Re-Singing the World Indigenous Pedagogies and Global Crisis during Conflicted Times

Abstract

Speaking of the global crisis of sustainability, Noam Chomsky observed, Throughout the world, Indigenous societies are struggling to protect what they sometimes call 'the rights of nature', while the civilized and sophisticated scoff at this silliness. The author locates himself as an Indigenous person from Aotearoa New Zealand, a country in which the relationship between the people of the land and the settler government is held to be defined by the Treaty of Waitangi, living as a guest in the traditional lands of the Cree, and Anishnabe people in the Canadian Province of Alberta, an area covered by three of the eleven numbered treaties signed between the First People of Canada and the British Crown. The politico/ economic changes occurring in both countries, Canada and Aotearoa New Zealand, bear upon the relationship between Indigenous people and their rights to their traditional customary practices and way of life in specific ways. Keywords: Aotearoa New Zealand; British Crown; Canada; global crisis; Indigenous people; Noam Chomsky