The brief.
In our first assignment for ETEC511, we are embarking on a ‘digital humanities’ exercise to situate and contextualize the representations of First Peoples in recorded histories of education. In choosing a document or set of documents describing education history, we will search for how Indigeneity and Indigenous peoples are referred to in the text(s) that comprise our knowledge and understanding about education.
The context.
For this early IP, I chose to analyze a report describing the development and operations of the Mi’kmaw Kina’matnewey. The report was a part of the Nurturing Capacity Program that focused on initiatives in education that supported the needs of First Nations, Inuit, and Metis students Canada-wide. While the majority of the projects occurred in the Western provinces, I chose to read a report on the impacts of the Mi’kmaq Education Act in my home province of Nova Scotia. Mi’kmaw Kina’matnewey (MK) is the official name for the Mi’kmaq Education Act, which was officially established in 1997 representing the educational interests of 12 Mi’kmaw communities in Nova Scotia (Simon, 2014). The Act is intended as a self-governing agreement which recognizes the Act to support individual band school in local language and culture curriculum. MK is described in the report’s Executive Summary as serving, rather than directing the activities at each local band school (Simon, 2014). The impact of this report could represent a paradigm shift in how we think about how not only Indigenous education is governed and organized, but how all education is governed and organized. By considering who serves whom and for what purpose we might explore a new educational history with regard to real policy change with clear effects.
The terminology.
When considering Indigenous populations in Atlantic Canada, we have one predominant group, the Mi’kmaw. Naming conventions in the English-speaking world have changed over time from the simplified and incorrect Micmac to the correct Mi’kmaw/Mi’kmaq. Mi’kmaw is the singular term referring to one person or whole group, while M'i’kmaq is plural referring to members of a group. Mi’kmaq cannot be used as an adjective (Nova Scotia Museum, n.d.). The terms represented in the report are primarily specific to the group with Mi’kmaw referring to all members as a whole. First Nation(s) and the singular Mi’kmaq are also notable but far below the use of Mi’kmaw. The terms Indigenous and Aboriginal appear in titles of other organizations and entities, not as terminology chosen by the author.
Represented terms.
The question.
In the Nova Scotian public education context, how in the reporting of educational policy change and new initiatives do we refer to the Indigenous populations in our region? What might be the implications of these languages choices in our policies and reporting?
The next question.
I have never had a clear understanding of how band schools organize their education systems within the broader colonial system as it is provincially construed. As a child of a mother who was a school teacher, I remember hearing snippets of anecdotal evidence about how band schools were run. These were typically unflattering and minimized the goals of local, self-governing education in the Mi’kmaw tradition. In this assignment, I find the opportunity to correct where I might have incorrect knowledge and to learn more about what the Act afforded local Mi’kmaw communities. Therefore, the new question is: How did the Mi’kmaq Education Act represent a shift to local self-governance in education and what were the resulting community-based priorities and impacts?
The terminology.
My choices on what to include in this next dive into the report’s terminology was perhaps not what you had in mind. I made the decision to create a set of terms that were about the goals of the Act and the successes the Mi’kmaw community experienced as a result of self-governance. What I think this yields is an idea of the kinds of priorities the report focused on, as in the priorities the Act afforded for these communities. As we can see, language is an enormous focus, as well as providing appropriate supports and capacity for effective learning to take place in a culturally rich environment.
New terms.
The new search terms.
To further probe the report and find out about the impacts of self-governance, I am adding several context-specific terms: language immersion (language, immersion, dictionary, bilingual), community-based, self-governance, support, professional development, technology, human capital.
The takeaways.
Of course, in my limited search the limitations were perhaps that I mined the search terms that were important to me, or resonated with me, through my own lens rather than some of the key report findings. I hoped to avoid that but it’s often difficult to see our own biases, even when we’re really trying to. My first results showed a focus on the specific naming used by the community, in the way it was intended both in grammar and pronunciation, and as opposed to less specific terms associated with identifying many groups together rather than pointing out the one. The secondary results showed the impacts and priorities of Mi’kmaw self-governance in an education context in Nova Scotia. For more context, the Act granted legal self-governance to 12 communities with local band schools. There are 42 reserve locations across Nova Scotia. With the positive impacts of the community-based curriculum put in place after the Act, I hope that more communities become incorporated to explore the language and culture driven affordances of this education with the support necessary to serve the goals of each local band school.
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Nova Scotia Museum. (n.d.). Mi’kmaq portraits collection. Nova Scotia Museum. https://novascotia.ca/museum/mikmaq/?section=spelling#:~:text=The%20term%20Mi'kmaq%2C%20is,never%20used%20as%20an%20adjective.
Simon, L. (2014). Mi’kmaw kina’matnewey: Supporting student success. Indspire. https://indspire.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/indspire-nurturing-capacity-mk-2014-en-v2.pdf.