"Gokum showed me how": Four Cree children's perspectives on language and culture maintenance

<p>Eighty percent of Indigenous children in Canada attend provincial schools off-reserve where there is no legal requirement for inclusion of Indigenous language or content in the curriculum. This has implications for the twin challenges currently faced by Indigenous communities in Canada of maintaining traditional cultures and languages while also overcoming a large gap in educational achievement between Indigenous and non-Indigenous children. While the challenges are well understood, there has been little research into these issues from the perspective of the primary stakeholders in education: children. This qualitative study explores the perspectives of four Cree children, their family members, and some teachers through a critical, social constructivist lens in the context of a James Bay Cree community in northern Quebec, Canada. This study asks, “How do Cree children who live on a reserve and attend non-Indigenous schools, and their families, make space for the expression and maintenance of their language and culture in daily life?” The data analysed include a ‘photovoice’ project conducted with the four students, and focus group discussions held with the children, their families, and teachers. The findings demonstrate that families maintain Cree traditions through land-based activities like hunting, supported by intergenerational teaching within the family. Although participants expressed cautious optimism for language maintenance, students and parents perceived that Cree knowledge has no place outside of Cree communities. Teachers felt constrained by their lack of confidence, resources or government mandate for including Cree content. Overall, between Indigenous communities’ twin challenges of culture maintenance and school achievement, achievement appears to be valued more highly by some parents and teachers. These findings have implications for how we understand the ongoing effects of colonization, globalization, and the hegemony of dominant languages and cultures in Indigenous education.</p>

"Gokum showed me how": Four Cree children's perspectives on language and culture maintenance

<p>Eighty percent of Indigenous children in Canada attend provincial schools off-reserve where there is no legal requirement for inclusion of Indigenous language or content in the curriculum. This has implications for the twin challenges currently faced by Indigenous communities in Canada of maintaining traditional cultures and languages while also overcoming a large gap in educational achievement between Indigenous and non-Indigenous children. While the challenges are well understood, there has been little research into these issues from the perspective of the primary stakeholders in education: children. This qualitative study explores the perspectives of four Cree children, their family members, and some teachers through a critical, social constructivist lens in the context of a James Bay Cree community in northern Quebec, Canada. This study asks, “How do Cree children who live on a reserve and attend non-Indigenous schools, and their families, make space for the expression and maintenance of their language and culture in daily life?” The data analysed include a ‘photovoice’ project conducted with the four students, and focus group discussions held with the children, their families, and teachers. The findings demonstrate that families maintain Cree traditions through land-based activities like hunting, supported by intergenerational teaching within the family. Although participants expressed cautious optimism for language maintenance, students and parents perceived that Cree knowledge has no place outside of Cree communities. Teachers felt constrained by their lack of confidence, resources or government mandate for including Cree content. Overall, between Indigenous communities’ twin challenges of culture maintenance and school achievement, achievement appears to be valued more highly by some parents and teachers. These findings have implications for how we understand the ongoing effects of colonization, globalization, and the hegemony of dominant languages and cultures in Indigenous education.</p>

Writing and Translation with the James Bay Cree of Northern Québec

Introduction

(Re)discovering Pedagogy of the Oppressed

This article chronicles a crisis of alignment regarding Critical Pedagogy due to the top-down power structures of White authority that is pervasive in the theory’s North American academic environment. Contesting the often touted “radical” or “revolutionary” nature of Critical Pedagogy in higher education spaces, the author questions his relationship with Paulo Freire’s work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, ultimately abandoning the content of writing over the way the theory/philosophy is lived in academia. Through the lived experience of engaging with community in the James Bay Cree territories and Malawi, the question is asked as to who owns Freire’s rebellious call to action.

Harvest Programs in First Nations of Subarctic Canada: The Benefits Go Beyond Addressing Food Security and Environmental Sustainability Issues

By breaking down barriers that impacted the ability of subarctic First Nations people to harvest waterfowl, the Sharing-the-Harvest program provided a safe, nutritious, and culturally appropriate food (i.e., geese) to James Bay Cree communities while also helping to protect the environment by harvesting overabundant geese. However, the impacts extend beyond those described above. Thus, the objectives of the present paper are twofold: to document the food sharing networks of the Sharing-the-Harvest program; and to examine the benefits associated with the harvest program beyond food security and environmental sustainability issues, as revealed through semi-directed interviews. In the regional initiative, harvested geese were shared with all James Bay communities; sharing is an important part of Cree culture. Where detailed information was collected, the goose-sharing network reached 76% of the homes in one of the communities. Likewise, in the local initiative, the goose-sharing network had a 76% coverage rate of the homes in the community. Although decreasing food insecurity was an important focus of the harvest-sharing programs, there were other benefits, from an Indigenous perspective, of being on the land, as identified by the Cree harvesters through semi-directed interviews (e.g., the transmission of Indigenous knowledge, the strengthening of social networks, and the feeling of wellness while out on-the-land). Thus, by participating in the on-the-land harvest programs, the Cree gained benefits beyond those solely related to strengthening food security and contributing in part to environmental sustainability. The Sharing-the-Harvest protocol has the potential to be adapted and employed by other Indigenous (or marginalized) groups worldwide, to help improve health and wellness, while, also protecting the environment from overabundant and/or invasive species.

Northern Québec James Bay Cree Regional Health Governance in Support of Community Participation: Honouring the "Butterfly"

Successful responses to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada's (TRC, 2015) Calls to Action require “joint leadership, trust-building, and transparency” between Canadian public institutions and First Nations. In the area of health and wellness, community participation in priority setting and planning constitutes one important step forward. In 2013, the Québec Cree regional health and social services agency launched a unique wellness planning initiative involving community participation in regional level policy-making. This article reports on a qualitative study conducted with key agency staff, an early component of a broader developmental participatory evaluation. Focusing on contextual challenges to and ways forward on community participation in planning, thematic analysis of 17 semi-structured interviews revealed important nuances between Cree and non-Cree perspectives: These perspectives reflected an empowerment versus a utilitarian view of participation, respectively. Cree Elders consulted on these results highlighted the ontological and epistemological distinction of Cree perspectives, and the importance of bringing these forth. These interpretations point to the relevance of extending cultural safety to institution-level processes bearing on relationships with communities and potentially building capacity for participation.

Achieving Certainty in Treaties with Indigenous Peoples: Small Steps Towards Adopting Elements of Recognition

The Eeyou Marine Region Land Claims Agreement (EMRLCA) with the James Bay Cree of northern Quebec contains a novel approach to achieving certainty in treaties with Indigenous peoples. For the federal government, the certainty of having the rights of an Indigenous nation exhaustively set out in one document is the benefit derived from treaties. Unlike Aboriginal rights, which the government views as ambiguous and hard to define, treaties are negotiated agreements that clearly outline rights. The goal of government when negotiating treaties is therefore to ensure that the Indigenous group can only exercise treaty rights and not their pre-existing Aboriginal rights which are recognized by the common law and the Constitution Act, 1982.