More than a year after our last collective agreement expired in June 2014, TAs at McGill are reaching the end of the bargaining process over a new contract. McGill’s administration made its final offer at the bargaining table on September 1, and TAs will be voting at the General Assembly for their union, AGSEM, on September 30 to determine whether to accept this offer or fight back by striking.

AGSEM’s primary goal in bargaining has been to keep TA hours consistent with undergraduate enrolment in order to maintain the quality of education at McGill. Essentially, we want to ensure that there are enough paid hours during which we can do the work that needs to be done. Over the past decade, the number of TA hours per undergraduate student at McGill has plunged significantly, from 12.86 in 2006 to 11.25 now, with the fraction of the operating budget dedicated to TA wages dwindling every year. Skimping on funding for teaching support means that there are fewer and lower paid TA jobs for graduate students, many of whom are already struggling to make ends meet in programs with no guaranteed funding. It means that some of the work TAs would have done is picked up by professors at the expense of their other commitments, by overworked course lecturers with limited union protection and no job security, and by underpaid course graders. Mostly, however, it means that undergraduate students end up with more and more multiple choice tests, fewer office hours and opportunities for one-on-one or small group learning, and a less fulfilling education overall.

McGill’s teaching assistants deserve – and desperately need – better working conditions.

AGSEM’s bargaining demands include indexing TA hours to increasing undergraduate enrolment and guaranteeing sufficient TA funds in McGill’s budgets for faculties and departments (as deemed necessary by professors in those departments). AGSEM also wants to establish stricter limits on TA positions  of fewer than 45 hours per semester, as these often lead to more work being offloaded onto grader positions that provide less educational support and pay much less per hour.

These demands – intended to preserve both the quality of educational support at McGill and the ability of our fellow TAs to pay their tuition and rent – have been met with absolute refusal by the McGill’s  senior administration, who declared the University  was only willing to bargain regarding the hourly wage. Even on this front, the University’s offer is inadequate. The administration’s final offer to TAs would only increase wages by $200 to $250 per year (assuming a student manages to get 180-hour positions in both the fall and winter semesters). With stagnant wages, increasing costs of living, and a shrinking pool of TA hours, this proposal isn’t enough to meet the needs of TAs. Additionally, under this offer, out-of-province and international students, who make up roughly 45 per cent of McGill’s graduate student body and are particularly reliant on on-campus jobs, cannot even cover their tuition increases. TA conditions are set to get worse, not better, under this proposal.  

Although McGill’s administration claims to be short on funds, its words at the bargaining table make it clear that cost is not the barrier preventing it from meeting our demands. When discussing AGSEM’s demand that McGill partially reimburse TAs’ health insurance and tuition, as is standard at other universities, McGill’s negotiators stated that the University’s objection was a matter of principle, not of cost. Much the same can be said of McGill’s refusal to guarantee an adequate number of TA hours or an adequate budget line from which to pay us. The issue is not cost, which would be well within its means (the TA budget is currently about 1.1 per cent of McGill’s operating budget), but rather the administration’s refusal to set any sort of precedent that might commit them to prioritizing fair and equitable conditions for students and workers.

One last option: a strike

On September 30, AGSEM members will vote on whether or not to accept McGill’s offer. As present and former members and elected officials of AGSEM, we know that McGill’s teaching assistants deserve – and desperately need – better working conditions. We also know that McGill’s administration concedes nothing without pressure. Although this is the final offer at the bargaining table, TAs still have a chance to fight for our university – by rejecting this offer and voting to strike.

Consider some of the gains that workers have won from going on strike.

First, every major gain McGill TAs have won has been due to a strike. And every time we have gone on strike, we have won something important: in 1976, a base salary and protections against overtime that set a precedent nationally; in 1998, a reduction in salary disparities across the university (TA salaries were completely equalized in 2006); and in 2008, after a two-month strike, the TA workload form that ensures that contract hours are equivalent to the amount of work required, as well as another significant pay increase.

Second, teaching assistants at the University of Toronto won increases to the guaranteed minimum funding packages for graduate students when they went on strike this year. They had initially won guaranteed minimum funding by striking in 2000.

This fall, students and workers across Quebec will be mobilizing against public funding cuts and increasing labour precarity. With other education sector workers also facing worsening working conditions, we will have opportunities for media exposure and solidarity actions with other workers. There is no better time to go on strike.

Voting for McGill’s offer will lock TAs into another four or more years of struggling to secure jobs to pay the bills, working unpaid overtime, and neglecting our studies and research to get second or third jobs to make ends meet. It will mean years of hard-to-reverse changes to undergraduate education as courses are cancelled or modified to provide little to no feedback for students or contact with instructors.

At AGSEM’s general assemblies over the past year, TAs have consistently demanded wages with which we can pay the bills and protections against declining TA hours. Our bargaining team did what it could to make those demands heard at the bargaining table. Now, it’s up to us to take a stand for ourselves, for future TAs, for current undergraduates, for the quality of education at McGill, and against the austerity mentality that is attacking education and public services across Canada. Negotiations at the bargaining table have come to an end. The only option left is to go on strike.

In addition to the authors’ active involvement in AGSEM in the past five years, Benjamin Elgie (also former chair of the Daily Publications Society), Megan Mericle, Sunci Avlijas, and rosalind hampton have held elected positions on AGSEM’s executive. Mona Luxion is also a former Daily columnist. To contact the authors, please email m.luxion@gmail.com.  

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McGill’s ‘diversity’

Students and faculty members have been raising concerns about institutional racism at McGill for at least half a century. Committees, focus groups, and more committees have been formed; reports, recommendations, and more recommendations have been submitted to all levels of the administration. Most of this volunteer labour has been and continues to be done by racialized students and professors, with minimal if any tangible results. The senior administration has consistently refused to acknowledge and address institutional racism at McGill, using the depoliticized framing of liberal Canadian multiculturalism and the strategic pairing of ‘diversity and equity’ in institutional discourses to suggest an automatic cause and effect between the two.

The University has increasingly mobilized the abstract and market-friendly language of ‘diversity,’ such as in the Principal’s Task Force on Diversity, Excellence and Community. This language serves as a container for all forms of difference from an assumed white, middle to upper class, heterosexual, able-bodied, Anglo norm, shifting attention away from demands for equity and toward a notion of shared values such as ‘excellence’ and ‘community.’ For example, despite the extensive work of the 2010 Equity Sub-Committee on Race and Ethnic Relations for the Principal’s Task Force, chaired by Charmaine Nelson, an Associate Professor of Art History at McGill, the administration’s preliminary response generally ignored the specificity of race and institutional racism, broadly defining “diversity” as “reflected not only in race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability, but also in language, sexual orientation, gender identity, community, politics, culture, way of life, economic status, and interests.”

Rather than signifying a new agenda and direction shifting away from McGill’s longstanding reputation as a predominantly white, anglophone, elite institution, the “use of diversity as an official description can be a way of maintaining rather than transforming existing organizational values,” as Sara Ahmed wrote in her 2012 book, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. In practice, the limited diversity that McGill does seem to value continues to be its international diversity: its ability to extend its economic, social, and political reach to draw students from across the globe.

The white supremacy inherent to many Canadian universities is part and parcel of the colonial contexts within which they were established and developed; and this, I believe, is what makes these spaces particularly problematic and in many cases hostile to Indigenous and Black people.

Representation in education

As an educator, one of the most concerning points raised in The Daily’s article about faculty representation was that “the worst-performing faculties in terms of tenure-track professors who identified as a ‘visible minority,’ ‘ethnic minority,’ or ‘Aboriginal,’ include the Faculty of Education (19.5 per cent) and the Faculty of Arts (22.8 per cent).” Much of my own past work as a community worker and educator in Montreal Black communities has involved organizing to compensate for and struggle against the Eurocentrism and racism of curricula, teachers, and school administrators within Montreal primary and secondary schools and school boards. This work informed my decision to pursue a doctoral program in Educational Studies as well as my current research examining social relations between Black people and the University. Shifting my immediate focus to universities as the production sites of knowledge and power and to the university programs within and by which education and other social, cultural, and political workers are schooled has, quite frankly, explained a lot.

In the spring of 2013, as VP Diversity and Equity of the Education Graduate Students’ Society (EGSS), I authored a report titled “Diversity and Equity in the McGill University Faculty of Education,” calling attention to the ongoing lack of racial diversity and the persistence of institutional racism at McGill despite years of organizing and activism, particularly by students and faculty members of colour. While these teachers and learners have consistently created alternative pedagogical initiatives and spaces to better address their concerns and meet their needs outside of the university’s official channels and structures, they have also demanded accountability and change from within the institution. The report was endorsed by EGSS Council on May 1, 2013 and submitted to all professors in the Faculty as well as to the Dean of the Faculty of Education, on May 9, 2013.

For what I believe to be a variety of reasons, including fear, ambivalence, apathy, and strategic disengagement from institutional structures, only one professor responded: she assigned the report to her graduate classes in the fall of 2013, and invited me and my EGSS colleagues to visit her classes and to discuss the report with her students. Several graduate students expressed to us that while they had recognized or experienced institutional racism at the university, they were afraid to speak out against it. One international student shared that reading the report had made them aware of how they had come to McGill aspiring to become a teacher in Quebec, but through their experiences in the Faculty had internalized the notion that people of their background are not teachers here and had abandoned their goal. This points to the broader consequences of teacher education programs that offer neither racially diverse faculty nor curricula that reflect the impacts and contributions of decades of critical race and Indigenous studies in academia.

That the Faculties of Education and Arts are reported to be those with the fewest “‘visible minority,’ ‘ethnic minority,’ or ‘Aboriginal’” tenure-track professors at McGill is particularly striking because these faculties are arguably the most prominent sites of contemporary race-related research and scholarship, with professors conducting all manner of research and claiming pedagogical expertise in critical race theory, Indigenous studies, postcolonial theories, inclusive education, and social justice education. The highly active and engaged memberships of Canadian academic organizations such as the Researchers and Academics of Colour for Equity (R.A.C.E. Network) and the Black Canadian Studies Association, as well as the longstanding transnational Critical Ethnic Studies Association demonstrate the ridiculous nature of assertions of a lack of qualified racialized professors within these fields.

Canadian scholars of colour have and continue to make critical contributions to their fields, including (but by no means limited to) those challenging some of the academy’s outdated and limited assumptions, agendas, and practices. Clearly, the issue is not a lack of qualified scholars. It must be underscored that this failure represents an ‘intellectual deficit’ within the university itself. As Nathan Richards, a freelance digital journalist and doctoral researcher at Goldsmiths University noted regarding universities in the UK, the failure to engage “the vast perspectives and experiences of the communities within this country or from the people roaming the halls of our universities; and [the ongoing] marginalization of certain groups negatively impacts social and political policy, policing, law, media, the arts and pretty much every facet within our society.”

The University’s institutional texts, discourses, and display practices constantly celebrate McGill’s colonial roots while ignoring and erasing the realities of colonial dispossession and violence.

White supremacy at settler universities

An ever-expanding corpus of research on Canadian universities has demonstrated the persistence of deeply embedded structural racism and biases against racialized faculty. According to University Affairs, Canadian universities have responded to this research “with reams of reports, commissions, committees, policies and plans. Not only do most have equity or human rights departments and offices, but the majority also state they want a more inclusive academy.” Yet, they fail to make progress on racial equity and progressive structural change. McGill has a pervasive and deeply embedded “culture of whiteness,” including a clear racial hierarchy that puts Black and Indigenous students and faculty at the very bottom.

Despite the rhetoric to the contrary, this institutional racism is not merely the unfortunate result of recent austerity measures and the underrepresentation of Black and Indigenous professors is certainly not due to a lack of qualified potential candidates. The white supremacy inherent to many Canadian universities is part and parcel of the colonial contexts within which they were established and developed; and this, I believe, is what makes these spaces particularly problematic and in many cases hostile to Indigenous and Black people. As several students and scholars who I have interviewed for my research have asserted, the University’s institutional texts, discourses, and display practices constantly celebrate McGill’s colonial roots while ignoring and erasing the realities of colonial dispossession and violence. Most of these people are well aware that James McGill was a colonizer who both owned and traded in Black and Indigenous slaves and many are both offended and deeply troubled by the University’s promotion of James McGill’s persona, most obviously through the prominent positioning of his skull and bones in the tomb outside of the Arts Building and of the statue enacting his immortal presence on lower campus.

A group of Black academics at the University of Cape Town (UCT), in solidarity with student activists involved in the #RhodesMustFall movement, recently asserted that the statue of British colonizer Cecil John Rhodes on the UCT campus is “a key sign of the larger symbolic landscape of the university’s failure to transform, [which] includes: the artifacts and names allocated to space across our campuses; the under-representation and under-valuing of black academic staff at all levels; the offensive discourse around standards and performance; and curricula that largely disregard African knowledges and practice in all their complexity. All of this contributes to an alienating institutional culture for black staff and students across the institution. [These are] key areas on which the university must focus in order to advance real transformation.”

In addition to calling for the removal of the Rhodes statue from the UCT campus, the movement demands “the inclusion of an Afrocentric curriculum, the promotion of workers’ rights and an end to outsourcing, and the employment of more Black academics.” As one student activist adeptly put it, “From the time that it was colonized there was never an attempt to decolonize the university. The university culture is still very white, it’s very elitist, [it’s] patriarchal, and it’s very heteronormative.”

As noted by writers on Africa is a Country, “Rhodes must fall everywhere.” The statue on the UCT campus was indeed taken down on April 9. However, Rhodes’s statue in this context represents much more – it is a symbol of the ongoing celebration and perpetuation of the colonial ideologies upon which so many settler colonial colleges and universities like McGill were founded, and more broadly, of the lasting colonial relations and racial hierarchies in universities – whether in Canada, South Africa, or elsewhere.

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Many people were shocked by the militarized force used by police and by scenes of violent street fighting in Ferguson that many Americans and Canadians associate with far-away war zones. This is North America, not Cairo or Gaza. Of course, such comments ignore hundreds of years of brutal state violence against Black and Indigenous people in Canada and the U.S., as well as the violence that is and always has been directed at the poor, or at any resistance posing a threat to the current social order and racial hierarchy.

Many people were shocked by the militarized force used by police and by scenes of violent street fighting in Ferguson that many Americans and Canadians associate with far-away war zones.

Less than a week before Brown was killed, police in Ohio shot death 22-year-old John Crawford to death in a Walmart after a shopper called 911, reporting a man in the store with a gun who might “rob the place” or “shoot somebody.” Crawford was on the telephone with the mother of his children, LeeCee Johnson, at the time. He had picked up a toy rifle, the butt of which he was reportedly leaning on when police arrived. His last words were “it’s not real,” before he was shot and killed by the police. Johnson reported, “I could hear him just crying and screaming. I feel like they shot him down like he was not even human.”

In July, Eric Garner was choked to death by a New York City Police Department (NYPD) officer. The 43-year-old father of six was accused by police of allegedly selling loose cigarettes, and was illegally placed in a chokehold by one of the officers. Cellphone footage of the incident led to widespread awareness of the case, and the chance to hear the final utterances of an asthmatic man pleading for his life: “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe!”

Videos that document police violence and abuses of power – particularly directed at Black, mentally ill, and poor people – constantly circulate. This violence is normalized to the extent that when someone whose identities place them in multiple groups is killed – someone who is Black and poor, or Black and mentally ill – many are inclined to view their death as inevitable. An example of this tendency was the police killing on August 19 of a second Black man, 25-year-old Kajieme Powell, not far from Ferguson. Captured in full on a cellphone video, some assessed the situation as “suicide by cops.”

The constant scripting of Black people as always-already criminal and/or pathological has profound consequences in our daily interactions.

This explanation requires that we accept unnecessarily lethal police violence as predictable and normal. It requires projecting a desire to die onto a victim of police violence based on behaviour that may be attributable to any number of things, including mental illness or the experience of systemic oppression. In many places, it is not legally permissible to assist another person in ending their life under even what some would argue are the most humane of conditions. Although reported to have been carrying a knife, Powell did not appear to pose an immediate and potentially deadly threat to anyone else’s life. Neither did Alain Magloire, a Black man in the throes of a mental health crisis who was wielding a hammer when Montreal police gunned him down last February.

A Black youth in Montreal recently shared a video on his Facebook page featuring a Black woman in a small store, chanting down an employee with dramatic religious fervour. The video was posted in July 2011, has 3,200 likes and 5,200 comments, and has been shared on Facebook over 83,000 times. Recent commenters on the video found it hilarious, speculating that the woman was “crazy,” on crack or some other drug, practicing voodoo, and/or creating a distraction to cover up shoplifting. Some described the video as “sad,” and the woman as needing help. A white woman apparently from one of Montreal’s ethno-racially diverse neighbourhoods commented, “Awww..I see these characters every day in Cote des Neiges…lol [sic].” The most recent comment was by someone whose Facebook account identifies them as the head coach of a youth soccer program in Dallas, Texas. He wrote: “Shoot it with a tranquilizer gun to get some rest.”

Before they were killed, what was the value placed on the lives of Mike Brown, Kajieme Powell, and Trayvon Martin in our societies? What were the lives of Fredy Villanueva, Alain Magloire, Farshad Mohammadi, and Mohamed Anas Bennis worth? What about the lives of thousands of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada?

I was struck by how typical these comments are as people consume a range of spectacles of Black difference, performance, suffering, and rage alike. The constant scripting of Black people as always-already criminal and/or pathological has profound consequences in our daily interactions. Contrary to what mainstream Canadian historical narratives would have us believe, colonialism and the enslavement of Black and Indigenous peoples are very much a part of this country’s histories, and continue to shape social relations today. For this to change we need to recognize and challenge white supremacy and norms of respectability that continue to suggest that some lives are worth more than others.

Before they were killed, what was the value placed on the lives of Mike Brown, Kajieme Powell, and Trayvon Martin in our societies? What were the lives of Fredy Villanueva, Alain Magloire, Farshad Mohammadi, and Mohamed Anas Bennis worth? What about the lives of thousands of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada? We can and must recognize one another’s humanity, identify with one another, and build stronger movements through working in solidarity across our differences.

rosalind hampton is a PhD candidate in Educational Studies. To contact the writer, please email commentary@mcgilldaily.com.

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“First Nations’ control of their education is essential for ensuring their social, economic, political and cultural development. […] Only through full First Nations’ jurisdiction over education will their students be able to receive a quality education that respects their cultural identity, common beliefs, languages, values and traditions.”

—The First Nations Education Council, “Project: Educational Governance”

As a non-Indigenous graduate student in Educational Studies at McGill, I have a sense of responsibility to think critically about issues and initiatives concerning Indigenous education. Indeed, we have an obligation to recognize that Canada is a settler-colonial state established and maintained through the dispossession and oppression of Indigenous peoples. Those of us who benefit from the power of Canadian institutions – including McGill and other universities – must work toward the elimination of colonial policies and practices. It is with this in mind that I look at the federal government’s First Nations Education Act, and a new organization, Teach for Canada (TFC).

Teach for Canada is an organization set to launch in September 2014, offering university graduates the opportunity to teach in rural Indigenous communities for two years, following an intensive summer training program. According to the TFC website, the organization’s “vision is to make education more equal by helping schools in rural, remote, and Aboriginal communities recruit outstanding classroom leaders.”

Kyle Hill and Adam Goldenberg, the co-founders of the program, assert that TFC can be a solution for educational inequity in Canada. Nonetheless, building on the extensive criticism of Teach for America, which has been active in the U.S. for more than two decades, serious concerns are already being raised about TFC. Critics especially call attention to the limited quantity and quality of training that the teachers receive, and to the problematic nature of assigning predominantly white, inexperienced teachers to work with Indigenous students in under-resourced, rural, community schools.

Teach for America and TFC can be understood as part of a broader austerity agenda, shifting responsibility for education from the public to the private sphere. As an article by Rob Green published in the Haudenosaunee weekly newspaper Two Row Times pointed out, the public awareness campaign for TFC coincided with the Harper government’s announcement of the First Nations Education Act (FNEA) last fall.

We have an obligation to recognize that Canada is a settler-colonial state established and maintained through the dispossession and oppression of Indigenous peoples.

As Green observes, the embedding of the FNEA within the Conservative government’s economic budget is telling, as is Hill’s description of TFC’s “long-term dream” of having “Teach for Canada fellows sitting at a Cabinet table, sitting in newsrooms, sitting in boardrooms on Bay Street, where they can have an impact on educational inequalities from those vantage points.” The suggestion is that of prioritizing neoliberal political and economic concerns, and a colonial perception of Indigenous people as an objectified, economic resource for Canada. As Métis educator Chelsea Vowel reminds us, “there is no Aboriginal system of education in Canada, […] the system of education that exists in Canada is wholly Canadian, both legislatively and in terms of provision.”

The federal government’s stated goal in relation to Indigenous education is “to provide First Nation students with quality education that provides them with the opportunity to acquire the skills needed to enter the labour market and be full participants in a strong Canadian economy.” This goal, the FNEA proposed by the federal government in October, and TFC all appear to simply ignore decades of Indigenous demands for self-determination, and jurisdiction over their own education systems.

The FNEA, renamed the First Nations Control of First Nations Education Act this winter, has been denounced by many Indigenous scholars, educators, activists and groups including the Assembly of First Nations of Quebec and Labrador and the First Nations Education Council. The Kahnawà:ke Education Working Group argues:

“The legislation does not respect the inherent rights of Indigenous Peoples to govern ourselves and take responsibility for our children. It places the Canadian government in a paternalistic position to impose Canadian and Quebec teaching ideologies upon our children, as was done in the Residential and Indian Day School eras. The legislation lacks cultural and linguistic appropriateness and does not respect the individual needs of our nations.”

“[T]here is no Aboriginal system of education in Canada, […] the system of education that exists in Canada is wholly Canadian, both legislatively and in terms of provision.”

Although in a February 7 news release the Harper government touted the Act as “an historic agreement between the Government of Canada and the Assembly of First Nations” many First Nations insist that the government has not met its obligation to consult with them. The proposed legislation has been repeatedly criticized for failing to guarantee “necessary, adequate, equitable and stable funding for Education” in First Nations communities, failing to provide “meaningful support for the teaching of First Nations languages, culture and cultural values,” and providing “little recognition and respect for First Nations jurisdiction and control of First Nations education.”

The very structure of the event announcing this “historical agreement” reflected the ongoing colonial nature of the government’s policies and practices regarding First Nations. Certain invitees and elders were named on an approved list, while others who were not approved were sent to watch the event on monitors. The latter group, including Blood Tribe (Kainai Nation) Idle No More activist Twila Singer, was later forced to leave at the conclusion of the event while approved guests were invited for a feast. Métis artist Christi Belcourt, who was present at the event, described being part of the non-approved group that was closely followed by security. As Belcourt reminds us the announcement itself took place in the context of Canadian State authorities marking and controlling the movement of Indigenous bodies on First Nations’ land.

Indeed Mi’kmaw lawyer, scholar, and Idle No More activist Pamela D. Palmater argues that the Act is actually less about Indigenous education than it is about “creating a new kind of dependence for First Nations—dependence on labour jobs from extractive industries to undermine attempts by their leaders to defend their territories and the resources on them.”

In writing from the institutional location of McGill, it is also important to remember that McGill was founded on the wealth of a European colonizer and has refused to recognize and compensate the Iroquois Six Nations for an outstanding debt incurred in 1860, when according the the Six Nations, McGill borrowed $8,000 from the Six Nations Trust Fund held by the colonial government in trust for Six Nations land. As McGill expresses a desire to recruit more Aboriginal students into its undergraduate programs, are these students merely expected to ignore the institutional failure to acknowledge its colonial history and to celebrate “the legacy of James McGill?”

The suggestion is that of prioritizing neoliberal political and economic concerns, and a colonial perception of Indigenous people as an objectified, economic resource for Canada.

What are the boundaries of the current partnerships such as those that form the basis of McGill’s First Nations and Inuit Education program in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education (DISE)? How does the University position itself in relation to the assertions of the Kahnawà:ke Education Centre and the First Nations Education Council? Are the campus and community-based programs we are engaged in both challenging and eliminating colonial relations? Are non-Indigenous McGill students, researchers, educators, and administrators actively working to de-centre whiteness and settler perspectives? How can we do more?

Without actively and consistently responding to these questions, education programs and other interventions by non-Indigenous people seeking to ‘help’ Indigenous communities, can amount to little more than what scholars Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang call “settler moves to innocence,” actions in the guise of ‘decolonization’ that serve to relieve settler guilt without significantly disrupting and altering colonial institutional structures and power relations. This is not to claim that non-Indigenous educators and researchers should never work with Indigenous students, or in Indigenous schools or communities. Non-Indigenous scholars can contribute expertise and resources toward building capacity in Indigenous communities that can promote Indigenous autonomy.

This can only happen, however, when Indigenous people, agendas, and belief systems are prioritized, and when approaches reflect the views of the specific communities within which the work is being done. Especially given the demands of neoliberalism, “educators are called upon to play a central role in constructing the conditions for a different kind of encounter, an encounter that both opposes ongoing colonization and that seeks to heal the social, cultural, and spiritual ravages of colonial history.”

rosalind hampton is a doctoral student in Educational Studies and the coordinator of Community-University Talks. To contact the writer, please email commentary@mcgilldaily.com.

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