"The Land Is the Best Teacher I Have Ever Had": Places as Pedagogy for Precarious Times (1)

Since the fallout from September 11, 2001, curriculum studies in Canada has become more concerned with education and empire, and pedagogy in times of war. My concern is that without memory, without history we might imagine that empire and education, pedagogy and war are only now linked. We might imagine that living in a time of war is somehow new, particularly for Canadians. And yet even a cursory glance at Canadian history, even a tentative scraping through the layered palimpsest of national memories reveals that in Canada--education has always served empire--and parts of the nation have always been at war with each other--or others. And in pointing this out I do not mean to be trite--nothing new under the sun--or cynical--nothing really matters anymore--or fatalistic--this too shall pass. I mean only that precarious times have been always and forever ... but what we are now experiencing is the intensity of the danger, the insecurity and the uncertainty. And we are experiencing this in the face of the mythologies of how we can live well, live longer, through freedom 55, investing in the market place, buying the right products, the right home in the right neighbourhood, protecting our investments--the mythologies that tell us that childhood is a safe zone, that adolescence is the pinnacle of life, that through market products and disciplining of the body middle age can be extended indefinitely; that retreat to the private domain--and the advancement of one's career--render life secure rather than fatal; and that cynicism and irony are the only possible responses to these precarious times. I wish I could address this matter from an elevated moral plane or a politically neutral space where I'm not implicated, or complicit, in that about which I am critical but that is another myth, one I believed for a long time. After a decade of working for aboriginal governments--as a teacher, researcher, community development worker, curriculum developer and administrator--I turned to the university as a place where I believed--ironically--that I could speak with authority regardless of race and gender-where it didn't matter that I wasn't Dene or Inuit or that I didn't grow up on the trapline. This is the naive fantasy of a white person. I sought a place where intelligence and forebearance were somehow synonymous with ethical conduct, inquiry synonymous with knowledge, and action with hope and transformation. I believed that a Ph.D. would allow me to live a life of the mind--a clean, uncomplicated, autonomous life that would provide me with an authority to speak grounded in Western rational knowledge, the veracity and validity of which was not dependent on context: on troubled histories, on accumulated grief, on politics local and global, present and past. In retrospect, I hoped a Ph.D. was a passport to a retreat, a utopic no-place where my commitment to working for the freedom of others could go unquestioned by those whose liberation I sought. And then what Leroy Little Bear calls the constant motion and flux of the universe came into play. In the early 1980s, I made a journey from where the Arctic Circle intersects with the Mackenzie River--a little village called Fort Good Hope to Great Falls, Montana. First, I flew on a small fixed-wing aircraft from Fort Good Hope to Norman Wells, and then I boarded a Boeing 737 for the flight to Yellowknife, Northwest Territories and on to Edmonton, Alberta. I rented a car and began the 900-kilometre drive south from Edmonton to Great Falls, Montana. It was December and Big Sky country was black that night; the roads slick with frost. Before I saw the outline of the deer, the headlights of the rental car illuminated their eyes. I slammed on the brakes, the car skidded and the herd bolted, almost vanished. Forewarned I slowed down and I lived to sit for the Graduate Record Examinations at 9:00 a.m. the next morning at the University of Montana. Scores from the Graduate Record Examinations, referred to as the GREs, are mandatory for application to graduate schools in the United States. …

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