well as racialized students and disrupts the overall ethical space of the classroom. This is further expressed by Aparna Tarc (2011) who described the resistance of teacher candidates confronting traumatic histories of Indigenous peoples through a reading of Robert Alexie’s (2009) Porcupines and China Dolls. Tarc wrote “I am asked to give proof of the government’s policy of forced assimilation. … I am asked to give more historical information. … I am asked to justify the validity of historical events” (p. 361). In my own experience teaching mandatory Indigenous content courses in teacher education, I am all too familiar with this line of questioning that diverts attention away from difficult knowledge that challenges the national mythology of Canada as a fair and peace-keeping country, a myth that many students hold on to with great pride (Dion, 2009; Regan, 2011). Such disruptions also mark the classroom as a violent space for both racialized instructors and students. This trend is echoed by Wang who shared initial reflections on the unteachable moment: “Internally I wondered why I had become the target of students’ displaced anger against learning difficult knowledge even though I was much less aggressive than my White woman colleague who taught the same class” (Wang, 2016, p. 457).

This resistance to learning difficult knowledge, particularly when it is being taught by racialized instructors, calls attention to the need for anti-racism discourse to be threaded throughout programs, especially in teacher education courses. Such a wide-scale approach to teaching anti-racism is likely to reduce the invisible and emotionally taxing labour associated with being the only point of contact for this kind of critical work in teacher education programs specifically and higher education generally. The resistance also highlights the need for curricular and pedagogical approaches that will move students beyond their own resistances so that they can engage in meaningful and transformative learning.

Reparative Curriculum

Another approach for engaging students in encounters with difficult knowledge is enacting a reparative curriculum. Tarc (2011) described reparative curriculum as “education’s shaky attempt to make lessons from terrible human history that cannot be saved, will not be redeemed, refuses to be forgotten, struggles for articulation, and must be heard” (p. 350). Reparative curriculum confronts traumatic history through literary testimonies that serve as counter-narratives to the histories students are often taught. It brings about a process of remembrances through untold accounts of historical events (Dion, 2009). Confronting these traumatic histories will engage resistances, but anti-racist praxis encourages students to be critical and reflexive in their encounters and felt experiences with literary testimony. As Tarc explained:

Revisions of history produced pedagogically from reparative acts of learning initiate opportunities for thinking traumatic history from the standpoint of its effects on human lives, political relations, and social organization. Reparative curriculum asks learners to encounter the other’s unaccounted-for experiences of extreme suffering and mass violence that persistently affect our present understandings of social and political life. (p. 351)

Tarc (2011) further explained how this engages emotional learning responses and how these emotional disturbances move learners into a defensive mode yearning for repair. Tarc’s work is useful for understanding the unteachable moment, an encounter with difficult knowledge, as a fragile rupture in need of repair:

The fragile chance for psychical and social reparation is threatened seemingly from nowhere and everywhere, at every twist and turn of feeling and thought, by unconscious and conscious defenses and disturbances that threaten the learner’s shaky attempts for repair. (p. 352)

This quest for repair serves as the basis for reparative learning. Tarc (2011) positioned reparative curriculum as a “pedagogical mourning space, a space of collective work where we might grieve violence-stricken thinking, knowledge, and human history” (p. 369). It is in this space that transformative engagement can occur and must be attended to through intentional pedagogical strategies that seek to engage the learning spirit.

Akin to the unteachable moments that stem from encounters with difficult knowledge, the pedagogical encounter that seeks repair also opens up spaces for teachable moments that engage emotion (Regan, 2011) and the mind-to-heart connection (Battiste, 2013). As Tarc (2011) contended, students must be guided to think through their emotive responses to literary testimony of traumatic history in ways that are reparative. In contrast to the unteachable moment, these ruptures that call for repair are layered; they are the convergence of a series of unteachable moments. These open spaces seeking repair must be attended to in ways that nourish the learning spirit (Battiste, 2013) and move learners beyond their resistances as they become reacquainted with their personal investments in place and territory. With this in mind, reparative curriculum asks how students can learn from the unthinkable human histories that “they are beholden to … through the affectively transmitted terrible inheritance of being born to a world wounded by senseless human words and deeds” (Tarc, 2011, p. 369). Alongside this, Indigenous Maternal Pedagogies ask students what their roles are in moving this knowledge forward as a call to action with a renewed commitment to social justice. Thus, as Tarc contended, “for curriculum to be reparative, it involves and moves feeling to thinking which can move one to a changed relation to the self and others” (p. 366). This work must be nurtured so that students do not get stuck in a space of passive empathy (Regan, 2011) but rather move toward responses that seek to disrupt the power relations that contribute to historical and contemporary injustices.

Thinking through unteachable moments and reparative curriculum points to approaches to teaching anti-racism and social justice while raising integral questions that move student learning beyond classrooms. For example, Wang (2016) asked, “How does one transform guilt or shame into social responsibility?” and affirmed “the need for students to feel a sense of inclusion and belonging in the pedagogical space of the classroom” (p. 464). Although these narratives threaten students’ understandings of Canada as a fair country, if attended to from a framework of ethical relationality, they can also foster powerful engagement that moves learners to look within and identify their relationship to social justice. This is the space of engagement that transforms students well beyond the completion of a course. As Tarc (2011) explained,

Sustained symbolic engagement with the other’s textual artifact of unthinkable experience can leave the learner altered and with a lasting impression. Curriculum, then, might provide the reparative means by which to imagine and practice more justly co-habitable human presents and futures. (p. 356)

It is in these fragile spaces that educators can stay with difficulty and embrace vulnerability to chart pathways for liberatory praxis. Indigenous Maternal Pedagogies work with literary testimony to map out curricular moves for engaging intellectual skills, felt knowledges, and mind-body-spirit connections to demand freedom beyond our colonized classrooms. These theoretical and ontological orientations offer ways to imagine practical moves toward societal transformation and demand socially just futures.

Indigenous Maternal Pedagogies: Advancing Curricular and Pedagogical Moves to Social Justice

As I enter into conversation with Wang (2016) and Tarc (2011), it is important that I remind the reader of my use of the word maternal and engagement with maternal theory. As outlined earlier, I carry the maternal teachings that are rooted in the matrilineal worldviews of Indigenous peoples. Thus, my understanding of maternal is one that refutes the patriarchal, heteronormative, and divisive binary that dominates western-centric thinking. Embracing the maternal in the context of the classroom involves the teachings of a matrilineal worldview that are connected to agency and activism. I advance the maternal calls in Wang’s and Tarc’s work to highlight the importance of embracing the whole student in educational contexts and creating an environment for vulnerable engagement that plants seeds for rebirth and renewal so that students might imagine their roles in creating social change. Human suffering does not only exist in the historical realm; it is ongoing and recent tragedies mark the importance of creating pedagogical spaces that issue calls for social justice and human rights. It is within this spirit that I present Indigenous Maternal Pedagogies within a fulsome understanding that they resist essentialist notions of the very word maternal and reclaim the power of matriarchal worldviews.

Wang’s (2016) work on unteachable moments and Tarc’s (2011) work on reparative curriculum seamlessly align with the praxis of Indigenous Maternal Pedagogies, as both Wang and Tarc make references to the M/Other or the maternal relationship integral to transformative engagement. Wang offered two related pedagogical strategies to work through difficult knowledge and transform student resistances: staying with difficulty and vulnerability. To this, I bring two integral components of Indigenous Maternal Pedagogies: 1) the need to develop a classroom community by establishing the ethical space of engagement and 2) the need to centre vulnerability in the learning exchange. Tarc’s work on reparative curriculum also explored curriculum as a pedagogical space for emotional learning. To summarize these connections, I offer three critical junctures for advancing curricular and pedagogical moves toward social justice.

Establishing Ethical Space for Difficult Conversations

Wang (2016) highlighted the value of staying with difficulty as unteachable moments become teachable moments:

[I]t is in this unsettling space that teaching hosts generative possibilities. When unteachable moments happen, the gap left by the breakdown of pedagogical relationality is filled with emotional intensity, which invites us to go deeper into the internal dynamics of the relational world for more pedagogical understanding. We have to be able to hold onto that moment, sometimes without knowing what it means until light is shed into the complexity and depth of pedagogical relationships. (p. 466)

Staying with difficulty requires a certain kind of pedagogical intention, especially within the context of establishing a safe classroom environment to work through a contentious and violent curriculum. Here, I draw attention to Ermine’s (2007) ethical space of engagement as outlined earlier. As I noted, part of the ethics of this space involves a commitment to fostering relationality and collective wellbeing. Thus, knowledge of the actions that can harm or enhance wellbeing is integral to establishing cultural safety within the learning community. As a theoretical underpinning of Indigenous Maternal Pedagogies, I extend the ethical space of engagement from my own cultural orientation as a Kanien’kehá:ka woman. I hold the Ka’nikonhrí:yo: “good mind” teachings with me as I co-develop a space for ethical relationality. From this space, the classroom is also positioned as a site for caring for one another’s spirits as we collectively stay with difficulty (Brant, 2022). I share this to demonstrate how I bring my whole self into the classroom to foster ethical and relational engagement; others will need to do this from their own cultural orientations. By extending my cultural knowledge to foster ethical space, I also become vulnerable in the knowledge exchange.

The Vulnerable Exchange

As Wang (2016) contended, for the act of staying with difficulty to be transformative and move unteachable moments to teachable moments, a vulnerable exchange must occur that requires the teacher to work through loss just like she expects students to. For example, some settler students will experience loss through curricular encounters that call on them to let go of the notion that Canada is “a fair country.” For racialized and Indigenous students, vulnerability is associated with the conversations that “hit close to home,” such as the ones documented in Seven Fallen Feathers (Talaga, 2017). As an Indigenous instructor, I experience vulnerability in the requirement to delve into material that deeply affects my communities. Thus, I am personally invested in the material in ways that settler instructors are not. As an example, the need to engage in conversations following the “discovery of unmarked graves” at the sites of former residential schools across Canada was felt differently for me as a granddaughter of a residential school survivor than it could have been felt by non-Indigenous instructors.

The vulnerable exchange also calls for settler instructors to be vulnerable as they move through a process of reflexivity. Wang (2016) discussed the importance of educators engaging in their own inner work to bridge new understandings. This is echoed by Paulette Regan (2011) who highlighted the need for educators to be personally committed to unsettling and disrupting contemporary power relations and embracing the discomfort associated with understanding how some individuals are beneficiaries of injustice. For some instructors this means being aware of their own racial privilege. Poitras Pratt and Danyluk (2019) built on this sentiment by noting that “it is vital that educators examine their positionality and perspectives, and to understand where their responsibilities lie in this work” (p. 4). As Cote-Meek (2014) contended, it is important to understand “the subjective position of the educator as well as the intent and type of pedagogy utilized” (p. 63).

Creating an ethical space for vulnerability is also integral to Indigenous Maternal Pedagogies. This is rooted in the value of the learning exchange being holistic and circular rather than top down. Thus, if I want the students to become vulnerable and look within, I must do the same. Part of this is rooted in positionality and relational engagement within the classroom, with texts as well as day-to-day realities. It is important, however, to consider how the vulnerable exchange might be experienced differently for white and racialized instructors. For example, my relationship to the not-guilty verdicts of Colton Boushie and Tina Fontaine would be different than my non-Indigenous colleagues’ relationships to the verdicts. Extending this, their willingness to embrace these topics of discussion offsets the extent to which it becomes unfamiliar and uncharted territory for students.

Curriculum as a Pedagogical Space for Emotional Learning

A third component of Indigenous Maternal Pedagogies involves the emotional learning exchange that takes place through the literary testimony of traumatic counter-narratives. Here I extend Tarc’s (2011) work on reparative curriculum. As she explained, “when symbolized, students’ emotional conflicts with literary testimony embody a curricular version of psychical reparation” (p. 351). This component is supported by the previous two: fostering an ethical space of engagement for staying with difficulty and embracing vulnerability. Together they open up the pedagogical space for emotional learning.

As Tarc (2011) posited, “Literary testimony as an object of curriculum also animates dormant and suppressed affective and performative dimensions of academic pedagogy” (p. 359). Tarc extended the work of Shoshana Felman (1992) to highlight the need for a different pedagogical approach and preparation for teaching literary testimony. This call is echoed by Dion (2009) whose work on bearing witness to traumatic histories calls for intention in the pedagogy and process of working through difficult knowledge. Dion and Tarc both contended that through reflective practices it is important to invite students to consider their relationship to traumatic histories. In contrast to settler moves to innocence (Mawhinney, 1998; Tuck & Yang, 2012), students will learn that there is no innocent space within the context of settler colonialism. Moreover, as settler students come to understand themselves as the beneficiaries of these traumatic histories, it is important for instructors to engage in assessment that embraces the transformative potential of emotional learning. Through the thematically developed lesson planning and decolonial assessment practices outlined earlier, Indigenous Maternal Pedagogies respond to the need to foster a pedagogical space for emotional learning through transformative curriculum and assessment that guides students on a journey toward social change.

In addition to the three critical junctures that connect Indigenous Maternal Pedagogies with Wang’s (2016) work on unteachable moments and Tarc’s (2011) work on reparative curriculum, it is important to consider both Wang’s and Tarc’s connections to the M/Other and maternal in conversation with Indigenous Maternal Pedagogies. In a discussion of unteachable moments and pedagogical relationships, Wang drew upon the Kristevian notion of intimate revolt and nonviolence to open space for self-questioning and keep the process of renewal and rebirth ongoing in daily teaching practice. Intimate revolt can be understood as a breakdown moment leading to a revolt in which students’ deeply held values and beliefs might be threatened as they come across knowledge that challenges them in profound ways. This calls for an intimate pedagogy that helps students work through these inner losses. Extending the psychoanalytical work of Kristeva, Wang explained that intimate revolt “informs pedagogical efforts to bridge loss and meaning, bring ‘intimacy’ to students’ critical questioning, and develop nonviolent relationality in classroom dynamics” (p. 459). Nonviolence, then, as Wang wrote “valorizes the role of the … maternal function in psychic and social transformation” (p. 463). This involves working through violent histories through “intimate and less violent forms of questioning” (p. 463). Indigenous Maternal Pedagogies imagine the classroom as a liberatory site for “dissolving violence through both resisting injustice and promoting interconnections” (Wang, 2016, p. 463).

The connection Tarc (2011) made to the M/Other informs her analysis of the “psychosocial processes and cultural productions by which members of a society pedagogically come to learn from histories of mass violence and oppression” (p. 366). Tarc extended Britzman’s (2010) work in Freud and Education and Megan Boler’s (1999) in Feeling Power to position natural responses to difficult knowledge as pathetic responses rather than empathetic responses. Tarc drew on the word pathos which means to experience tension within oneself. This tension offers an entry point into the space that is opened by difficult knowledge. These fragile openings within oneself, in turn, create an opportunity for repair that can be understood as a teachable moment. Rather than an empathetic response, the “troublesome assumption that feeling for others can make us identify with them” (p. 365), a pathetic response is one that seeks repair in the relationship with others. Tarc used this framework to unpack the emotive and affective responses to literary testimony that call for repair and offer important opportunities for liberatory praxis. In this way, Tarc contributed to the notion of the M/Other and maternal by imagining reparative curriculum as life producing and necessary in an already hostile environment. The connections to the M/Other and the maternal are critical components of liberatory praxis that encourage students to embody and embrace their felt experiences of working with difficult knowledges and imagine repair and socio-political action beyond the classroom.

Words to Carry Forward

To bring this article full circle, I return to the description of the events that marked my first year as a faculty member to recentre the lives of Colten Boushie and Tina Fontaine amidst the continued refusal of the Canadian settler state to generate meaningful education to redress ongoing and persistent violence against Indigenous peoples and communities. The back-to-back not-guilty verdicts of the men accused of killing Colten Boushie and Tina Fontaine were only weeks apart and the heaviness of these disheartening outcomes was met with pervasive institutional silence and heightened racial tensions. As I noted earlier, the persistent violence that characterized these moments was felt throughout society and trickled onto campus. In response to the collective grief among Indigenous faculty, staff, and students, a ceremonial gathering was held at the Migizii Agamik Indigenous Student Centre. In the spirit of healing, campus Elders, faculty, and support staff opened the space for sharing. I recall a doctoral student expressing what she referred to as daily encounters with racism in education, healthcare, and other social encounters. Her experiences resonated as she named the racist injuries that attendees of the gathering all face in various facets of our social lives. Indeed, the continued acts of violence call for immediate interventions and demand curricular and pedagogical spaces that advance justice.

I am currently writing a year after Canada’s so called national reckoning following the acknowledgement of the existence of unmarked graves at residential school sites across Canada. I use the word acknowledgement because these are not new discoveries and, in fact, knowledge about unmarked graves was documented in Volume 4: Canada’s Residential Schools: Missing Children and Unmarked Burials of the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, which was released in 2015. In May 2022, The National Post published a troubling article perpetuating residential school denialism. Resistance and denialism when learning about the residential school system historically permeates the white settler mindset and is passed down intergenerationally in the settler communities where many of Canada’s teacher education programs take place.

I have now been teaching reconciliatory courses in teacher education for several years, and the divisions between Indigenous communities and the Canadian state continue as racialized, sexualized, and gender-based violences against Indigenous peoples, land, and territories persist across the nation. The general institutional silence alongside scripted territorial acknowledgements adds another complicated layer that seemingly veils institutional complicity in racism. Our academic programming continues throughout ongoing conflict, but the racial tensions experienced beyond our courses are carried by students; they are layered, ongoing, and experienced in different ways.

For some settler students this is experienced in the tangled knot of emotions—anger, terror, sadness, guilt—that manifest resistance. Others are moved by the desire to help. This desire is expressed through settler moves to innocence, while others push through this resistance by engaging in reflexive and critical dialogue. As a space of engagement, students are called to enter into relationship with literary testimony, with one another, and with communities beyond the classroom. Amidst this web of emotions are Indigenous and racialized students who hold these tensions in myriad ways; I imagine, like me, they are looking beyond territorial acknowledgements for ongoing accountability to redress the manifestation of colonial violence in our classrooms (Asher et al., 2018). This calls upon us to engage emotions as we advance racial literacy (Grosland & Matias, 2017) so we can embrace the unteachable moment as a teachable moment (Wang, 2016) through reparative curriculum (Tarc, 2011). My work on Indigenous Maternal Pedagogies offers a liberatory pathway forward as I showcase how one can become vulnerable with their students as they stay with/embrace difficult knowledge.

I offer this work as a justice call for critical intervention into the pedagogical engagement of historical and ongoing settler colonial violences against Indigenous peoples and communities. As I noted in the introduction, the contentious moments following the aftermath of colonial violence call for curricular and pedagogical responses that embrace the classroom as a site for liberatory praxis. Although it might seem paradoxical to imagine “education as the practice of freedom” (Freire, 1973; hooks, 1994, p. 207), the aforementioned political moments remind us of the urgency of this work. By presenting Indigenous Maternal Pedagogies as a theory of change amidst unteachable moments, my intention is to foster a curriculum of repair that tends to the ethical space of engagement and advances pathways of liberatory possibilities for resurgence and reconciliation education that transcends classroom spaces.

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Jennifer Brant

Jennifer Brant belongs to the Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk Nation) and is a mother-scholar and Assistant Professor in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Jennifer writes and teaches about Indigenous Maternal Pedagogies and Indigenous literatures and is the co-editor with Memee Lavell-Harvard of Forever Loved: Exposing the Hidden Crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in Canada. Jennifer positions Indigenous literatures as educational tools to foster sociopolitical action and calls for immediate responses to racialized, sexualized, and gender-based violence.