Pushing the entrepreneurial prodigy: Canadian Aboriginal entrepreneurship education initiatives

Abstract

Globally, neoliberal education policy touts youth entrepreneurship education as a solution for staggering youth unemployment, a means to bolster economically depressed regions, and solution to the ill-defined changing marketplace. Many jurisdictions have emphasized a need for K-12 entrepreneurial education for the general population, and targeted to youth labelled "at risk." The Martin Aboriginal Education Initiative's Aboriginal Youth Entrepreneurship Program (AYEP) has been enacted across Canada. This paper applies critical discourse analysis to a corpus of texts, exposing how colonial practices, deficit discourse and discursive neoliberalism are embedded and perpetuated though entrepreneurial education targeted at Aboriginal students via AYEP.

Advancing Racial Equality through Insights from Canadian Indigenous Art and Literature

“…Indigenous activists call for dismantling systems of colonization and revisiting social justice paradigms that bypass colonialism and tribal justice. It must be remembered that much work lies ahead in bringing about racial, political, educational, and social equality as "postcolonialism is an ideal not yet achieved" [10].…”

“…Activists see majoritarian populations and structures as complicit in systems of dispossession that displace indigenous communities. Just as "cultural dispossession and assimilation are central to colonization" [10], repossession of land as a tribal right and entitlement drives decolonization [16].…”

Financial Literacy Education with an Aboriginal Community: Identifying Critical Moments for Enabling Praxis

“…Practices include the sayings, doing and relating that are particular to a site and are amid arrangements in intersubjective spaces (semantic, physical and social) where people encounter each other [30]. By exploring how FLE was practised in an Aboriginal community located on a reservation, it was important to consider that: (1) current FLE practices may be attempting to colonise individuals into a certain way of being and behaving that may not always be in the participants' best interest (as shown with entrepreneurship education initiatives in Aboriginal communities) [31]. Instead, the interests of governments and political agendas designed to reform an individual's financial decision-making may be driving these FLE practices [32,33].…”

Aboriginal entrepreneurship financing in Canada

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