The Wasting of a Sacrificial Caribou (by Laura Kirby)

This week’s blog post includes a linked audio file. Just click on the link below if you would like to hear the post read aloud. Scroll down to read the text.

Our guest blogger this week, Laura Kirby, is a graduate student pursuing her Master’s of Education (Leadership, Societies, and Language) at Bishop’s University. Her goal is to improve her educational practice to meet the social, cultural, academic and technological needs of her students. She is in her sixth year of teaching mathematics and science at Stanstead College, where she began after completing her thirteen-week practicum at the school as part of the requirements for her undergraduate degrees at Bishop’s University (BSc & BEd).

In one of my Masters of Education courses, Selected Topics in Curriculum: Teaching, Learning, and Radical Hope, Dr. Dawn Wiseman introduced us to the challenges of dealing with the invisible. As stated by Dr. Wiseman on our course Moodle page, “Critical approaches to education likewise ask what we cannot see, what we choose not to see, and how systems render some things hypervisible (and the norm) while simultaneously rendering other things invisible.” When the COVID-19 pandemic started, I was alarmed at how the vulnerability of the Indigenous community was exacerbated by their remote location, overcrowded multi-generational homes, and limited access to health care (Morin, 2020). More notably, I was concerned by the gendered impacts of COVID-19 on Indigenous women that were being ignored. Prior to the pandemic, Indigenous women were already at a high risk of domestic violence and with the onset of the pandemic came a sharp rise in cases (Wright, 2020).

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