Indigenous studies should be incorporated into all faculty curricula

Integrating Indigenous knowledge into all McMaster faculties would open opportunities for moving beyond symbolic gestures of reconciliation

Education is a necessary component of reconciliation, which cannot be achieved without acknowledging the uncomfortable truths about Canada's past and present actions. Education is a key call to action outlined in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's report. One way to improve education is to build Indigenous knowledge into university courses and curricula.

Indigenous knowledge systems are complex bodies of wisdom and skills developed over centuries and passed down through generations. Unlike Western knowledge, where humans sit at the centre, Indigenous knowledge considers everything in the natural world to be an essential part of an interconnected whole.

Integrating Indigenous knowledge into every faculty and department at McMaster would open new opportunities to learn things through traditional perspectives. Shifting beyond only discussing reconciliation to taking real action would also help students learn lessons about colonialism, residential schools, intergenerational trauma, and Indigenous resurgence among many other topics.

Dawn Martin-Hill, the chair of McMaster's Indigenous Education Council and a Mohawk of the Wolf Clan, spoke about how the integration of Indigenous studies could be realized at McMaster.

“The university students that I teach are incredibly enthusiastic, but they just want this information, especially the environmental students and the natural science students. I get frustrated because we could conquer the world if we actually had a path to work together,” said Martin-Hill.

Currently there are two significant barriers to the distribution of Indigenous information.

First, because students pay for their education, they may not support the integration of Indigenous studies if they don't think it will be relevant to their degree. However, learning about Indigenous ways of life is a moral obligation to remedy our relationships with those native to Canadian lands. And, Indigenous knowledge is applicable to all subjects within both the sciences and humanities.

“I didn’t know I would love engineering so much because I liked the way they think. It’s similar to Indigenous thinking in a weird way because they just want to solve problems. They want to execute things in a way that is efficient,” explained Martin-Hill.

The second barrier is a more structural one that Martin-Hill has been working to resolve for many years. Indigenous peoples are relied upon to lead the integration of their knowledge into university curricula, but there are not yet enough academics available to do this work at McMaster.

“It’s a lack of human resources because we were in residential schools and not in mainstream schools. There’s a lot of reasons why they’re just now populating these spaces,” said Martin-Hill.

Martin-Hill expressed that students have the power to make demands to resolve these barriers. McMaster is depriving students of opportunities to learn about the land they study on and the locally based Indigenous ways of knowing.

“Students have a lot of agency and authority and what frustrates me is I feel like they don’t know. They could change this space in a minute if they just got together, mobilized, and said, ‘Look, we demand. We want this information. Why is it not being given to us?’” concluded Martin-Hill

In the face of contemporary issues like the climate crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a lot to be learned from Indigenous peoples. Although they make up about five per cent of the global population Indigenous peoples protect 80 per cent of the Earth's biodiversity. Their knowledge and work plays a critical role in the maintenance of a healthy planet.

To learn more about Indigenous knowledge, McMaster's Indigenous Health Learning Lodge is facilitating a series of lectures called Sharing Notable Indigenous Pedagogy & and Education. The SNIPE lectures are all about Indigenous ways of thinking in relation to interdisciplinary subjects. The first lecture in the series, covering how Indigenous knowledge can mitigate health and wellbeing, was hosted Wednesday, November 15. The date for the next lecture has yet to be determined, but more information can be found on their website.