Core Curriculum: A Breathing Space for Wellness to Sustain Decolonizing Leadership

Introduction

In this chapter, the author shares students’ leadership efforts to decolonize themselves. As a campus leader in community-service learning, and as a faculty member on campus who was responsible for mentoring Indigenous students and facilitating collaborative community-based teaching and research partnerships with Indigenous peoples across Canada, the author shares her approach to decolonizing herself alongside her students’ efforts to do so. She shares a decolonizing journey with students in a class that they co-created, using the four stages and twelve steps of the analytical framework that she developed with D. Beverly McKee, called The Default to Deliberation Framework (D2 Framework). The D2 Framework provides a visual journey for leaders to decolonize themselves, moving away from the denial and delusion, willful blindness, and compassion fatigue that characterize the ‘Default Mode’ of neo-colonialism. Moving up The D2 Framework, away from the Default Mode and towards the ‘Curiosity about’ and ‘Connecting with’ stages, involves a commitment to decolonizing oneself by listening to and learning from Indigenous peoples. The task of moving beyond mere curiosity and towards ‘Connecting with’ Indigenous peoples involves establishing relationships with and growing respect for First Peoples in Canada and around the world. The stage of ‘Caring about’ Indigenous peoples is reflected in a citizen’s actions locally, regionally, nationally and/or internationally including, for example, amplifying calls by the International Panel on Climate Change (2020) to prioritize Indigenous voices around the world in climate dialogues, strategic initiatives, and policy actions; importantly, actions within the ‘Caring about’ stage of The D2 Framework can contribute to efforts to sustain, extend and deepen democracy. Moving up The D2 Framework reflects one’s efforts to take-up opportunities—and obligations—for civic engagement to ensure that nation-to-nation relationships vis-à-vis Indigenous nations within multinational states such as Canada are fostered and sustained, respected, and promoted.

The D2 Framework was developed to provide a new learning mindset by illustrating what a decolonizing journey looks like for non-Indigenous, or settler, campus leaders. However, the upwards journey away from the Default Mode of colonialism involves intense emotional labour, intellectual rigour, and a sustained commitment to lifelong learning and civic engagement. Despite indications of an emerging societal dis-ease with systemic discrimination in an era of #IdleNoMore and #BlackLivesMatter and other social movements, it can be more comfortable for campus leaders to remain within the Default Mode of colonialism given, for example, the familiarity of dominant narratives that are perpetuated as much in the halls of the academy as in mainstream media, and also given the hubris of optic allyship that professors and media pundits can perform as often as politicians do.

For over twenty years, in an effort to decolonize her courses and provide a connection between the campus and Indigenous communities, the author developed community service-learning opportunities for students, co-organized special campus events in collaboration with Indigenous Elders and youth and community members, offered land-based retreats for students to learn from Indigenous community members, and facilitated community-driven research and teaching partnerships that continue to engage students with Inuit in Nunavut, in the Eastern Arctic in Canada. Sustaining such path-finding initiatives took a toll on the author’s health and well-being. Becoming a yoga and pilates teacher provided the author with new insights into how to sustain her civic engagement, research relationships, and pedagogical innovations while honouring her own health and well-being.