Indigenous Governance: Restoring Control and Responsibility over the Education of Our People

Abstract

Indigenous Governance has a wide-ranging impact among the Indigenous peoples. The levels of impact are legal-juridical, political, and economic in connection to educational institutions. This section focuses on Indigenous systems of governance with implications for education, learning, and teaching. The chapter conceptualizes Indigenous Governance and its manifestation to Indigenous and alternative educational sites. The legacies of colonialism and colonial settler-hood as well as the urgency for Indigenous self-determination have centralized Indigenous governance in the public domain. This has also been necessitated by the resiliency and agency of Indigenous ways of knowing and praxis. There is an eruption of an antithesis to the dominant conception of governance. It is defined by a rich historical knowledge of Indigenous communities having their own systems of government. Such an indigenous presentation of governance is holistic, open, community based, and liberating. It is an anti-oversimplification of Indigenous peoples’ political culture often masked in racist explanations of inherent moral and cultural shortcomings of Indigenous communities. At the global level, particularly the Canadian contexts, self-government agreements allow self determination, sovereignty, and upholding of treaty agreements of Indigenous populations. These agreements provide self-control to education, health, social, and economic development. However, the chapter notes that many theorists have critiqued Canada’s long history of settler colonialism that never meets or respects the sovereignty of Indigenous groups. Global governance of Indigenous rights is an urgent matter. We approach this question drawing a link between Indigenous Governance and global governance.