As scholars and practitioners in the higher education fields of internationalization (Beck) and Indigenous education (Pidgeon), and as colleagues in a Canadian Faculty of Education, we have observed how we are often set up in adversarial positions for institutional and government resources. Recognizing the colonial roots of the university system and the legacy of colonization at home and abroad, we asked ourselves if our efforts in seeking principled internationalization and Indigenization had more in common than we realized. This session presents a dialogue between us on the incommensurabilities, possibilities, potential, and futures in pursuing Indigenization and internationalization within institutional spaces that were never set up to support these processes. Reflecting the process that unfolded in our exploration, we begin our conversations by applying postcolonial, decolonial and Indigenous analyses to both projects. We then demonstrate how internationalization and Indigenization occupy “generative spaces of tension”, at the liminal interface of neoliberal and critical orientations as articulated by Andreotti, Stein, Pashby, and Nicolson (2016) in their social cartography on internationalization. We then discuss the implications for Indigenization and internationalization in the face of the latest institutional initiatives emerging in Canadian higher education institutions on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion.
