Reckoning with Implication: Hearing Indigenous Voices

Workshop Presentation
Susan Dion  

Stories are not just entertainment. From an Indigenous perspective, they reflect the deepest, the most intimate perceptions, relations and attitudes of a people. Drawing on this philosophy, nIshnabek de’bwe wIn//telling our truths, a three-year multimedia storytelling research project located on the traditional territories of the Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee peoples, aims to create Indigenized spaces for Indigenous students and teachers and non-Indigenous allies to tell, hear, and share stories about Indigenous people’s experiences in Canadian schools. Although much is written about colonial histories and legacies of Canada’s residential schools, little research has provided opportunities for Indigenous students and teachers to tell their own stories of school—of a system that remains ultimately a western colonial structure. What do Indigenous people themselves have to say about their experiences of schooling? How might their stories provide stakeholders with the capacity to better respond to Indigenous students? In this workshop, we screen videos created by Indigenous students and teachers that raise questions of identity, survival and schooling, and in so doing, create possibilities for hearing Indigenous voices differently. We interweave their creations with stories made by allies to investigate how settlers reckon with the affects and ethics of knowing/not knowing and their own implicatedness in colonialism and to deepen understandings about what may be required to transform Indigenous-settler relations in schools. This workshop moves from reflecting on multimedia storytelling as a decolonizing research method, to offering an opportunity for workshop participants to create their own decolonizing “postcards” using techniques from the multi-media storytelling method.