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This article provides examples of introductory activities that engage students in initial steps in understanding the systemic structure of colonization. Examples of student group responses to the activities are provided. The understandings explored by students through these activities are then taken up through Indigenous literatures in university contexts in order to contribute to the ongoing decolonization of knowledge in the university and to explore indigenous understandings of pedagogies. The author explores various themes important to the decolonizing of educational practices through discussions of (a) colonizing and decolonizing agendas, (b) disrupting government ideology, (c) decolonizing government and reclaiming Indigenous governance, (e) decolonizing spirituality and ceremony, (f) disrupting colonizing ideologies and decolonizing minds, (g) reconnecting to land, (h) decolonizing history, and (i) community-based education and decolonizing education. Conclusions drawn include the importance of engaging students in Indigenous pedagogies so that they can find support for transforming understandings through Indigenous literatures and understand strategies and opportunities to decolonize education.
Introduction
Indigenous education is self-determined; engages distinctive Indigenous methods, structures, and content; and encourages respect for Indigenous knowledges and self-reliance and self-respect of Indigenous peoples (Hampton 1995). It addresses the social, cultural, pedagogic, and epistemologica! needs of Indigenous communities and explores Indigenous collective heritage and contributions to global education (Cajete, 1994). It enables an understanding of Indigenous ancestors' mimetic consciousness as well as examination and critique of colonization (Graveline, 1998). Our pedagogies, like our epistemologies, are in relation to the worlds we know and experience.
In this article I describe a teaching scenario that creates opportunities for students to express experiences, processes, and effects of colonization and its historical and current realities and provides a set of shared stories that students can then draw on throughout the course to express the new understandings of colonization that emerge. It also serves as the basis of understanding from which to draw out understandings of decolonization.
Decolonizing, once viewed as the formal process of handing over the instruments of government is now recognized as a long-term process involving the bureaucratic, cultural, linguistic and psychological divesting of colonial power. (Smith, 1999, p. 98)
A step in the process of defeating colonial power is to recognize this power, how it is structured into an integrated system, and to begin to disrupt it...