Elder, student, teacher : a Kainai curriculum metissage

Abstract

Aboriginal educations is an ambiguous field of study that presents many challenging dilemmas for educators today. A major part of this ambiguity stems from the tendency to emphasize traditional cultural values, Aboriginal identity, and experiences as distinct and unique, and therefore essentially different from mainstream approaches to education. By drawing upon the memories and narrative of my own Metis family as well as the history and memories of the people of the Kainai community from the Blood Reserve in Alberta, I confront some of these dilemmas in both personal and collective ways. Following Eduoard Glissant, Francoise Lionnet, and Mark Zuss, I explore the character of the Kainai community as a tetissage of texts and genres which overlap, interact, juxtapose, and mix the textual contributions of an elder, a student, and a teacher (myself) to create a more complicated portrait of the Kainai community that stretches beyond the 'us versus them' binary. These texts are then interpreted using a (post)colonial framework largely based upon the works of Frantz Fanon, Gerald Vizenor, Homi Bhabha, and Neal McLeod.