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19 Deconstructing Chinn and Hana’ike: Pedagogy Through an Indigenous Lens 249
programs and institutions sponsored by the Canadian government (Malatest and
Associates 2002). According to Waldram (2004), while this new system helped to
mitigate some of the devastating health problems brought from Europe (such as
influenza, tuberculosis, and small pox, which developed through the early contact
period) that killed off about 90% of the population, it failed to protect the traditional
education, ways of knowing, and health and well-being of Indigenous people in
several ways.
Historically, traditional teachers and healers were ridiculed and persecuted by
the dominant culture and by governmental legislation (Waldram 2004). Traditional
teachers, often Elders or healers in community, were forced to practice their tradi-
tions such as Potlatch, Sundance, and shamanic healing in secret. Many Indigenous
people no longer availed themselves of the benefits of their skills and knowledge,
either because they did not know how to access these services or because they had
been taught to mistrust, fear, or condemn their own healing traditions through
residential school teachings. Through this process of eliminating the practice of
traditional healers and educators, a great deal of very valuable cultural knowledge
has been lost. Currently, such persecution takes the form of overt and subtle dis-
crimination, which has been cited by Kirkness and Barnhardt (1991) as the most
serious challenge being experienced by Indigenous students in postsecondary
institutions.
Secondly, western perspectives that dominate formal education have their roots
in modernism, worldviews that value objective truth, rational thinking, and the
constancy of measurement (Duran 2006). This focus on a western perspective to
education in terms of secondary and postsecondary schooling means that Indige-
nous communities have had limited access to certain western types of education
programs. Such programs focus exclusively on western health care, teaching, and
learning styles that are based on competition and individuality rather than on
Indigenous ways of healing, learning, and teaching (Mussell et al. 1993). An
Indige nous way of knowing learning, for example, is intimately intertwined with
community development and interdependence, which are currently needed to
restore Indigenous individuals, families, and communities to a level of health and
wellness (Smith 1999).
Indigenous peoples and communities lost control over the institutions and pro-
cesses that were supposed to protect the well-being and health of their people,
including education (Battiste 2002). Colonialism ensured that Indigenous people
were taught that the dominant society knew best which services and programs they
needed. The creation and enforcement of residential schools for Indigenous chil-
dren, which, as discussed earlier, has been linked in the literature to generations of
personal and community trauma, has also fostered mistrust in western education as
a whole (Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples 1996). Even now, as many
Indigenous communities are negotiating with Canadian governments for the trans-
fer of secondary education and programs to their control, they are often being given
administrative responsibility for existing programs but very little real power to actu-
ally recreate education programming in order to move toward maximum health and
well-being (Waldram 2004).