the school of philosophy

Remember “Indian Control Over Indian Education“? That was 1972.

What if we stopped looking for colonial accreditation and recognition in education? What if we took all the energy we put in trying to change a broken education system and put it into local, community-controlled immersion education programs? Programs centred on our own ways of knowing – programs deliberately connecting our peoples to the land, our political traditions, our languages and the local issues of relevance. What if we purposefully educated our own?

And what about post-secondary education? What if we centred education in a nest of everyday acts of resurgence (to use the words of Jeff Corntassel)? We’ve been participating in post-secondary education for several decades now. We have a lot of people with BAs, MAs and PhDs. What can programs like AFS teach us? What if our sole purpose is using our own intellectual traditions to educate our own youth and our allies?

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