Garrett-Petts, Will F.

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.

As societies face unprecedented challenges that are global in scope and “wicked” in nature, the usual educational response has been to emphasize the need for more knowledge, better policies, and more compelling arguments, in order to effectively convince more people to change their convictions, and, as a consequence, their behaviour. My research collective has been experimenting with a different educational orientation that does not see the problems of the present primarily as rooted in a methodological challenge of better strategies (i.e. the call for more effective policies and communications), nor an epistemological challenge of knowing (i.e. the call for more data, information or perspectives). Rather, we propose that the problems are rooted in an ontological challenge of being (i.e. the call to address how we exist in relation to each other and the planet). From this educational orientation, the problems lie in the universalization of a modern/colonial imaginary that creates intellectual, affective and relational economies that invisibilize the violences that subsidize modern/colonial systems, thus hiding their inherent unsustainability. The modern/colonial approach to education has left us unprepared and unwilling to address our complicity in systemic social and ecological harm, and to set our horizons of hope beyond what is intelligible and desirable within it. My presentation will outline some of the social cartographies, analyses and experiments of the “Gesturing towards decolonial futures” collective and the “In Earth’s CARE” network of social-ecological innovations that focus on transformative justice.