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Thèse

Urban Indigenous youths’ perspectives on identity, place and place-based learning and the implications for education.

This a study centered on a non-formal place based learning program delivered to ten First Nation and Metis urban youth during the summer and fall of 2006. I used Cajete’s (2000a) notion of curricula as maps, the growing body of literature associated with place-based learning (Gruenewald, 2003), and understandings of place as known by Indigenous Elders and academics (Kawagley & R. Barnhardt, 1999) to initiate a program
that sought to teach at the intersection of knowledge and nature. Place-based education has special significance in contexts where Indigenous people have developed a deep, longstanding relationship to the place in which they have lived for millennia. Newhouse & Peters (2003) importantly point out that when Aboriginal people move into cities, unlike other urban in-migrants, very often they are travelling within their traditional territories.

The intent of the study was to garner an understanding of how urban Native youth experience identity, place and education in the early twenty-first century. I employed both a conventional and visual research approach to data collection, the latter helping to privilege the frequently silenced voices of Indigenous youth. The use of a visual research method along with critical race theory (CRT) in qualitative research (Parker & Lynn, 2002) allow for greater emphasis on the ‘voice’ of participants, male and female, fourteen to sixteen years of age. Made explicit through their voice is that race and racism heavily influence their sense of Indigenous identity and experience of place on the Canadian prairies. Using CRT in education (Ladson-Billings, 1999), I highlight the contradictions produced by an ecology-focused place-based learning for urban Native youth. I argue that an uneven emphasis on environmental, rural, and outdoor learning in place-based education, at times tied to the discourses of authenticity and neo-primitivism, obscures ongoing oppression and a full analysis of the ways in which identities are constructed and maintained in the domination of peoples, places, and knowledges. Suggested by this research is an alternative conception of place-based learning that is concerned with the
local environment in ways that resonate with anti-racist education and the noncompartmentalized ways of knowing available in Indigenous knowledge systems.