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Despite several decades of work on educational equity in curriculum and research and bridging and access projects, Aboriginal peoples' achievements, knowledge, histories, and perspectives remain too often ignored, rejected, suppressed, marginalized, or underutilized in universities across Canada and beyond. Although promising to make postsecondary education accessible to Aboriginal peoples, universities express an Aboriginal agenda in mission statements, priorities, and projects that reaffirm Eurocentric and colonial encounters in the name of excellence, integration, and modernity. Addressing these challenges is the purpose of a research project undertaken by a team of investigators at the University of Saskatchewan, building on the theoretical foundations of postcolonial Indigenous consciousness emerging from Canadian Aboriginal scholars and from Aotearoa (New Zealand) in the scholarly work of Graham and Linda Smith. This article offers a process of animating postsecondary education that can generate methods and practices for the more thorough decolonization of research and policy development and the experience of Aboriginal students and teachers.
Contexts of Colonialism
Displacing systemic discrimination against Indigenous peoples created and legitimized by the cognitive frameworks of imperialism and colonialism remains the single most crucial cultural challenge facing humanity. Meeting this responsibility is not just a problem for the colonized and the oppressed, but rather the defining challenge for all peoples. It is the path to a shared and sustainable future for all peoples. (Erica Irene Daes, United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Peoples at the UNESCO Conference on Education, July 1999)
The destiny of a people is intricately bound to the way its children are educated. Education is the transmission of cultural DNA from one generation to the next. It shapes the language and pathways of thinking, the contours of character and values, the social skills and creative potential of the individual. It determines the productive skills of a people. (Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples [RCAP], 1996, vol. 3, p. 433)
Introduction
During the last three decades, Canadian universities have made some progress toward a postsecondary education system accessible to Aboriginal peoples. Registered Indian and Inuit student participation in higher education steadily increased from the 1970s until 1995, when enrollment peaked at 27,183 Indian and Inuit students enrolled in postsecondary institutions (approximately 7% of total enrollment) who had received funding from the Department of Indian and...