Derek Murray

I appreciate your reference to family since the work we do in our professional lives is just one part of our being. This was a good reminder for me that education should be about the whole person and not just "students" and "teachers". I am hoping I can make more concrete reference to that aspect of my life as well in my revised acknowledgement.

Just a comment on your last point: this process has also encouraged me to think about (and do a little digging) into my own family history and connections to place. Thank you for sharing.

Thanks Bonnie! I think the plain and direct language is useful, especially for ELL, and clearly lays out the importance of reconciliation.

In my classes at CapU I tend to have about 50% international students, and they are often surprised when they start learning about the history of Indigenous Peoples in Canada. One thing I might encourage is to emphasize the length of time that Indigenous people have lived here, measured in thousands as opposed to hundreds of years. Given the ELL context, a phrase like "time immemorial" might be a bit much, but the emphasis on thousands of years of occupation dispels the notion that we are all immigrants.

I am so glad to hear that other people are asking these questions! I have comments on each of your questions and I am really interested to hear what you and others think.

My colleague here at UVic does a lot of work on our staff training courses. We do not at this point have a land acknowledgment in those courses, though it is something we are looking at. It is especially challenging when you are building a course but the course really belongs to someone else. It is also one of those situations where it can easily become an "add on" rather than being integrated into the course. We have a standard university-wide acknowledgement video that people use in a variety of ways. At Capilano we have a standard land acknowledgement statement that goes on the front of every course syllabus.

I was chatting with Donna this morning about the "model" online course I am developing at UVic. The goal is that the model course will foreground the importance of Indigenization as something that is woven into the design process of a course from the very beginning (not as an afterthought) and will give faculty and instructors concrete strategies for how to accomplish this. I am working from the definitions of Indigenization and decolonization that are provided in the BCcampus "Pulling Together" series (which Dianne was a big part of putting together). Indigenization by their definition "refers to a deliberate coming together of these two ways of knowing [Indigenous and Western]." It is a weaving together of Indigenous knowledge and Western knowledge, not a mash-up, or an add-on, or a replacement of one with the other. The guides were developed for the Canadian context (and BC in particular) but I don't see why they couldn't also be useful in Minnesota!

I am also interested in the Indigenization of online learning more broadly, which was part of my reason for taking this FLO course. I will be at a conference in a couple of weeks presenting on "Decolonizing Online Learning and Using Indigenous-Inspired Pedagogy to Create a “Model” Online Environment." It is more of an information-gathering talk, rather than a formal paper and I certainly do not have all the answers, but I am actively looking. If you want to chat more about that after the conference, I can let you know how it goes!

If you have any thoughts on that, I'd love to hear!

Does anyone else have thoughts on what Indigenization looks like in the online environment? I am thinking not only about adding content to online courses, but about Indigenous-inspired pedagogies (e.g. place-based learning) and how/whether/if they translate to the online environment.

Thanks Kirk. I am wondering about those contexts where an institution has multiple campuses on the lands of multiple different groups, yet the specific gathering (a class, meeting, workshop, etc.) is only happening on the territory of one group.