Apprenticeship Pedagogy for Teaching Indigenous Popular Literary and Multi-Media Genres

Abstract

Apprenticeship Pedagogy for Teaching Indigenous Popular Literary and Multi-Media Genres Brenda Vellino (bio) As I am writing this chapter on unceded Algonquin Anishinaabe territory in the Kiji Sibi (Ottawa River) watershed of northern Turtle Island, I am teaching an Indigenous drama course to fifteen students on Zoom. Recent encounters with teachings from Algonquin Anishnaabe educators, scholars, and performance practitioners are rearranging my learning and teaching practices.1 These will indelibly shape how I teach my next offering of a seminar in Indigenous Popular Literary and Multi-Media Genres, the subject of this essay. The teaching story I offer here is thus a continual work in progress, changing even as I teach and write in this semester. I was raised in settler culture without knowing that an ethical existence depends upon respecting the Indigenous territories I was living in. I also passed decades of my life before learning what John Borrows, Aaron Mills, Zoe Todd, and Anna Kanngieser have taught us: that stories arising from these lands and waters teach kinship relations principles and responsibilities for the humans and more-than-human beings dwelling there. Although I was in high school more than forty years ago, this is still true for those settler students present in many of our Indigenous literatures classrooms. Learning more about how to learn beyond the simple fact of a land acknowledgment has rearranged my brain, just as rethinking my address from the point of view of being a citizen of the Kiji Sibi watershed has done.2 An ongoing practice of decolonial land and territories apprenticeship-based learning informs how I encourage diverse student engagement in my Indigenous Popular Literary and Multi-Media Genres course.3 While key discussions of Indigenous literary pedagogy are foundational,4 my thinking draws particularly on multidisciplinary [End Page 163] Indigenous perspectives with pedagogical implications. An Indigenous literatures course can be productively informed by Indigenous-led conversations from performative storywork methodologies, legal studies, and decolonial place-based studies. The confluence of these overlapping areas is an informing matrix for the development of this course. Key emergent contexts for my teaching include storywork priorities as theorized by Jo-Ann Archibald (Stó:lō) and Brunette-Debissage (Mushkego Cree iskwew/French) and Pauline Wakeham for engaging Indigenous literary studies from the perspective of relational respect and responsibility. John Borrows (Chippewas of Nawash) and Aaron Mills (Anishinabe) further emphasize the ways that oral stories carry legal principles governing responsible relations between all elements of the multispecies world. This is augmented by experiential learning practices that pay careful attention to decolonial land and territory positioning where land is not taken up solely as an abstract literary theme, setting, or metaphor (Tuck and McKenzie, 134, 148). To have an inkling of how to engage with relational kinship priorities manifest in the "animacy" of land, plants, trees, and beings in oral, written, and performance texts (Watts; Todd and Kanngieser; Cariou), it is important to have a tangible sense of the lands and waters where one resides and the laws arising from them. Anishinaabe legal scholar Aaron Mills advocates for settlers to "respect and live by" Indigenous laws arising from the territories where one lives: "to understand that you are … always in relationship with everybody there, including all those non-humans who fly, walk, crawl, swim, reach, and rumble" (20–24). His call to "do much more than simply make space for our voices," invites reflection on what it might mean for instructors and students to live in a way that reflects principles of territorial Indigenous laws. What might it mean to read and respond to texts from this perspective? This question can be productively applied to engagement with all forms of literary, visual, and performative storywork, augmented by attention to performance studies priorities for embodied and multi-sensory engagement (Archibald-Barber, Ravensbergen, Lachance). My apprenticeship journey began and continues through experiential learning from diverse Indigenous knowledge holders, educators, and artists at public gatherings like the CACLALS Aboriginal Round Tables (http://caclals.ca/about-us/), community events, lectures, art shows, and performances. Informed by these, I began to teach selected Indigenous [End Page 164] fiction, poetry, and drama as key texts in a Canadian literature survey course, oriented...