Page 275 - Cultural Studies of Science Education
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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).
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