Gathering Stories, Gathering Pedagogies: Animating Indigenous Knowledges through Story

This paper brings together four Indigenous and non-Indigenous teacher educators to consider the pedagogical possibilities of Indigenous children's literature in our work with pre-service teachers.¹ In this paper, we take up an invitation to consider Indigenous literary arts in relation to pedagogies, land, sovereignty, and Indigenous ways of knowing. Specifically, we do this by sharing pedagogical examples of the ways in which various picturebooks and oral stories work within our classrooms. Over the past year, we have had opportunities to collaborate and co-write in two cities. While we come from different backgrounds, communities, and positionalities, we were brought together by our shared investment in the power of picturebooks as rich pedagogical resources to spark conversations about many of the themes and topics we seek to share with our students—such as land and place, intergenerational kinship networks, community relations, language revitalization, cultural identity, and Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and doing.

Each of us strongly believes that Indigenous children's literature, including picturebooks, offer an opportunity to reiterate to pre-service teachers that "Indigenous literatures matter because Indigenous peoples matter" (Justice, Why Indigenous Literatures Matter 211). For many of our students, picturebooks are a first foray into Indigenous Education. Our students come to our classrooms with varying understandings and lived experiences of colonialism and Indigenous knowledges. Regardless of our students' prior experiences, they are required to weave Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and doing into their professional practices. For example, Alberta has a new Teaching Quality Standard that was implemented in the fall of 2019. Teachers are now evaluated on their ability to "develop and apply foundational knowledge about First Nations, Métis, and Inuit" (6). As we share within this paper, we have found picturebooks and oral stories to be a safe entrypoint into this material; they offer insight into particular communities, places, cultures, and identities in an accessible and celebratory way. These texts also have a depth and complexity to them that facilitate conversations about the sometimes-difficult learning we engage in. To make this argument within this paper, we move through four examples of picturebooks and stories within our own teaching practices.

Picturebooks open up important opportunities and questions in our teaching. The visual and verbal texts of picturebooks carry multiple meanings that can be read in different ways. Likewise, we have found there to be interesting conversations to be had about the differences between a text that exists on the page and an oral story: does putting a (live) story (spirit) into a book, impaling it on the page, cut off its life force? What happens when an oral culture, which is tied to lifeways and traditions, is recorded in print?² Is it ethical to share information, such as spiritual customs, in picturebook form? Questions such as these guide our practice with pre-service teachers. We know from Lumbee scholar Bryan McKinley Jones Brayboy that "Oral stories remind us of our origins and serve as lessons for the younger members of our communities; they have a place in our communities and our lives" (439)—how meaningfully do these lessons transfer via the page? Many of our pre-service teachers are afraid of making mistakes, especially early in their journeys, but they need to learn to sit with this discomfort and to take pedagogical risks within the classroom. We believe that discomfort is when deep learning and epistemological and ontological shifts occur.

Part of our role as educators is to point our students toward the wealth of resources and tools that are available to them, including Indigenous literatures, and to help them negotiate how to critically evaluate these sources for classroom purposes. While we always encourage our students to collaborate with colleagues, Indigenous community members, and knowledge-keepers, we are well aware that asking Indigenous people to carry the weight of teaching continues to rely on extractivist and exploitative ways of gaining knowledge. Indigenous picturebooks, such as the ones illustrated below, contain cultural knowledge that can help begin the conversation. Through texts, we can...