The Relationships Between Racialized Immigrants And Indigenous Peoples In Canada: A Literature Review

This literature review assesses the current status of Indigenous and racialized newcomer relations in Canada and provides recommendations for future research, government policy, and grassroots organizing. In Canada, as is other “white settler-societies”, there is a strict separation between two intersecting debates surrounding identity, citizenship, and belonging—one revolves around the immigrant experience and the other around Indigenous peoples. To break down the barriers separating these two debates, this paper will explore what the nature of the relationship is between immigrants and Indigenous peoples through a review of the literature using postcolonial and decolonized anti-racist frameworks. This literature review attempts to contribute to the unsettling of insider/outsider, minority/majority, Indigenous/settler, and black/white binaries, which are pervasive within the racialized and colonized Canadian society, and build dialogue and cross-cultural collaboration in anti-racist activism and scholarship.

The Relationships Between Racialized Immigrants And Indigenous Peoples In Canada: A Literature Review

This literature review assesses the current status of Indigenous and racialized newcomer relations in Canada and provides recommendations for future research, government policy, and grassroots organizing. In Canada, as is other “white settler-societies”, there is a strict separation between two intersecting debates surrounding identity, citizenship, and belonging—one revolves around the immigrant experience and the other around Indigenous peoples. To break down the barriers separating these two debates, this paper will explore what the nature of the relationship is between immigrants and Indigenous peoples through a review of the literature using postcolonial and decolonized anti-racist frameworks. This literature review attempts to contribute to the unsettling of insider/outsider, minority/majority, Indigenous/settler, and black/white binaries, which are pervasive within the racialized and colonized Canadian society, and build dialogue and cross-cultural collaboration in anti-racist activism and scholarship.

Community Organizing as Curriculum and for Curriculum Critique and Reform

The article explores the connections and contradictions between community organizing and curriculum. Huckaby distinguishes coordinated habits that move a. populace in a particular direction from community organizing that is intentional collective work that is corrective in nature as it aims to advance freedom, rectify injustices, and amend inequalities. Community organizing also functions to expose and reveal the oppressive structures and processed bolstered by hidden curricula that implicitly inform individual actions and practices enacted by people en masse. Community organizing builds movements that are collective in nature, taking into consideration the wisdom and experiences of the community without imposing a prescribed solution or agenda to the issues. This piece specifically attends to grassroots community organizing around neoliberal impositions on education. To disrupt, resist, and refuse neoliberal policies, laws, and structures that further marginalize individuals, grassroots efforts must go beyond networking. Huckaby turns Haraway’s cyborg theory to understand the necessity of weaving, rather than simply networking, to create and sustain solidarity that binds different kinds of things, moving in different directions together. Weaving makes for transformation through connection, affinity, coalition, and political kinship. This process, a process toward not only transformation but also toward freedom offers reciprocal, yet unguaranteed benefits for individuals and the world. As individuals work in groups to better understand their needs, the world, too, has an opportunity to learn. While community organizing as curriculum may not solve all the problems of the world, it acts as a robust vehicle for collective steps toward various types of freedom as individuals demand rights for themselves and others. This text offers examples and forms of community and grassroots organizing including testimonies, teachers’ strike, #hashtags, and teach-ins conceptualized via participatory democracy, critical pedagogy, Kaupapa Maori research, cyborg weaving, freedom from, and freedom for. Community organizing as curriculum and for curriculum critique and reform has a corrective purpose that reveals injustices and seeks to unravel inequalities, while weaving relations that create and sustain solidarity and conjoined liberation.

Accountability from the Ground Up: Uncovering the Limitations and Possibilities of Organizing for Community Schools in Philadelphia

This paper focuses on the evolution of community schools from a grassroots organizing effort to a formal initiative in Philadelphia. The authors implemented a critical participatory action research project to examine the process and impact of the education organizing. We present two narratives to illustrate the potential and limitations of two divergent community school approaches. We argue that education justice movements must develop processes and metrics of accountability to effectively organize for transformative community-driven education. Findings provide insights to communities organizing for public education in other contexts and locales and an example of how research can support social justice movements.

“Our Stories Are Powerful”: The Use of Youth Storytelling in Policy Advocacy to Combat the School-to-Prison Pipeline

The use of narratives and storytelling has become an increasingly common strategy in grassroots organizing and advocacy efforts to influence policy change. Drawing on qualitative interviews and observations, Jeffrey Moyer, Mark Warren, and Andrew King present a case study of the successful campaign by Voices of Youth in Chicago Education (VOYCE) to pass SB100, a progressive Illinois law aimed at ending the school-to-prison pipeline. The authors show that personal storytelling, when combined with other approaches, constitutes an effective strategy for youth organizing groups in low-income communities of color to achieve racial equity and educational justice policy goals. In this case, youth leaders involved in VOYCE told legislators their personal stories of the harm done to them and their friends by zero-tolerance school discipline and spoke to the racial inequities they faced. In doing so, they countered previously held narratives of youth of color as troublemakers and violence-prone and created a moral urgency for legislators to act. Youth leaders used storytelling and data to build a larger alliance of supporters, which contributed to the passage of a bill that limited harsh discipline, promoted restorative justice alternatives, and took steps to close racial gaps in suspensions and expulsions.