Johnson, Shelly

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.

This keynote introduces an Indigenous paradigm of "witnessing" and "truth telling" to educators, researchers and students trained in Western methodologies. Its story-telling and videography format is intended to expose participants to researcher’s roles as witnesses and truth tellers through the example of a SSHRC funded canoe revitalization research project. This SSHRC project resulted in the first canoe carved in a West Coast First Nation in more than 30 years. The responsibilities of the university witness in research are critical, as it is in many Indigenous communities and societies where witnesses are the historians of other villages and places. The highest priority of a witness in ceremony is to maintain the absolute accuracy of all the details in the work they have observed in order to maintain this history for generations to come. Particular attention will be paid to how an Indigenous research paradigm can open up culturally- and place-specific understandings of Indigenist research more broadly.