About the Research
There are chronic gaps in historical research focusing on Indigenous Peoples’ relationships and early presence in Canadian universities. This project shares findings from a collaborative interdisciplinary research project that uses Western University as a case study site to retrace Indigenous peoples’ presence at one university over time. The purpose of this study is to contribute to decolonizing institutional stories about universities, and critically interrogating university memory in ways that aim to “unforget” the ongoing colonial relationships of the academy with Indigenous Lands and Indigenous Peoples themselves.
The research draws on settler colonialism (Wolfe, 2006) to understand complex colonial networks at play in the founding and sustaining of universities in Canada. Through a decolonial approach to historiography, researchers actively counter settler memories (Bruyneel, 2013), and temporal separations between past and present (Stein, 2022) to share Indigenous stories. In this research, Indigenous survivance theory (Vizenor, 2006) is used to examine how Indigenous Peoples have both survived and resisted settler colonial dynamics of power in the university system over time. Drawing on Sandy Grande (2015) extension of Indigenous survivance theory to academic contexts, we will show how “Indigenous and [some] non-Indigenous peoples work[ed] together to unmap the structures, processes and discourses of settler colonialism.” (p.8) at Western University to make room for Indigenous presence.
