In wilderness, in community: mentorship, academia, and ‘emerging’ as a scholar in settler colonial institutions

Abstract

ABSTRACT We ground the emergence of the Northeast North American university on the stolen territories of Indigenous nations in the Puritan historical context of their origins. In particular, we examine the concept of academic mentorship of people identified as emerging scholars. We show how academic mentorship within this unchallenged and continued Puritanical framework functions as a disciplinary regime to assimilate scholars made marginal into the elite academic institution. Far from the bastions of progressive thought and action, we highlight the narrowly defined ways marginalized scholars must operate from within the Northeast North American university. This article derives from a panel presentation at a Canadian Historical Association annual meeting where we centred community building as a decolonizing research praxis, which became the central focus of Wolasuweltomuwakon – a community building gathering. This article holds the methodological practices we began to develop on that panel and during that gathering. We divided this article into three sections, each written by one of the three authors, together, and in conversation, with one another.