This project aimed to share stories of six Indigenous mentees and their successes, struggles, and experiences in health science and in the Indigenous Mentorship Network Program. All participants were mentees within a mentorship network specific to their province. Mentees participated in semi-structured interviews about their experiences, which…

Central to restorative justice is a commitment to sharing and listening to first voice. This is required for the work of transitioning to just relations. The Restorative Inquiry for the Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children (The Home), and its Digital Oral Histories for Reconciliation (DOHR) project, offers a significant example of the power of…

This classroom practice oriented article provides the instructional framework and procedures for one of the sample field-tested lessons from the oral narrative units derived from the Syrian Learners of English for Employment in Canada (SLEEC) project (Huang, 2021, 2022). This sharing is intended to provide a ready-to-use lesson plan and materials…

This paper will explore the history and present-day land use, and the islands and rivers located around Île à la Crosse, Saskatchewan. I will share how storytelling and spiritual ecology have always connected the people of Île à la Crosse to these landscapes and waterways. The knowledges that have been passed on to me through oral storytelling and…

Story is experience held in memory and story is the spark for a transformative possibility in the moment of its telling. The words we use are equally significant. This commentary reflects upon why words, stories, and oracy are powerful in learning landscapes. Indigenous peoples have known the value of story and the significance of words in…

Oral history as a field of research, teaching, archival collection, community building or engagement, truth and reconciliation, and creative practice, emerged with the diffusion of the tape recorder in the 1960s and 1970s. This was a time of enormous social and political upheaval. As a result, oral history was quickly taken up by feminists,…

The life narrative is an oral genre grounded in Indigenous tradition and teaching practice. In Canadian Indigenous communities, the expertise and content transmitted by life narratives are a part of their oral heritage. Drawing from their personal and professional experiences in Indigenous school environments, as well as the results from…

Substantial historical research indicates that during World War II Canadian schools were considered optimal sites for fostering nationalistic sentiments in teachers and learners. Policymakers directed educators and students to collect scrap metals, purchase war savings certificates, salute the flag, and undertake marching drills. These…

Indigenist scholars have been attending to the research process in ways that highlight the move toward inquiry, the beginnings of the research journey. The energies that animate imagination and inquiry need to be respected and accounted for. If we recognize that place and the consciousness of landscape contain the primordial elements for the…

In the pursuit of my doctoral research on the institutional history of the art department at Central Technical School (CTS) in Toronto, Canada, I amassed a collection of oral histories from 20 current and former CTS art instructors and students, recorded across the country. As an instructor in the CTS art department in addition to being its…

As part of my PhD practice-based research on Tlicho lands (a self-governed Indigenous region in Canada's Northwest Territories), drawing is being used to embody intangible cultural heritage (which includes activities such as oral history and the social practice of walking). Recent work to emerge from this research consists of two drawings created…

Through the course of Indigenous history, cultural and spiritual knowledge remains, in many places as faint as the smoke rising from the embers of last night's fire; in other places, with enough flame to ignite another log. In spite of the genocidal acts portrayed through colonialism's experimentation through religious doctrine, residential…

This paper explores the data produced from an oral history project about a Black pioneer settlement in Grey County, Ontario. Twelve area residents were interviewed and the data produced points to various community practices of both remembering and forgetting. I employ Avery Gordon's (2008) theorization of ghosts and hauntings to make sense of the…

Historians of education wanting to develop culturally responsive historiographies of Indigenous communities should move beyond a reliance on government and church policy documents--with some variegations of testimony from residential school survivors. The unique circumstances of colonisation that were forged by national/settler policies should be…

A team of four students and one faculty member from the University of Winnipeg, as well as two community representatives, undertook a collaborative action-research project in Fisher River Cree Nation, Manitoba, Canada, to explore Indigenous knowledges associated with cultivation, production, and consumption practices of traditional foods and…