Inside the ‘Indigenisation’ of Canada’s universities

While there has been a spate of hiring of Indigenous scholars into faculty and leadership roles in Canada’s universities, many have ended up dropping out in frustration, citing a lack of support and resources to carry out their goals. Critics also allege universities are doing a poor job of screening candidates’ claims of Indigenous identity and that a reliance on self-identification is resulting in “ethnic fraud”, writes Douglas Quan for the Toronto Star.

Hayden King, an Anishinaabe educator and adviser to the dean of arts on Indigenous education at Ryerson University, says Canadian universities have generally made a “superficial attempt” to include Indigenous people and knowledge into their institutions and curriculum.

“Universities like to pursue these symbolic gestures, these superficial, surface-level changes that make it appear as though there’s something fundamentally changing when, in reality … the changes are not really there,” says King.
Full report on the Toronto Star site