Susan D. Dion, Braided Learning: Illuminating Indigenous Presence through Art and Story

Susan Dion offers readers opportunities to engage in relational learning through traditional Indigenous pedagogies of art and story.Dion writes this book as a response to her understanding that Indigenous children and peoples are acutely aware of the lack of historical and cultural knowledge of Indigenous peoples in the settler Canadian mind.Through her writing, she creates a more relational form of allyship and reconciliation and situates art and story as the method through which current narratives should be disrupted to restore balance to our shared history and relationship.An honest conversation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples is a primary theme throughout this work.The writing is abrupt and gentle, being truthful about the ways settlers perpetuate continued settler colonial violence, while simultaneously inviting readers into relationship and providing a starting place to repair the broken relationship.In her introduction, Dion provides anecdotes of ignorant and racist experiences she and students she has worked with have suffered, enabled by stereotypical, romanticized, and historicized images found in and perpetuated by Canadian educational curricula and teacher practices.At the same time, Dion recognizes how the work of Indigenous peoples has transformed Canadian mindsets towards a desire to revisit these stories and better understand the truth.She notes, "We agree that the stories we hear and do not hear -the stories we tell and do not tell, about ourselves and each other -matter a great deal."(10).As such, Dion appeals to the reader to be responsible listeners, who, from an Indigenous episteme, do not interrupt the speaker, and instead listen to the whole story, from which they can gain their own insights about themselves.From this, Dion positions settler educators as responsible for learning and teaching the true history of relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples for reconciliation to be possible.In her first chapter she outlines four requisites: implication, investment, shared interest, and impact.The chapters that follow provide opportunities for readers to begin or continue their own learning.The first requisite, implication, establishes the responsibility of recognizing self as implicated in this shared history and, if one is a settler, as a beneficiary of the privileges of colonialism.To aid the reader in understanding this process, Dion offers three settler stories -one from a settler working in the field of education, one from a first-generation immigrant, and another from a settler who works for a Canadian government department directly responsible for relations with Indigenous peoples.The stories demonstrate humility in learning and allow readers to recognize themselves in the stories, while also teaching important lessons.For example, one author writes about how their perspective was shaken and their ignorance noted on several occasions while another notes the need for all Canadians to unlearn the Indian Act.The following chapters provide opportunities for the readers to engage further with learning from this new understanding of their place within an

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