DECOLONIZING EDUCATION : ONE KITCHEN TABLE PARTY AT A TIME
By Russell Fayant
Back Row ( left to right ): Kaleb Desjarlais ( wearing cap ), Micheal Langan , Aly Prudat ( standing ), Kyra Menhart ; Front Row ( kneeling left to right ): Tana Terry , Nolan Robertson , Dee Aubichon , Paige LaRose , Tristan Frei , Jordan Parisian , Nick Bage ( seated )
In traditional Michif pedagogy ( ways of teaching ), the classroom was the kitchen , the Old Ones were the teachers and the land was the textbook . From the buffalo hunt , to the road allowance era , the skills we needed to survive and thrive as a people were often imparted around a kitchen table . It ’ s a pedagogy that centers relationships , modeling , listening , watching , doing , and the maintaining of high expectations . Contemporary classrooms and learning resources offer us much in the way of making knowledge accessible and easily distributed , but they do not always offer a real and tangible connection to community , the land , and ancestral knowledge .
At the Saskatchewan Urban Native Teacher Education Program ( SUNTEP ) Regina Centre , we strive to assist our students in the reclaiming of their traditional ways of knowing and being , and to teach them how to engage with this knowledge in order to navigate and enhance mainstream education and classrooms . It is with this in mind that SUNTEP Regina staff and students recently organized and hosted a Métis Kitchen Table Party as a culmination of a semester long journey of exploration and discovery .
The faculty members of SUNTEP Regina are constantly looking for new ways to collaborate and to provide our students with unique and decolonizing experiences . Prior to the beginning of the semester , Faculty members Brenna Pacholko , Erin Kramer , Natalie McNabb and Russ Fayant met to discuss the possibility of a collaborative assignment . It was decided that a Kitchen Table Party would be a great way to allow students of different years and classes to work together and to connect to community all while achieving curricular goals for our respective classes .
Kramer ’ s first year EPS 116 ( Professional Studies ) students were put in charge of cooking , invitations , and set up . This allowed them to build some valuable and necessary event organizing skills which come in handy as a classroom teacher .
McNabb ’ s KHS 139 ( Movement Education ) class was in charge of the entertainment . SUNTEP Regina offers KHS 139 as a semester-long Métis dance class . The students worked throughout the semester with McNabb and renowned Métis dance expert Jeanne Pelletier to practice three Métis square dances and of course the Red River Jig , which had all those who attended thoroughly entertained . In Fayant ’ s INDG 221 ( Métis History ) course , second year students were tasked with researching an aspect of Métis / Michif history and retelling it as a historical narrative .
The audience was regaled with recollections of Métis fur trade maven Madame Laframboise in addition to stories about Jim Brady , the Northwest Resistance and the loves of Louis Riel . Finally , Pacholko ’ s third year EAES 215 ( Educational Aesthetics ) course had students reconstructing a portion of a road allowance house that was used as the backdrop to the dancing and storytelling .
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