Dear EDST Members:
Tomorrow, Tuesday, September 30th, 2025, we commemorate The National Day for Truth and Reconciliation / Journée nationale de la vérité et de la réconciliation. On that day we are called to reflect on the lasting devastating impacts residential schools have had, and continue to have, on Indigenous communities, their families and the inter-generational wounds of suffering, pain and dislocation. The stories that capture this colonial history of dispossession through schools represent a vivid reminder of this suffering. Dean Jane Hare’s message encourages us all to “to explore, reflect, and consider how these stories may guide your own learning and actions”. She further exhorts us to “continue to walk this path with respect, accountability, and hope.”
As a Department focused on studying the impacts of education, schools and schooling on society, let this commemorative Day remind us of two major points:
First, let us acknowledge the vulnerability and destructive nature of any educational project when it lacks a critical decolonial consideration of its impacts on social groups marked by difference, plurality and differentials of power. Keeping present in our reflections the dangers we all run when thinking of education and schooling generically, as a “modernizing” or “enlightening” project, represents one safeguard against becoming accomplice in the violence embedded in this institution when deployed thoughtlessly.
Secondly, on this commemoration Day, let us renew our commitment and recognize the roles schools and education play in the colonization of the space we refer to as Canada and beyond, internationally. Let us endeavour to think the school as an institution and organization that should be Indigenized – in its epistemic and pedagogical attributes – before it can lay claim to a capacity to heal and offer a venue of justice and reconciliation.
As we reconvene on campus this week, let us explore further how we can come together and work towards the fostering of an education worth wanting, one that heals, promotes justice and builds rather than destroy and dispossess.
Thank you for your attention & engagement.
Wishing us all a significant commemoration and reflection,
André