Cultural safety and indigenous students : a promising course of action for the entire high education community

Abstract

From the outset of colonialization, the institutionalized education of Aboriginal peoples has been a tool of forced religious conversion, Francization, assimilation, and acculturation, part of larger sociocultural power struggles that served political and economic goals. It is impossible to overestimate the intergenerational impacts of assimilative violence on Indigenous peoples that was brought to bear through the educational and Residential School systems. During the aforementioned campaigns (espoused and orchestrated by the Canadian government of the era), more than 150,000 children were forcibly removed from their families and sent to institutions which were culturally, psychologically, and often physically abusive, whose aim was to facilitate the sedentarization of then nomadic peoples. Sedentarization was viewed as a means to access and exploit the forestry resources of First Peoples’ land. Considering that in Quebec this period ranged from roughly 1931 to 1978 (TCR, 2015) and reached it peak during the period 1950-1960, it is understandable that intergenerational stigma from this attempted ethnocide still reverberates today in as familial, communal, cultural and educational fallout.