Trying to Get It Back: Indigenous Women, Education and Culture

Dave Hutchinson is assistant superintendent of the School District of
Mystery Lake in Thompson, Manitoba.

What originally began as an Australian-based study of the impact of
colonization on indigenous peoples’ art expanded into an international
ethnographic and narrative-based research study into the lives of three
generations of aboriginal women. The intent of the study essentially
evolved into an investigation of the transgenerational impact of
colonization (most specifically religious education) with a view to both
analyzing this impact historically and into the future.

By transcribing interviews with six subjects (three from an
Adnyamathanha in South Australia, and three from a Sechelt community in
British Columbia), editor Gillian Weiss provides a comprehensive glimpse
into the impact of assimilation and the recent evolution of a trend
toward aboriginal culture and language restoration.

In general, despite the setbacks associated with colonization and
systemic discrimination, Weiss’s subjects held decidedly positive
views about the future, particularly with respect to community
development and education. “These six women,” writes Weiss, “live
within the mainstream culture of their respective countries as well as
in their own cultures. They have no desire to give up either. What they
want is to forge an identity and a way of life that incorporates what
they can regain and retain of their traditional cultures as well as what
they value and find useful in mainstream culture. And there is a third
aspect that consists of a blend of the old and new that they and their
people are constructing now in the present. It is through a process of
combining the three into living cultures that their goals will be
achieved in the future.”

In his landmark book, Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences, Donald
Polkinghorne laments the application of research that does nothing to
help resolve significant human problems. Polkinghorne would be proud of
Weiss’s work—not only the findings, but the research process itself.
If anything, Weiss has shown that the academy can touch down in the
lives of aboriginal peoples in ways that hold much promise for the
positive, postcolonial redevelopment of aboriginal communities and
nations. Anyone currently working in this vein, aboriginal or
nonaboriginal, would find this study extremely useful.