Reclaiming Our Ancestral Knowledge and Ways: Aboriginal Teachers Honouring Children, Youth, Families, Elders, and Communities as Relational Decision Makers

Abstract

We began this chapter with storied experiences of relationships with children and youth and of questions around tensions they can experience as they make home, familial, community, and school transitions. These questions included: Why do we do it this way? Who decides? Can’t I think about what's best for my child? For Aboriginal children? As Khea, Jennifer, and Brenda Mary storied the experiences noted earlier, and as we collectively inquired into their stories, attentive to the intergenerational narrative reverberations of colonization made visible, it was their attentiveness to the particular life of a youth, Robbie; of a child, Rachel; and of a grandchild that we were first drawn. Their deep yearnings for something different in schools also turned our attention toward the counterstories to live by which they were composing. Across Khea's, Jennifer's, and Brenda Mary's earlier storied experiences the counterstories to live by around which they were threading new possible intergenerational narrative reverberations were focused on understanding children and youth as composing lives shaped by multiple contexts, that is, lives shaped through multiple relationships in places in and outside of school. This need for understanding the multiple places and relationships shaping the lives of children and youth as they enter into schools is, as shown in the earlier noted stories, vital in Aboriginal families and communities given the ways in which the narrative of colonization continues to reverberate in present lives.

Citation

Isabelle Young, M., Joe, L., Lamoureux, J., Marshall, L., Dorothy Moore, S., Orr, J.-L., Mary Parisian, B., Paul, K., Paynter, F. and Huber, J. (2012), "Reclaiming Our Ancestral Knowledge and Ways: Aboriginal Teachers Honouring Children, Youth, Families, Elders, and Communities as Relational Decision Makers", Isabelle Young, M., Joe, L., Lamoureux, J., Marshall, L., Dorothy Moore, S., Orr, J.-L., Mary Parisian, B., Paul, K., Paynter, F. and Huber, J. (Ed.) Warrior Women: Remaking Postsecondary Places through Relational Narrative Inquiry (Advances in Research on Teaching, Vol. 17), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 79-107. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1479-3687(2012)0000017011