Using Indigenous-Informed Close-Reading and Research Skills to Unlearn

Here in Vancouver, local protocols require that we identify ourselves in relation to our families and to the land and peoples who were here first. It is a sign of respect for the host First Nations, but it is also key to unlearning commonly-held assumptions about history and citizenship. So each semester I share with my students the fact that while I have lived in East Vancouver for two decades, I am not from here. I was born on the Canadian Prairies to a Cree-speaking Métis mother from Northern Saskatchewan and a German-speaking second-generation immigrant father born in Manitoba whose parents had left Poland after World War I. My position as an Indigenous woman of mixed heritage does not diminish my responsibilities to acknowledge that I live and work as an uninvited guest on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh, Skwxwú7mesh, and Stó:lō peoples.

I work at Simon Fraser University, named for a so-called explorer, and because I am cross-appointed in both the Departments of English (ENGL) and Indigenous Studies (INDG), I usually teach literary studies, but not always to literature students; while the majority of my students in ENGL are non-Indigenous, my INDG classes are mixed. When I teach INDG 201, a second-year core course that examines dominant cultural institutions that preserve history, I ask my students to examine the background, purpose, and imagined audience of libraries, archives, museums, public school textbooks, and public history projects, and to question who benefits from the methods of inquiry that we teach and learn in university. It is a strategy to ask them to question what they think they know as a way to dismantle assumptions embedded in structures and materials that they typically have considered to be neutral.

While I think that the topic is particularly significant for Indigenous students, who often have already suspected that they were not the target audience for public history narratives, it would be wrong to say that these students respond uniformly one way and non-Indigenous students another. Regardless, all benefit from learning an Indigenous-informed methodology that draws on both the disciplines of English and history. I teach students how to combine close reading and research skills to determine who benefits from the systems as they have been organized: students need skills in "close reading" in order to decode the subtle assumptions underlying the sources they read; at the same time, students need a research skillset to locate historical sources from whatever time period is under scrutiny, using the library databases and archives. But these standard humanities-based research methods need to be culturally enhanced: students need to consider ways in which Indigenous perspectives are present or valued; they need to be introduced to work by Indigenous theorists and storytellers in order to be able to appreciate and prioritize multiple Indigenous perspectives; they need to be exposed to varying tribal approaches to history-keeping as a way to consider sources that are often excluded from conventional repositories. And in keeping with the holism of Indigenous pedagogy, I call attention to the emotional work that unlearning requires, so that students can expect a combination of troubling reactions as they question dominant approaches and think through new ideas.¹

A main focus of the course is using this method of Indigenous-informed close-reading to examine seemingly innocent institutions established to preserve cultural knowledge. What histories are preserved and prioritized? Upon what underlying assumptions are collections organized and for whom? Which authors are included and whose stories are told? Who makes a living as the researcher and who is researched?

I assign a few chapters of Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith's Decolonizing Methodologies (1999; revised 2021), and I warn students that Smith's book is genuinely difficult to read. I explain that former students have returned to tell me that it is one of the most important titles that they read during their degree and that it continues to be relevant during graduate work. I share an important crib note: that while the first half of...