Episode 001: Celia Haig-Brown
Prof. Celia Haig-Brown is an ethnographer and filmmaker who studies Indigenous education. She works with First Nations communities to understand the stories of residential school survivors and to document how First Nations are dealing with mining companies operating on their land.
Transcript
Cameron Graham: My guest today is Celia Haig-Brown, Professor of Education at York University. Celia's area of research is Indigenous education. She's the author of Resistance and Renewal: Surviving the Indian Residential School. Published in 1988, this was one of the first books to examine the history of residential schools in Canada. Since then, Celia has developed a reputation as a prolific and innovative researcher, addressing topics of fundamental importance to Canadian society through books, journal articles and film. Celia, welcome to the podcast!
Celia Haig-Brown: Thank you.
Cameron: I want to talk to you about your research first of all, and about how you got started in this particular field. And hopefully along the way we can kind of figure out how your research has changed over, what, about 30 years.
Celia: Mm-hmm.
Cameron: And I'm hoping to get a sense of what it's like to do research in this field, because it's a really intense and problematic area for Canadian society, and your role as an academic in trying to navigate that space, trying to contribute to that conversation, I think is really interesting to me. So, your starting point: was your research on residential schools part of your doctoral research? Did it go back that far?
Celia: It's actually my master’s thesis.
Cameron: Okay. So, what drew you to that? That was in the ‘80s. What was going on for you at that time that drew you to that topic?
Celia: Well, at that particular time in my life, I had been working as a teacher in high schools in Kamloops, British Columbia, and through a series of lovely incidents I was encouraged to apply to be the coordinator for the Native Indian Teacher Education Program. This was a UBC teacher ed program offered off-campus for Indigenous people who were wanting to come back to university -- or come to university -- and become elementary teachers. I'd been a high school teacher, but I thought the job sounded really interesting. So, I applied for this job and got it, and it was quite an amazing job. I worked with, in the first year, I had about 20 students, various ages, some of them coming to the university at the usual age, some of them, a lot of them, were mature students who had been out of school for some time, and were interested in education, teaching, schools. That was really the beginning of my formal education in understanding the place of schooling in Indigenous contexts in Canada. And it was a very intense introduction. I worked in that job for about 10 years. I stopped for a year off somewhere in the middle because I had three children along the way, two of them in a row, and so I took some time there. But what happened with that program is that the students who came into the program really became my serious teachers, even though I was teaching them. It was really a reciprocal relationship. And through that work -- but also through, and I can talk more about this, through my involvement with rodeo! -- I came to know stories of residential schools. And this is really about driving home late at night on a Sunday night from the rodeo, having worked all weekend, with my friends, and we would tell stories to stay awake. And for my Indigenous friends, and I think of Julie Antoine at this moment in time, the stories were about residential school. And I'm a fairly well-educated Canadian and I had grown up with Indigenous people in my life in various contexts, including relatives ... I didn't know about residential schools. And I thought, wow, if I don't know about them, I think there are probably quite a few people who don't know about them. Ironically, the program that I was involved with, the Native Indian Teacher Ed Program, the classrooms and the office space were in the senior girls’ dormitory of the old Kamloops Indian Residential School. And it actually happened that we interviewed all the students who came in. It actually happened during the interviews that some of the students would say thinks like, "I had my bed right under that window." So, that's an intense introduction to residential schools.
Cameron: No kidding. No kidding. Um, so, how did you move from that very practical teaching experience to the idea of turning this into an academic research project, resulting in your book?
Celia: I think I'd always wanted to write a book, but I'm not as disciplined as I'd like to be, so it was when I had these two babies in a row and I wasn't actually working with the UBC program, I decided to look around and see if there was a master’s degree available. And sure enough, UBC was offering a degree in curriculum and instruction in Kamloops, and I applied and enrolled. And the reason I enrolled in that program was because I wanted to write a book. And I was trying to understand about Indigenous control. I was looking at what I knew of the history of schooling for Indigenous people and my own Indigenous students when I was teaching high school, and I was very puzzled by the fact that here were groups of Indigenous people coming to be trained as teachers, to move into that schooling system that had been so harsh in terms of their success there. So that question was in my mind, and when I began my master’s work, I really wanted to understand about Indian control, and I use this phrase "Indian control" because there is this 1973 document, Indian Control of Indian Education, which I insist is a document still worth reading. It was the National Indian Brotherhood, now know as the Assembly of First Nations, it was the National Indian Brotherhood's response to the White Paper developed by Chretien and Trudeau. And that document still has currency: Indigenous, local control and parental responsibility are two of the main tenets of that document, and when you read it, the resonances with the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report, the recommendations that are in there still resonate. So, I was curious, why is this idea of schooling seen to be useful to Indigenous people? That was my question that I came into the master’s program with, and the idea that I wanted to write a book. Those were the two things that drew me in.
Cameron: Now you self-identify as non-Indigenous.
Celia: Oh yes, I'm a white researcher and I need to say this. My good friend, Ruth Koleszar-Green, who is Haudenosaunee, faculty member in the School of Social Work here, and the chair of the Indigenous Council, has said to me, "Celia, you must come out as white, because of the work you do, people assume that you are Indigenous."
Cameron: So, I think there are certain parallels between your position as non-Indigenous, trying to do research on Aboriginal issues ...
Celia: … "with" Aboriginal people!
Cameron: Thank you. And the role of the academic in wider society as somehow alongside but separate from what's going on and trying to observe what's going on and make some comments about it, and so one of the issues here has to do with power, right, not just the fundamental issues of power when you're talking about Indigenous control of Indigenous education, but the power relationship between you as a researcher and the people that you are working with. Could you talk a bit about the importance of maintaining Aboriginal voices in the work that you do, and what you do to ensure that this isn't you talking over top of them?
Celia: Yeah, good question. Well, first of all I appeal to Foucault and power as a relation. So, in moving to that understanding, you get to the place that power isn't something that somebody holds and the other person doesn't have any. And I often use this example, that if we think about a professor in front of a class of students, the professor is in control, the professor has the power, the professor will award the grade. But let me tell you, if those 60 or 120 students stand up and walk out of the room, that professor is in trouble. So power is a relation. The only reason that this relationship exists is because the people involved agree to it. So, in terms of working with Indigenous people, Foucault is not my only theoretician who informs my work. It really is Indigenous knowledge keepers who have taught me over the years. Also, I would say my parents taught me incredible respect for Indigenous people. I was raised with the pretty strong understanding of at least the initial relations that exist between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. So starting from a point of respect, thinking through the importance of relationships, understanding the significance of reciprocity when it comes to doing research with Indigenous people, and also feeling strongly committed -- and this really addresses your point about the larger public -- feeling a strong responsibility to do work that's relevant to the people who are involved in the research and with me doing this work. so that's always been a kind of a high-level thought as I come to do the work. In terms of specifics and methodologies, I actually don't make a move without ensuring that the people with whom I am working are aware of what I'm doing. They can direct me if they feel that I'm not going in the right direction. So, I remain open throughout the process to hearing back from people who may say, "Don't like this." And just for example, when I did Resistance and Renewal, I did take the excerpts that I used from the book -- before it was a book, in the thesis -- back to everyone who I'd interviewed. I went back, sat with them, and showed them how I'd contextualized their words. Because you're right, as soon as you move into being the author, the editor, you're in control of how you frame words, what you select from the interviews. And I can say without exception, people were fine with that. I worried a little ...
Cameron: Sorry, fine with what you had done or fine with the process that you had laid out that made them comfortable?
Celia: Uh, well, fine with what I had done. The only one who didn't participate in the process was one man I'd interviewed, who said to his wife who I did meet with, "Tell her what I said I said! I don't need to know what she's done with it." [laughs] I loved him. Um, yeah, so fine with what was included.
Cameron: One of the things that I find in looking at your work is that you don't shy away from issues about struggle and conflict, and I get the sense that you think of those as very productive things, as opposed to things that should be avoided. So can you tell me how that kind of position or approach changes the way you do your work?
Celia: Yeah, I don't know that is changes, it informs my work I guess because that's the only way I know how to think about things. Yes, I do see being explicit about controversy and living in controversy often is a very productive space to occupy. And again, I mean that comes partly from Foucault. I mean the theoretical piece comes partly from Foucault around the production -- this is a productive space. I want to be a little bit careful about my references to Foucault, because I must say that I actually like to be with people, speak with people, interview people, participate with people, and then I look around for theory that doesn't interfere with what I've been taught by the people with whom I've been speaking. So that is the way that Foucault came into my work. But yes, I see incredible productivity, and really with Resistance and Renewal, one of the most important points of that text is showing how, although the schools were oppressive places, they didn't succeed in squashing the students. The students themselves had incredibly creative ways of resisting what was being done to them, what was being insisted upon, that whole idea of "they should become someone they weren't." And I think the people that I interviewed, who were clearly the survivors, and this is not to take anything away from the fact that there were people who didn't survive and who didn't manage to resist what was going on, but the particular people I interviewed had done that, and had successfully managed to negotiate their way through the schools, maintaining the integrity of who they were as Indigenous people.
Cameron: So one of the one of the important things about allowing conflict to imbue your work, to permeate the work that you're doing, is to help, I think, problematize some of the narratives we have about society being a thing of progress and about economic development as being kind of one-directional, that we just get better and better and better, and this really important I think to allow voices to challenge that, right, and that comes through in your work.
Celia: Yeah, I certainly don't see linear progress as anything other than a nice myth. The whole idea of, you know, scalability and we're improving constantly: those ideas do not resonate with me. What I have learned again through thinking deeply with Indigenous knowledge is to think about the cyclical nature of all of this, and while we want to be the champions of our time, really things are repeating, intensifying, diversifying, shifting, changing. We always have the possibility of making change
Cameron: One of the kind of parallels to what you're doing, or an issue that I think is very integral to what you're doing, is feminism. The intersection between the position of Indigenous people in society and the position of women in society is profoundly intense, and you see this in Canada, the Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women inquiry and the fiasco around that. Can you tell me a little bit about how and that notion of, the issue of feminism, gets drawn into your work and does it push it new directions or give you a different way of looking at things?
Celia: I have to say with you raise the issue of feminism I think immediately of a good friend and colleague, Verna St. Denis, a Cree scholar at the University of Saskatchewan, who has written an article that I use often in my classes called, "Feminism for Everybody." And I really appreciate that article. The thing about feminism is -- of course as woman walking in the world I experience all of what we hear about in the news media and "me too" and all those things -- at the same time I have to be -- I had to be, let me say -- very careful in terms of how I was bringing feminism into relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, and you probably have heard the statement from Indigenous people, from African Americans, from African Canadians, "I'm not going to go to feminism," because the misperception around feminism is that it is around man-hating. And I think we've moved past that in a lot of ways. but it has been a piece of what's going on in the years of the work that I've been doing. So, I would have people say to me, "I don't want to think just about women. I'm worried about my son, I'm worried about my father, I'm worried about my brothers." And as we know, I mean people walk in the world with particular race written on them and that has an impact on how they're received. So, I have full sympathy with people who reject feminism because they see it as something narrow. That being said, I then want move into educating that feminism, as Verna says, is for everybody, and that to focus on women -- and certainly I mean many of the Indigenous cultures with whom I’ve worked, the women are central, it's matricentric, they're matriarchal, they're matrilineal, where there is an incredible respect for women -- and I do think what has happened with and many Indigenous cultures -- and I don't know all of them so I can't claim this is across the board -- but the attitude of patriarchy that came from Europe really impacted how those cultures were proceeding, moving forward. Now certainly some of the Nation's have managed to maintain a traditional governance system at the same time as, yes, they do have a band council which looks very much like a town council and which does have colonial aspects to it.
Cameron: Mm-hmm. We live in an age where toxic masculinity and patriarchy are affecting everything. You see this in politics, you see this in race relations in the US, you see it in Indigenous relations between Canadian society and Indigenous society in Canada, you see it in the academic world, you see it everywhere. So, I don't think that it's possible to separate feminism from any study, and I’m really interested in the way that you integrate this. Does it affect the way that you think about First Nations relationships in Canada, for instance? Does it changed the way that you theorize what you're seeing?
Celia: Again, I say it informs because I don't escape my feminism, I live it, right? So, I mean … I don't know how to answer that question. Ask it another way.
Cameron: Let me ask it a different way. Maybe step back and be a little more broad: What is the role of theory in academic research for you? Everybody that I talked to as an academic has a different way of answering this question. To me, it seems, my kind of assumption as an academic is that there's something about the notion of theory that is what makes academic research different than say journalism. But I wanted to keep that notion of theory very, very open because everybody's got a different perspective on it. So, when I say to you, "How do you theorize your work, what is theory in your work?", what does that bring to mind for you?
Celia: Well, I think maybe what you do is through me into the impostor syndrome, because as I said already, one of the one of the things I do is I … I like the work I do because I work with people, I sit with people, I talk with people, just as we're doing now. This is what I’m excited by, so that's what informs all of the work that I do. And then what I do is look around and I discover theory that supports what I’m doing. So then I can be a real academic because I bring the theory to bear. I can use my initial example of this, is the work that I was doing in the Native Indian Teacher Education Program. I've always believed in dialogue. I've always had classrooms where, even in my high school classrooms, where the students were very much engaged in shaping what we were doing, had choice, participated in open ended conversations, those sorts of things. Then I moved to the Native Indian Teacher Ed Program. I had to acknowledge I was learning very, very deep and thoughtful lessons from the students with whom I was working. When I moved into my master’s degree, I thought, okay, you know, hear I go. I had done a year of teacher professional training, teacher education as they call it, and I wasn't impressed with the quality of the education that I had received there. I had a couple of courses that were great, philosophy of education for one was good, but when I moved into the master's degree, I was a little suspicious of what was going to happen there. I thought it could interfere with the real questions that I have around this notion of Indigenous control. And as I was in the program, the first course I took I had to read Paolo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. People had been telling me to read this book for some time and I finally e had to because it was in a course. I don't have much discipline, as I told you. And when I read Pedagogy of the Oppressed, I thought, wow, this works. This is what my life has been about and here's somebody who's putting names on it in a theoretical away.
Cameron: So when you say it works, whey you say it's putting names on it, so in a sense is theory a way of talking, a way of expressing what's going on, or is it about explaining or predicting?
Celia: No. I think theory's a way of joining an ongoing conversation. So, in terms of critical pedagogy that allowed me to join that conversation and I became part of the Canadian critical pedagogy network. I took papers to Bergamo, the big critical pedagogy conference in the US. So it gave me a common point of conversation to then engage with and investigate more deeply what it was that I had been doing. And I had a similar thing with my doctoral work, in that -- so in my doctoral work I did spend time really looking deeply at Indigenous control of education and what it looked like on the ground -- and as I was doing my doctoral research, I was in a place called the Native Education Centre in Vancouver -- as I was doing that research I was pushing back against all the theoretical text that I had been engaging with in my coursework and reading. And as I talk to some of my fellow students about what I was doing, without exception they'd say you have to read Foucault. And I would say no, no, no, why would I read Foucault, what does this old French guy got to do with anything about Indigenous people? I finally read Foucault, and when I did, I had had enough time with the people that I could bring Foucault into relationship to the work I’d been doing, to the those Indigenous voices if you want (they had bodies, too!) I could bring Foucault into relation in a way that I think maintained the integrity of what people had shared with me, but at the same time created another dimension to the conversation. So that's kind of how I think about theory. I once did a conference presentation, responding a little bit to some of the people that I got were way too connected to theory, to the point where they actually couldn't hear people's voices, the participants that they were working with, and that paper was called "Resistance to theory." I won't name the theoretician that I was drawing on for that, because very problematic things were discovered about him, but his statement was, "Resistance to theory is theory itself." So that's where I'd put myself.
Cameron: Yeah, and that resonates with the whole power/knowledge notion in Foucault, right? You're talking about the production of knowledge in Indigenous education and so the power relationships are integral to that knowledge, but then also about the production of knowledge about Indigenous education, right, the kind of work that you then try to publish in academic journals or write the book.
Celia: I wanted to tell you one more example about theory and it informing my work. I was working with a community-based scholar in the Northern Ontario, Karen Dannenmann, we've done some writing together, she's Anishnaabe, and we found ourselves in a situation that was incredibly complicated related to differences within community, within family, it was a, hmm, it was a very problematic time. And we just had to back up and say, "We have to figure out what's going on here, we have to stop. We have to think." And at that moment I found the turn theory was very useful to me. I could go, I could read my scholarly text, I could look at how people had theorized these kinds of difficult conflict struggles, and that helped us move through that and to be able to continue the work we were doing, and with pedagogical, land-based pedagogy that we'd been working on.
Cameron: So, a way of stepping back for a second and making sense of what's going on.
Celia: Yeah.
Cameron: Good. You've been using the word pedagogy and I want to turn to the phrase that is really prominent in some of your work, at least later on in your career, this notion of pedagogy of the land. And I wonder if you could explain that to me and to our listeners.
Celia: For sure I can. So I think I have to give credit to the first teacher I had in relation to pedagogy of the land and that would be the river that I grew up beside. That river informs all of who I am, all of what I think about, and one of the ways that I know how integral that river is to me, is that while I lived there for the first many years of my life, I had no idea that a river made a sound. I thought that's just how life is. That was what sound was. It had always river in the background. And not only the sound of that river, but I spent many hours beside it. My father was a fly fishermen. He would go down to the river, I was tagging along behind, and from tiny ages, sitting by that river, studying the plants that were waving around in the waters, looking at the caddisfly larvae, etc. So, land and rivers have always been really important to my family to me to my growing up to my teachings. That being said, I was quite interested when I found myself living in cities to hear people say, "Yeah, I don't, I don't really have any connection to nature. I don't know, the land doesn't mean much to me. I get in my car and drive to work and ...," whatever. So, I started to really try to think through how can I, how can I insist that people understand they do not live separate from land. now of course, Indigenous teachings also, which I had been experiencing along the way, insist that the land is the primary relationship, that the land is animate, that the land has character, that a river is an animate being. And that deepening of my understanding of what I had learned as a child really took hold of me. So, as I was working with my students at York University, I thought how can I get them to understand we all live in relation to land. It's inescapable, and we need to learn that lesson. If we don't, it's at our peril that we avoid it. So, I designed a course called "Pedagogy of the land," and actually it's been now taught by other people. Some of my students have carried on teaching it, another, an Indigenous woman who was here as a contract faculty member taught it, and it has incredible power in getting people to understand exactly that. And it begins and continues by having students out of their seats, out of the classrooms, onto the land. One of the first things they do is go outside, the minute they get to class, I say I want you to go outside, I want you to be by yourself, I want you to take a picture or pick up something that you can return that represents your relationship to this land called York University. The results of that are amazing.
Cameron: My father was a chaplain in the Canadian Armed Forces, and so I moved around quite a bit, so I've experienced a lot of Canada. And as an adult, there's two places that I can go back to that cause for me just a profound emotional reaction, it's just, you know, like your heart lifting up. One of those is northern Quebec, because we lived in Bagotville for three years, you know, very formative years for me. I call that northern Quebec; people in the real northern Quebec wouldn't, but for me the Canadian shield just causes that intense emotional reaction. And the other, of course, being from Alberta, is the mountains. I was recently back in Alberta and just seeing the mountains just changes my experience of myself. But I think you're talking about something that's more than just an emotional reaction. There's something about learning from that experience that you're trying to get across to people. And so what is that aspect of learning? The word pedagogy is in the phrase, right?
Celia: Well, the relationship between pedagogy and land is an insistence that the land is continually teaching us lessons and we need to pay attention to those lessons. So clearly, at this time of climate change, and increasing pollution, and worries about plastic, ...
Cameron: Oil pipelines.
Celia: Oil pipelines! All of those environmental issues that are in the news, in our lives, they're also in our bodies. And so what I really am hoping and trying to achieve in this course is to get people to recognize that they ignore these things that their peril. I was listening to a student who is actually in Schulich focusing on sustainability, yesterday, talking about how many of her colleagues don't see, they don't know what sustainability means let alone see that they are fully implicated in the sustainability of this world. It's not a joke. And I mean again, I was raised by a father who was a conservationist, many years ago and at a time when that word was barely having any currency, so I’ve always had this clear sense: if you put a mine up there above your drinking water, you're endangering yourself. I watched the caddisfly larvae that I had seen as a child disappear from the river because of the pollution that was coming from mines above. They've cleaned it up, now the caddisfly larvae are back! We can clean these things up. But pedagogy of the land is really about ... I want it to be gentle, to start, so that people can engage with these lessons on a very personal and emotional level, in order to move into the intellectual understanding and then, one hopes, some activism, and you know back to Paolo Freirean praxis.
Cameron: Yeah. When you talk about activism, I want to shift focus a bit and take the discussion to the way that you move your research beyond academic conversations. And for many researchers that I talk to, this is about taking an academic article and somehow paraphrasing it and making it intelligible to a wider audience, and maybe publishing it in an editorial piece or something in a newspaper. You're doing something that is profoundly engaged in the community, and I think that there's no such thing is doing academic research and then translating it. It is coming from engagement with the community. And so, the pedagogy of the land is also about engaging with communities that are on that land. I wonder if you can talk about how you think about the role of the university in relation to these communities, because you talk a lot about partnerships in research between universities and communities, and that's really building engagement from the ground up.
Celia: Yeah, well, let me just start with pedagogy of the land, because as far as I’m concerned, that's me engaging with my community called Toronto, to have people who live in an urban context really come to some depth of understanding. When I think about the relationship between land, community, the work that I do, pedagogy of the land is an example of starting with my community here called Toronto, because I do think that's an important place and space to do this work. But I want to come back to Resistance and Renewal for a minute as a kind of impetus for me to get very focused on ensuring that the work that I’m doing is community-related. One of the high points for me about Resistance and Renewal is that not only is it read in university classrooms -- and it's read in a lot of university classrooms -- it's also read by people in the community. So, I have had Indigenous people from across Canada say to me that they have read that book and that it spoke to them, not in a university classroom but in their own hands, in their own living rooms. Only today I got an email from a man on Vancouver Island saying he had just read Resistance and Renewal and it was a really important contribution to his deepening understandings of relationships with Indigenous people in Canada. He's only starting to be aware of it, and I certainly credit the Truth and Reconciliation Commission with making that difference. But in terms of work with community, when I saw what Resistance and Renewal had done, I always wanted to replicate that connection between my scholarly work and the communities with whom I was working and beyond. So, I did think of film as a way to ensure that the work that I was doing was much more accessible to many more people. So that is one of the reasons for moving into film, in order to ensure that the research I’m doing gets back to the people who can benefit from it.
Cameron: Right. I want to talk about the film in a moment. I just want to focus briefly on this question: when I think of community-based research and the relationship between communities and the university, it's very clear to me as an academic how much the communities matter to me as an academic. I can't do my work, it is about them, it's not about me, right? That's fundamentally important. But how does the university matter to the community?
Celia: I think that that comes back to the notion of reciprocity, and it is one of the things I've been talking with my own students about lately. There's been a tendency for people who start to work in community, whether they're Indigenous communities or otherwise, of recognizing this whole thing about power and then saying to themselves, "Okay, I'm going to go into the community and I'm just going to listen." And I’m saying, that's not good enough. We have strengths, we have things we've learned, we have knowledge that we can bring -- yes, tentatively, because we don't know what's going to work for the community and what isn't -- but we have a responsibility to bring something to that table when go there and say teach me about whatever the question is. So that's a really important dimension of what I think academics should be doing. And not only that, in terms of this time when universities are really under attack from a lot of places, or at the very least undervalued, this is one of the ways that we can demonstrate our value, by taking something to the table when we go to communities.
Cameron: When you're talking about this, one of the things I think about is my relationship with my spouse, and I think something that's very profound in a relationship like that is that you get to reflect back to each other what you're seeing in that person, and to help them understand who they are by reflecting back to them what you're seeing in them. So is there something of that in the relationship between the university and community: the researcher can come in and at least very tentatively say, you know, here's what I’m seeing, I've had these other experiences, these other theorizations, these other research efforts, and when I come here, here's what I see. Is that, does that make any sense to you? Is that the kind of a dialogue you're talking about?
Celia: Yeah, that's part of it. Another piece of the reciprocity that I've often appealed to over the years, is that sitting down for an interview with a person is an incredible privilege. And if we think about it, the number of times another adult human being sits down with us and actually listens to what we have to say are few and far between. We have therapists, they do, and sometimes we have a good friend that might listen for a bit before they tell us what they want to say about themselves. But I do find that people are often very surprised by what it is that, first of all, that they've done that is interesting to me as a researcher, but also just articulating and recognizing, "Wow, I have done all this work." That can be a benefit in and of itself.
Cameron: Mm-hmm. And so, to the film -- which is being able to assemble an image that you can then feed back into the community. The title of the film is Cowboys, Indians and Education, made in 2012, with your daughter Helen?
Celia: No, my niece.
Cameron: Your niece, Helen. Can you tell me how you got into the film project?
Celia: I can and it's back to Resistance and Renewal. So, I have a cabin in the bush in Kamloops. I lived in Kamloops for fifteen years. I go there every summer. One summer, we were in town getting groceries and I encountered the children of two sets of parents I had interviewed for Resistance and Renewal. "Hi Cathie, hi Rob, how are you? Good to see you. What's going on?" "Oh, we're running an immersion school in the Secwepemc language. Secwepemctsín, in Chase, and here are our daughters and they are fluent in the language." Went back, wandered in the woods, thought about this, and thought, wow, sequel to Resistance and Renewal! Here's how Indigenous people have taken schooling, and then education, broadly defined, and used it to move against the efforts of the residential schools, the Canadian government, etc., to obliterate Indigenous knowledges and languages. So, the more I thought about it, the more excited I got. One the people I had interviewed initially for Resistance and Renewal was my sister-in-law. My niece by this time was an award-winning Indigenous filmmaker, up-and-coming, So I said to her, "Helen, let's do this. Your filmmaking is one aspect of education. We can interview the people from the residential, uh, from the immersion school, we can interview my rodeo friends. Let's go do it.” "Oh, Auntie, I don't do documentary, I do experimental documentary, I'm an artist." I said, "That's why I want you, because you'll make a beautiful film." And we did! Cowboys, Indians and Education is actually a secondary film out of the real work that we did. We got a SSHRC grant. Interestingly, at that time, SSHRC was not keen on funding documentary film. They've changed from that. We had our budget cut in half and the comment because we don't fund expensive documentary film. (This was from SSHRC.) So, my research officer came and said, "That's too bad, you can't do your film." And I said, "No no no, it says 'expensive.' We will do this film." So, I know how to interview holding a sound boom at the same time, and my niece and I carried equipment and did whatever, and away we went and made the film. So, the first film that we made, the one that was really based on what we were supposed to be doing, was called Pelq'ilc (Coming Home), and it's in Secwepemctsín, in the language of the Secwepemc people. That film was accepted in the Native American Film Festival, with the Smithsonian in New York, and they purchased it and toured it around to the Indian Festival in Santa Fe, and so it did very well. But that's what got me into filmmaking, and it was working with my niece as co-director. She's clearly an experienced filmmaker, she guided me through this whole process. She took the lead in terms of the camera work and the editing, etc. We worked together; I mean it was a very interesting journey. We had so much great footage, we went back and did Cowboys, Indians and Education, which is a second film. They're both in the York Library, by the way.
Cameron: Cool. So is the filmmaking, is it research or is it research dissemination, for you?
Celia: I'd say it's research, particularly now having just been part of writing both the first and the second Strategic Research Plan for the university. We really have tried to make very clear that we see artistic production as research productivity. There isn't a separation. There can't be. If you think about the work that people in in the arts do in order to produce a play, a piece of writing, a script, it's intensely research-driven. And so I actually see creative scholarly production as, I don't want to say "the equivalent," but as an equal to any kind of other scholarly production.
Cameron: So, we've touched on a number of things over the course of your career, and I wonder if you see your research as having some kind of a trajectory or an arc, or has it just kind of happened to you?
Celia: Trajectories are always nice to see when you look back, right, you can kind of define them at that point. I would say that it was through my work in the Native Indian Teacher Ed Program that I really became very committed to ensuring that schooling, education, post-secondary education, was a place that welcomed Indigenous scholars, faculty member, students, programs, courses. And if there's any kind of consistency in what I’ve done, that's been a major piece of what I hope I have contributed to. That's my goal. In terms of the actual research that I do, it's always in that direction, or almost always in that direction, certainly in the direction of social justice/equity, it's one of the reasons I love being at York, because it's not just a statement, it's actually real for so many of the faculty members here. So always that has been an integral part of what I’ve been doing. but the particular pieces themselves are happenstance. As I say, I run into these two people when I go to get groceries and it gives me an idea. The latest film I’ve done resulted from Wes Cragg, Schulich School of Business, coming to my office and saying, "Would you come and work with me on this project?" And me thinking, "I don't know where Schefferville is, I've certainly heard of it, and Kawawachikamach is beyond my knowledge and I don't know who the Naskapi are. Sure, let's go do it!"
Cameron: [laughs] So you end up being very engaged in issues of mining and economic development, resource extraction, and the relationship to the land, the relationship to Indigenous peoples. And as an academic you get the opportunity, or you get called in some way, to write these reports that can be part of the discourse around these issues. How do you get ... did you just kind of say that's what I want to do, or did someone invite you to do that?
Celia: Well, this is Wes Cragg, so Wes, as you know, was the head of the Canadian Business Ethics Research Network, and he had established a connection with the Naskapi Nation in northern Quebec, Naskapi nation of Kawawachikamach. He had a particular relationship with Phil Einish, the chief there. They are traditional caribou hunters, nomadic caribou hunters, who became invested in and engaged in open-pit iron ore mining. So, Wes was very keen on knowing how this mining was impacting the Naskapi people. At the time that he began to work with the community, iron ore prices had gone up and the mines were about to reopen -- they had been closed for some time. So, he went to the community and with his grad students and a colleague, Ben Bradshaw from the University of Guelph. They conducted a community-based survey. They went into everybody's houses, implemented this questionnaire, and worked to address a knowledge-needs assessment. What do you need to know now that the mines are reopening? And so they came up with a list of twenty things they need to know, and it was everything from, you know, what are the jobs going to be, to what about environment the monitoring, how can we think about cultural and language retention and preservation and maintenance, how can ... many things. Wes came and said, "Here is this study we've done. Here are the knowledge needs we've established. If this is going to have any kind of impact, it has to start with the kids in the schools. I know you've done some work in Indigenous education. Would you come and work in the school and see what we can do about this?" So I said yes! And off I went. And that's what actually got me to the point of getting deeper into understanding about this really complex relation -- and I’d say it's a complex relation we all live: how do we think about economic, environmental, and cultural sustainability? So that's what the focus of my work with the Naskapi became. But I spent time in the school, I'd say I was there for two or three years before I thought of engaging in any research. Again, relationships are central to the work I do, and I really feel that the time I had with the Naskapi was not nearly enough. Now that more time has elapsed, and we've done the film together, and we've been doing some screenings and the community people have been coming to participate in those screenings, I feel like I know them much better and the relationship is much deeper. But, the time in the school then allowed me to see this community, get excited about it. The most impressive thing for me was the level of language facility, use, maintenance. So, when you walk into the provincially funded school, in the community of Kawawachikamach -- it's been provincially funded since the 1980s, and that's significant if you know about federally funded schools -- everyone is speaking Naskapi. All the children in the hallways are speaking Naskapi, the people in the office are speaking Naskapi, the teachers. For the first three years, the kids are all in Naskapi class. They learn to read and write in Naskapi, and then they move into English, so some of the more senior teachers are English speakers. But that's what really grabbed my attention, because so many communities are working so hard to maintain, to restore, language, who are worrying about the fact that, you know, they have the seven fluent speakers, and here's a whole community that is speaking their language.
Cameron: Hmm. Amazing. I want to ask you to just step back for a second, as we kind of wrap up the interview, and looking at the way that you're career has moved from books to film, as you have developed a certain amount of credibility with in your relationships with First Nations and certain specific communities, and the way that you are able to take positions of a certain amount of wisdom, I would say, in being able to comment on what you're seeing, because of your history and your knowledge, your experience -- things are very different today for young academics starting out. Are the possibilities of establishing that kind of a position there for young academics, or is their position quite different? How do you see the likelihood of a young academic developing this kind of relationship with communities and being able to do this kind of research, given the short term nature of funding and so forth in academia?
Celia: I really have kind of mixed feelings about how things are proceeding. One of the really hopeful dimensions for me is that Indigenous academics are moving into the university and transforming it. The other thing that gives me hope, and I think is something very worth protecting, is tenure. We have tenure at our Canadian universities, and that is what allows people to do the kind of work that I have been able to do. So, I think the opportunities are still there. I also think that a lot of younger academics are much pickier about what they will agree to do. So, in some ways I think the opportunities are there, yes, jobs may not be as ... there may not be as many jobs as there have been, although that really goes in, uh, ...
Cameron: Demographic waves.
Celia: Yeah, demographic waves, and there are a whole lot of us about to disappear. I'm the head, I'm the lead of the baby boomers, man, so there are going to be spaces open up. I think the main thing we need to do is protect tenure, because that is what allows us to go and do these things. And I have to say, I turned to film at the moment that I became a full professor. I thought I can do whatever I want, and now I can really move into this commitment I have to ensuring that the work that I’m doing is available and accessible to the community, in ways that some of my, you know, UBC Press books and refereed journal articles ... some of them are read out there but it's not the kind of thing that people tend to do. They don't go and look for a scholarly journal, but they might look for a video, or a podcast!
Cameron: Hmm. Yeah. I think what you're saying about tenure is really profoundly important. We need spaces in society where people are protected to be able to do work that is not influenced by short term thinking, that is protected from political interference to a certain degree, and allows people to say things that might be unpopular, either because of opposition or because it's simply not part of the faddish discourse of the day, right, that longer term thinking. But I think what many people not realized is just how deeply affected the universities are by the gig economy. And you see that kind of precariousness of work that affects news media, and people are losing jobs left, right and center at the major newspapers and at the major media companies, like CBC, and having to turn to a lot of freelance work in order to get by. And they cobble together as reporters a story here and a story there in order to survive. I see many of my colleagues at the university in that same situation, people who are teaching twelve, thirteen courses at a time, some of them here, some of them at other institutions, just trying to get by, trying to cobble together an income. And some of them love it, absolutely, some of them love it. But the difference between that and having tenure, which I enjoy -- for me, I respond profoundly to that sense of security, of not having to worry about where the next paycheck is going, and I can just then focus on my work. I think that's really important, and I wonder how you would express the way that that changes the kinds of questions that you yourself are able to tackle, having tenure.
Celia: I mean, I think it makes all the difference in the world. I do think that we also need to be very cognizant of the importance of tenure-stream jobs, so that rather than having the piecemeal work that so many people are doing, really getting serious as a university. And I think we have been doing that at York over the last couple of years, is really focusing in on hiring people into tenure-stream positions. I do think there's another dimension to this, though, which is that some of my graduate students that I work with are very critical of the institution and are very hesitant to move into the, not to put too fine a point on it, what appears to them to be the rat race, where it is essential to publish, it is essential to do work, certainly until you have tenure. And I guess I have a little worry as well about people who may take advantage of tenure, and having tenure and therefore not necessarily being as productive as they have been, because they're frustrated, because they've applied for funding and not got it, because it's complicated to negotiate the Office of Research Accounting, or whatever those reasons are. But I, I do think that that's a concern as well that we have to pay attention to and ensure that there are ways to encourage mid-career scholars to be as deeply engaged in their commitment to this work as they were as young scholars, as they were coming to do their PhDs. I mean we all came here because we'd love research, we love getting into the depths and the woods, and whatever. I think those possibilities remain. I really think they're here as long as we have tenure. I do think that we may not be able to live in downtown Toronto and have a tenure-stream job in exactly where we want to be, but for people who are committed academics, you know is well as I do, we all go to the same conferences, we all do the same work, we all apply to the same granting agencies. I think those I think those possibilities are still here, and I think we really need to be excited about the young scholars who are coming in, particularly I'll say again Indigenous scholars -- and now we're getting to some very mature Indigenous scholars who are shaping how we do the kind of work that I've done over the years.
Cameron: That is a very hopeful.
Celia: I'm very hopeful.
Cameron: Thank you. Celia, thank you for being on the podcast. I really appreciate your being here and sharing your thoughts. And I personally want to thank you for your support for this whole project, for putting together this podcast. You've been a big supporter from the get-go and your backing has helped this become a reality.
Celia: Thank you, Cameron. It's a fabulous opportunity and I love --- as I say, it's not very often we get to sit down and somebody really listens to what matters to us
Cameron: I know. I'm loving it!
Celia: Thank you. Thank you.
Cameron: Thanks, Celia.
Resources
Books
Films
Cowboys, Indians and Education
Credits
This episode was the first one we recorded at York University’s Learning Technology Services studio.
Host: Cameron Graham
Producer: Bertland Imai
Photos: York University
Music: Musicbed
Recorded: February 15, 2019
Location: York University
