Seeking Educational Justice for Indigenous Populations
This project is a Strategic Partnership facilitated through The Human Rights Lab. It examines whether and how public education functions as an arena for reparative justice in societies with a history of foundational violence perpetrated against its Indigenous population. George Dalbo, a PhD Student working on the project, recently gave us an update into how the research is progressing.
Our Human Rights Lab subgrant, "Public Education on Indigenous Dispossession and Reparative Justice Across Minnesota and Manitoba Workshop," has been off to an auspicious start this academic year. After a summer of in-depth background research into the landscape of formal education in Manitoba and Minnesota, our team, Alejandro Baer, George Dalbo, Joe Eggers, and Jillian LaBranche, spent the fall semester conducting key informant interviews with experts in the field.
In Minnesota, this has included interviews with a Dakota scholar and community activist and educator and the director of Indian education for one of the largest school districts in the state, as well as a focus group with several sixth-grade social studies teachers [sixth grade is the year when students in public school typically learn about Minnesota history and Indigenous peoples, history, and culture].
In addition, members of the team have already made two trips to Winnipeg, Manitoba to make connections and conduct interviews. During the course of these two trips, Alejandro interviewed educators at the Manitoba Museum, Jillian interviewed leaders at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights and made contacts with the Metis community, while George presented at the annual meeting of the Manitoba Social Science Teachers' Association conference. Alejandro and George are planning more interviews for a third trip already scheduled for late February.
The team is also in the midst of planning a workshop at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg in late August. The multi-day workshop aims to bring together a group of 24 (12 from Minnesota and 12 from Manitoba) teachers and school leaders, community educators and activists, and scholars and policymakers to discuss representations of Indigenous peoples, cultures, histories, and contemporary realities in education, including public schools, community spaces, museums, and other sites of education, as well as the prospects for education to serve both for and as reparative justice in settler societies, such as Minnesota and Manitoba.
As we begin to analyze the data we've collected thus far, we are preparing to present our research findings at several national and international conferences. This included seeking early feedback from U of MN faculty and graduate students during a presentation of the project's main aims and research design at the Holocaust, Genocide, and Mass Violence interdisciplinary graduate group. George shared findings from initial research at an education conference at the University of Oxford (UK) in October 2019, as well as the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in April. Alejandro will present at the 2020 Joint Conference on Human Rights and Foreign Policy in London in June. Additional proposals have been submitted for Alejandro and Jillian to present at the annual American Sociological Association conference in San Francisco in August, and for the entire team to present at a conference, "Mass Violence and Its Lasting Impact on Indigenous Peoples," organized by the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation in October.
Lastly, the team is beginning to construct a resource guide covering issues of Indigenous representation in formal public K-12 education in Minnesota. The resource guide aims to support the breadth of those people involved in decision making around educational policy and implementation in Minnesota from classroom educators to legislators.
