Braiding Histories

Learning from Aboriginal Peoples’ Experiences and Perspectives

By Susan D. Dion
Categories: Education, Social Sciences, Race & Ethnicity
Publisher: UBC Press
Hardcover : 9780774815178, 264 pages, December 2008
Paperback : 9780774815185, 264 pages, July 2009
Ebook (PDF) : 9780774815192, 264 pages, July 2009
Ebook (MobiPocket) : 9780774852746, 264 pages, August 2014
Ebook (EPUB) : 9780774858489, 264 pages, May 2009

Table of contents

Acknowledgments

 

1 Historical Amnesia and the Discourse of the Romantic, Mythical Other

 

2 Listen Again and I’ll (Re)tell You a Story

 

3 Listening – But What Is Being Heard?

 

4 The Braiding Histories Project

 

5 “Her Solitary Place”: Teaching and Learning from Shanawdithit’s Story

 

6 “We Wanted to Hear Your Stories”: Teaching and Learning from Audrey’s Story

 

7 Disrupting Moulded Images

 

Appendix A: The Braiding Histories Stories as Distributed for Classroom Use

 

Appendix B: Initial Teacher Interview Questions

 

Appendix C: Planning-Session Agendas and Discussion Questions

 

Notes

 

References

 

Index

Description

This book proposes a new pedagogy for addressing Aboriginal subject material, shifting the focus from an essentializing or “othering” exploration of the attributes of Aboriginal peoples to a focus on historical experiences that inform our understanding of contemporary relationships between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples. Reflecting on the process of writing a series of stories, Dion takes up questions of (re)presenting the lived experiences of Aboriginal people in the service of pedagogy. Investigating what happened when the stories were taken up in history classrooms, she illustrates how our investments in particular identities structure how we hear and what we are “willing to know.”