Indigenous peoples

Language is defined by Merriam-Webster Dictionary as a “system of words or signs that people use to express thoughts and feelings to each other” (Merriam-Webster). But language is more than that, language is a vessel that carries culture, spirituality, knowledge and wisdom, it connects humanity to the past therefore bringing an overall community essence to all those who speak it. As a result of this deep connection to language that humanity shares, when language is taken through assimilation it…

uprooting frequently occasioned by dam construction separate people from the material context of their cultural identity and threaten them with a loss of vital cultural resources. (Brandt & Fekri Hassan, 2000, p. 15) Their daily routine had changed from looking for resources in the forest to the looking for job in the nearest…

detrimental but did not destroy everything. Indigenous relationships with the peopled universe emphasize environmental values and a way of being that holds strong to cultural values. Colonizers desperately tried to erase this deeply rooted culture, but it is hard to erase a link so completely tied to the land. Deeply embedded in each native person’s pedagogy is history, collective trauma, the reverberating effects of genocide and colonization, and yet Native peoples are resilient, proving…

Week 10: Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls, Inuit Perspectives I found myself very relieved to finally discuss the murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls in Canada, a topic that receives devastatingly little attention in the mainstream media. When thinking about this journal article, I automatically knew that I wanted to contribute to Metis artist Jaime Black’s (2014) REDress project, which was started as a way to build attention to the realities of the missing and…

Simpson’s style of writing and use of Indigenous words are ways in which we see her resist colonialist storytelling conventions. Leanne Simpson deconstructs colonial space by creating a book that is both familiar and accessible to members of and beyond her community. The absence of capital letters and her use of the Nishinaabemowin language, throughout her work, are examples of this resistance to the standard. Ultimately, the use of language is a method to connect with Anishinaabe culture.…

Nahua. The use of allegorical figures in the plays, such as the Final Judgement, could have been very confusing to viewers and actors. Using people dressed up as Penance, The Holy Church, Sweeping, Time, and Death to convey ideas that are not material or human could have added to pagan ideas that previously existed. Another preexisting idea of the native people that was carried over post-conquest that we have evidence of, was the veneration of the feathers of the Quetzal bird. Associated with…

that this recipe was not written by a Canadian Indigenous person, as Indian is not their true identity. It makes one wonder, where the foods one eats comes from, as this is not something consumers think about when in the market. This is in addition to the acts of colonization that lurk on Canadian land, and was vividly taking place around the publication of the Indian Bread recipe. Was this recipe, then, a form of appreciating the breads of the Indigenous communities that helped sustain the…

white European descent and sometimes people have wrongly assumed that I care nothing for the other cultures of the world (based on my skin tone alone), I have always had a passion for learning about other cultures, ethnicities, religions, and people in general. I often say that if we are all the same, this world would be boring. So having the opportunity to recently interview Gerald Auger was a veritable treat. I do not often come into contact with Indigenous peoples, and the fact that he is…

In the wake of Kevin Rudd’s Apology in 2008, the Australian Indigenous educational landscape has remained in a state of upheaval, with countless initiatives, strategies, and cross-curricular priorities aimed at closing the gap in educational outcomes apparent between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students. One of the major by-products of this tumultuous climate was the resurrection of the theoretical framework introduced by Ladson-Billings (2000), who links the concepts of Critical Race Theory…

Indigenous Language and Mental Health Recent studies (Walls, Hautala, and Hurley, 2014) have reported the association between language dispossession and a steady increase in suicide rates amongst First Nations youth in Canada. Indeed, the ability to articulate inner psychological experiences, and its association with mental health has been the focus of many psychological researches around the world. For instance, Şimşek (2010) contributed to the conceptualization of language as a determinant…