“Errors were made:” Public attitudes regarding reconciliation and education in Canada

Abstract

The 2015 release of the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada accelerated the extensive range of educational activities across Canadian jurisdictions dedicated to updating curricula and supporting Indigenous students. How have these initiatives affected educational practices and more general understandings about Indigenous‐settler relations? Drawing on data from a survey of public perspectives on education and reconciliation conducted in Alberta and Saskatchewan, this paper addresses the question: What are the current public attitudes regarding reconciliation overall and within Alberta and Saskatchewan schools? We explore these perspectives by highlighting two contrasting orientations – one in which reconciliation is accepted as a form of peaceful coexistence within existing settler colonial frameworks and another in which liberal discourses as well as more openly racist stances serve as a form of democratic colonization that further reinforce those frameworks.

Public perspectives on curriculum reform for truth and reconciliation in Canada

“…Survey respondents, as we report elsewhere (Wotherspoon & Milne, 2021), were strongly supportive of the need for reconciliation and agreed that schools have a significant role to play in working towards reconciliation. These views are echoed in the data in Table 2, which reveal that over 85% of respondents agreed that schools should have mandatory curricula to teach about Indigenous histories and cultures.…”

Following Their Voices Supporting Indigenous Students' Learning by Fostering Culturally Sustaining Relational Pedagogies to Reshape the School and Classroom Environment

“…It is only relatively recently that school systems and local communities have committed to (re)addressing the social, emotional, spiritual and educational harms created by this colonial relationship. Many suggest that reconciliation will be difficult to achieve (Wotherspoon, 2021), but as Senator Murray Sinclair, Chair of the Truth and Reconciliation has noted in a number of his addresses, "Education got us into this mess and education will get us out of it". All 11 schools that participated in the case studies and meta-analysis that is the focus of this paper are situated in First Nations or rural/remote/northern communities that are moving forward on this complex reconciliatory journey.…”