When I first read the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: Calls to Action (2015), I was struck by the mandate to include residential school legacy as part of the organizational learning curriculum. How is this applicable to meeting the needs of the organization? To organizational problem solving? To the workplace in general?
It is the ‘organization first’ mindset that stifles the imagination when it comes to opening the door to talking about the residential school system, Indigenous assimilation practices, and the traumatic and lasting, intergenerational legacy the system produced.
- How do we address residential school legacy in relation to today’s post-colonial, yet Eurocentric corporate construct?
- In what ways do we challenge the status quo in order to decolonize and reconstruct the corporate construct in ways that embrace Indigenous ways of knowing in a genuine manner, without cultural appropriation of traditional knowledge? How does this fit with reconciliation themes?
- What role does historical agency (Seixas & Peck, 2004) have in a challenge of this complexity and magnitude?
- Through which Indigenous philosophical or pedagogical lens do we proceed? Indigenous leadership? Indigenous feminism? Indigenous self-determination?
Deconstructing the colonial perspectives of the history of residential schools that “had been collectively chosen and publicly enforced” (Toews, 2016, p. 95), will be a priority when attempting to answer these four newly emerging research questions.
References
Seixas, P., and Peck, C. (2004). Teaching historical thinking. In A. Sears, and I. Wright (eds.). Challenges & prospects for Canadian social studies. Vancouver, BC: Pacific Educational Press.
Toews, J.E. (2016). Thinking historically about thinking historically: Is historical theory a historical or metahistorical practice?. History and Theory, 55(2), 99-109.
