Our guest bloggers this week are a group of graduate students with first-hand experience of EDI initiatives within a “Canadian” university. The BILD editorship has agreed, exceptionally, that they may remain anonymous. As they say, “We feel exploited and unsupported within so-called EDI committees. We share these frustrations here.”
In order to plot a more equitable future for the field of education in what is now known as Canada, we must first grapple with our history both as a country and as a discipline. In 1867, the English and French empires officially carved provincial and territorial borders into the land, renaming it “Canada.” In order to achieve their long-term settlement goal, the governments of both empires colluded with the RCMP and Christian churches to enact a large-scale genocide of the people Indigenous to “Canada”, resulting in the death of over 4.5 million bodies. Among the Aboriginal communities that remained, over 150,000 children were kidnapped and placed into Residential schools, where staff abused them and attempted to indoctrinate them into Western epistemologies and religions. The last Residential school closed in 1996.
Currently, many Canadian universities and colleges are directly connected to these genocidal religious endeavours (i.e., Jesuit missions in the University of Toronto’s Regis college; Nova Scotia’s St. Mary’s; Concordia University’s Loyola College), and enslavement projects (i.e., McGill University), or are simply products of settler colonial government policies. Canadian classrooms, therefore, have a longstanding tradition of perpetuating colonial ideologies, not least through their history of segregation. In response to these histories, Canadian educational institutions must enact a long-term commitment to actively restore the knowledges of those communities they have targeted and harmed.
In short, Canadian education systems can either continue to serve as a site of Western-centric and settler colonial epistemologies (Battiste, 2013) or they can actively work to be anti-colonial (i.e., equitable) and anti-oppressive (i.e., inclusive of a diverse population). This letter appeals to those educators wishing to pursue the second path.
