Indigenous Education Professional Development Day

The Professional Development Day had two amazing keynote speakers who taught about decolonizing classrooms to indigenize classrooms. They were very moving perspectives and approaches to infusing and incorporating Indigenous ways of knowing and being. As a Haida and Tsimshian woman it helped shed light on how important it is to pave the way to foster room to infuse indigenous ways of knowing. That first to bring indigenous knowledge we must lay a foundation first that honours that knowledge. The learnings helped me explore my assumptions about being able to indigenize, but not with first cleansing colonial imposed assumptions that I can even be unconscious of. I learned I cannot indigenize in a good way not without first decolonizing my perspective, and my students assumptions or perspectives. I understand more clearly how deeply impacted even my experience is with colonial imposed strategies that affect even an Indigenous educator striving to undo the damages of the many injustices executed by the Canadian Government where Residential schools are only one part of mass cultural genocides. This learning really challenged me to think of how I can engage in meaningful and relevant teachings that foster reciprocal connections between teachers and students.