Teaching History from an Indigenous Perspective: Four Winding Paths up the Mountain

I read this chapter by Michael Marker in October for another class - EDCP 562 Curriculum Issues.  It is a chapter in a book published by Dr Penney Clarke (who is my supervisor) - New Possibilities for the Past: Shaping History Education in Canada.

This chapter was a 'stop' for me in terms of my understanding of history education, historical thinking, the long-reaching effects of colonisation and, most importantly, the construction of knowledge.  The word 'epistemology' is not something I really used (or understood) prior to arriving in Canada.  The realisation and exploration of the idea that knowledge is not fixed, that all knowledge is local, that knowledge is constructed, that different knowledge systems can have different epistemic roots has left me a little bamboozled!  This has had a direct effect on my sense of self and identity as, of course, I have been 'saturated' (to use a phrase of Marie Battiste's) in Eurocentrism and the western construct of knowledge.

Marker's article is highlighting the problem of the history classroom in terms of indigenous historical consciousness or ways of understanding the past.  This is a far more profound issue than a lack of inclusion of Native content or narrative including First Nation communities.  There are specific epistemic contradictions and areas of contention regarding the past.  Marker points out four themes:

1. Circular and linear time. 
The western perception of time is that it is linear or chronological, from the indigenous point of view history is not a linear progression of people and ideas in time.  Instead there is a spiralling of events where themes reappear within circles of seasons.  Time is of a more circular or cyclical nature.

2. Relationships with landscape and non-humans
From a western perspective, human agency is at the centre of history - human's use the past to conceive the future and they are the centre of all narratives that historians construct of the past.  If history were a play, then humans would be the protagonist.  Indigenous ways of knowing does not place human at the centre of the story in the same way. Animals and the environment are of equal importance and have agency.  In oral narratives there are stories of how animals sacrifice and help humans.

3.  Place and Indigenous understanding of the past

4.  Colonizatoin and the house of murky mirrorsMichael Marker article