Trickster Chases the Tale of Education by Sylvia Moore (review)

in his powerful introduction to Noon nee-me-poo (We the Nez Perces): Culture and History of the Nez Perces, Allen P. Slickpoo insisted on the importance of Native history written by Native scholars in conjunction with Native epistemologies. Most important, Slickpoo wrote, these books are needed in the classroom, because "it was not possible to live as a Native American for sixteen hours a day and spend the other seven or eight hours with Dick and Jane who lived in a home designed for 'middle-class' people, and not become confused and unhappy."¹ Public schools governed by Eurocentric pedagogy and organizational structures have been hostile to Indigenous knowledge, even in the rare instances when teachers have tried to incorporate community traditions into the curriculum. Because the classroom must also prepare Native students to engage in a world beyond their own communities, the conflict between the two different, often oppositional teaching traditions has historically fallen in favor of Eurocentric pedagogy, and educators have forced Indigenous knowledge and teaching practice to fit within the contradictory structure of Western education. In Trickster Chases the Tale of Education, Sylvia Moore challenges the foundational assumption that either tradition must give way to the other in order to incorporate them both, and she does so in an innovative format that continually forces the reader to confront her own assumptions.

Moore's work tells the story of a 2007 community-based research project involving salmon at North Queens School, a primary school adjacent to Wildcat First Nation in Caledonia, Novia Scotia. The project focused on introducing students (both from Mi'kmaw Nation and non-Indigenous) to traditional Mi'kmaw ecological knowledge by following salmon through the first stages of their life cycle. The goal of the project was "to examine the dynamics of school educators and Mi'kmaw community members working together to centre and legitimate Mi'kmaw knowledge in education" (10). As the project progressed, and especially when Moore sat down to collect and analyze her findings, she discovered that the true difficulty lay in honoring Mi'kmaw ways of knowing and learning alongside her formal training as an education researcher. Bringing Indigenous knowledge into Eurocentric education subjects it to a colonized framework, a framework that necessarily contradicts vital components of Indigenous knowledge production and sharing. Instead, Moore pushes against the notion that Indigenous knowledge should be subservient to curricular structures and presents a model in which apparent dichotomous traditions can exist in the same classroom space, honoring the importance of both perspectives without an overarching framework that reconciles their differences.

Moore is a Mi'kmaw mother and grandmother and an assistant professor of Aboriginal community-based education at the Labrador Institute of Memorial University of Newfoundland, and her decade of experience incorporating traditional knowledge and Indigenous teaching methodologies into Eurocentric classrooms is evident in this well-researched study. What is most powerful about her work, however, is her bold choice to present the study in the format of traditional storytelling. In conversation with Crow, the Trickster, Moore relates the details of the project in the form of personal narrative, even incorporating blank pages at key points in the narrative to encourage the reader to sit in silence with her as she thinks through the process. What would in many other authors' hands become a gimmick Moore wields as a persuasive tool to illustrate the efficacy and importance of her methodology. Moore's personal narrative approach offers a refreshingly introspective discussion of the research project and her process in analyzing its components, and she transparently reports the real challenges she faced in seeking the balance between the two educational traditions in a way that offers readers a productive model to follow while reminding scholars that educational research is an ongoing process, not something to conclude too hastily or tidily.

While Moore's unique structure for the book is engaging, it does not sacrifice academic rigor. The text is peppered with references to scholars and traditional knowledge-keepers whose work influences Moore's...