Structured Relationalism in the Classroom: A Collaborative Approach to Teaching Indigenous Literatures

Abstract

Structured Relationalism in the ClassroomA Collaborative Approach to Teaching Indigenous Literatures Kristina Fagan Bidwell (bio) and Adar Charlton (bio) With special thanks to the students in ENG 114 and ENG 811, whose varied contributions to, critiques of, and sometimes resistance to the pedagogical project described here shaped this essay. Kristina Fagan Bidwell is a Professor in the Department of English at the University of Saskatchewan. Adar Charlton came to the U of S as a PhD student in English and was a student in Fagan Bidwell's graduate seminar. Together, Fagan Bidwell and the seminar students designed a multi-phased collaborative project for Fagan Bidwell's all-Indigenous introductory English course. To reflect their different roles and positions, Fagan Bidwell and Charlton wrote their introductory positionings and concluding reflections separately but the sections describing the project itself together. introductory positions kristina fagan bidwell: I believe that academic work is, ultimately, personal, and that is certainly true of this project. I am a member of NunatuKavut, the Inuit community of southern Labrador; grew up in Newfoundland; and have lived in Saskatchewan for many years, with the result that I am neither fully at home "back home" nor on the prairies. I am Indigenous, but I am not Indigenous to the lands now known as Saskatchewan as are the Cree, Dene, Saulteaux, Lakota, Dakota, Nakota, or Métis. And so, I am always aware of the diversity of Indigenous people and our complex relationships to one another and to place, an awareness that shaped my thinking as I prepared, in 2012, to teach an introductory literature course to a group of all-Indigenous students [End Page 183] and a same-term graduate seminar in Indigenous literatures. But when I decided to take advantage of this teaching schedule to bring the two classes together, I did not anticipate how the resulting project, and the long process of thinking collaboratively about it, would change how I think about my teaching, turning my primary focus to the relationships to and around course content, rather than to the content itself. adar charlton: I am a white settler from Thunder Bay, Ontario, situated on the lands of the Anishinaabeg, the traditional territory of Fort William First Nation under the Robinson-Superior Treaty of 1850. I grew up witnessing the injustices of systemic and outward racisms and violence toward Indigenous peoples in Thunder Bay perpetrated by ongoing processes of settler colonialism. Coming to understand my own privilege and complicity within these processes motivates me to combat settler amnesia and hold space for Indigenous presence in my work in order to support a decolonial future. I read, teach, and share Indigenous literature now as an emerging scholar and teacher because this literature carries the transformative power to create such a future. Participating in Kristina's seminar and in this collaborative project as a first-year PhD Student at the University of Saskatchewan started a process for me of continual, critical, and self-reflexive positioning. course creation Indigenization of the classroom is often understood as incorporating course materials and interpretive frameworks in which Indigenous students can see themselves reflected. However, the diversity of even the nineteen Indigenous students in the introductory English class challenged that conception: they came from First Nations, Métis, urban, rural, and northern communities across different language groups and treaty areas and brought with them widely varying experiences and belief systems.1 Attempting to reflect this diversity through course content would inevitably leave some students feeling misrepresented or excluded. In the same term, the graduate seminar was focusing on relationalism, a theoretical approach that assumes people are primarily constituted by relationship. In the seminar, we explored how relationalism offers an alternative way of thinking about Indigenizing the classroom—through relational processes rather [End Page 184] than through content—and designed a project that put this thinking into pedagogical practice. While this project centered on a text by an Indigenous author, its focus was not on bringing any particular or fixed form of Indigenous culture into the classroom. Instead, we worked from the assumption that Indigenous cultures were inevitably present in a class that included Indigenous students, and that those cultures were relational and continually recreated...