What is this?
One of the most common refrains I heard while working on my Bachelors degrees is that it's hard for new teachers, especially those who are unfamiliar with the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island to know where to start when it comes to incorporating meaningful and appropriate approaches to Indigenous Education into their classroom practice. Hopefully, this database can be that starting point. Aen Maachihtaahk is a living bibliography of resources for educators to improve their understandings of the Indigenous populations that they live with and work for.
Okay, but why is this?
Presently, schools borrow from and often enforce cultural canons. The cultural canon can be imagined as the collective whole of our most desired future, as painted by our least favourable past. It is the goal of those with power (in the forms of wealth, capital, control, and privilege) to construct a future that perpetuates the beliefs, values, and narratives that uphold and enforce their power. When teachers only engage with the canon of power, we replicate systems of injustice and enforce a system that thrives on encultured white supremacy, bigotry, and racism. Aen Maachihtaahk is not a plug-in-and-play source of Indigenous education resources. Very few of the contents within this database are going to be immediately applicable to the classroom. It is instead intended to provide answers to questions that many settlers have, or have yet to realise they can and should be asking. Where sites like Teachers Pay Teachers can provide lessons and units for teachers to use with their students, Aen Maachihtaahk provides resources for teachers to grow as learners themselves, so that the content they do bring to their students regarding Indigenous Peoples is more accurate, appropriate, and meaningful.
On the now defunct science fiction blog Queership, Dominique Dickey asked "What do we do when the canon fails us?" While Dickey targeted the exclusion of science fiction from the western literary canon, and the further exclusion from the canon of science fiction any works not written by "straight white male authors," they came to the same conclusion that sparked the public release of this database. When the canon fails us, we create new ones.
One of the most common refrains I heard while working on my Bachelors degrees is that it's hard for new teachers, especially those who are unfamiliar with the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island to know where to start when it comes to incorporating meaningful and appropriate approaches to Indigenous Education into their classroom practice. Hopefully, this database can be that starting point. Aen Maachihtaahk is a living bibliography of resources for educators to improve their understandings of the Indigenous populations that they live with and work for.
Okay, but why is this?
Presently, schools borrow from and often enforce cultural canons. The cultural canon can be imagined as the collective whole of our most desired future, as painted by our least favourable past. It is the goal of those with power (in the forms of wealth, capital, control, and privilege) to construct a future that perpetuates the beliefs, values, and narratives that uphold and enforce their power. When teachers only engage with the canon of power, we replicate systems of injustice and enforce a system that thrives on encultured white supremacy, bigotry, and racism. Aen Maachihtaahk is not a plug-in-and-play source of Indigenous education resources. Very few of the contents within this database are going to be immediately applicable to the classroom. It is instead intended to provide answers to questions that many settlers have, or have yet to realise they can and should be asking. Where sites like Teachers Pay Teachers can provide lessons and units for teachers to use with their students, Aen Maachihtaahk provides resources for teachers to grow as learners themselves, so that the content they do bring to their students regarding Indigenous Peoples is more accurate, appropriate, and meaningful.
On the now defunct science fiction blog Queership, Dominique Dickey asked "What do we do when the canon fails us?" While Dickey targeted the exclusion of science fiction from the western literary canon, and the further exclusion from the canon of science fiction any works not written by "straight white male authors," they came to the same conclusion that sparked the public release of this database. When the canon fails us, we create new ones.
