Wahéhshon Whitebean, speaks on the importance of addressing tokenism and sensationalized meta-narratives of trauma of the indigenous communities
The Spotlight series is an interview-based profile series by to McGill Global Health Perspectives. The series focuses on researchers and practitioners in global health outside of high-income country settings (and) or representing marginalized groups. For our sixth spotlight profile, we are featuring Wahéhshon Shiann Whitebean (she/her) is a Wolf Clan of the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation at Kahnawà:ke. She is a PhD Candidate (ABD), Vanier Scholar, and Tomlinson fellow in the Department of Integrated Studies of Education at McGill University. She is the co-author of the first Research Policy & Code of Ethics for the Kahnawà:ke Education Center, where she currently holds the position of Education Research Coordinator and Chair of the Education Research (ethics) Committee.
Wahéhshon’s doctoral research centralized the stories of formal Indian Day School students/survivors from her home community – to assess the intergenerational impacts on individual and communal levels.
Can you tell us about how you became interested in improving education for indigenous communities, starting with your community and highlighting impacts of Indian Day Schools?
I grew up in a multi-generational family and I was fortunate to be able to learn parts of my history and culture orally from elders. We are matrilineal, so I carry the Wolf Clan from my mother’s family. Both of my parents are from Kahnawà:ke, although my paternal grandfather was raised in the community from six years old, he was from a Scottish-Irish family. So my father was half-white with Scottish and Irish ancestry on his father’s side. I was close to my paternal grandmother. She wanted us to know who we are as Kanien’kehá:ka people (Mohawk), and as a child she took us to the longhouse which is our ceremonial and cultural center and exposed us to our history. For me, getting exposed to this history as a child showed me who we are, but also showed me the injustices that had happened. Our language is currently considered at risk or endangered and much of our history has been erased.
So, I was a young activist struggling against the injustice that had happened and was happening to us. While protesting was useful, I found that protesting can be taxing with sometimes little results, so I wanted to go to university. My thinking was that I was going to confront the heart of where these discriminatory ideas are coming from. I wanted to take the fight to another level and learn about root causes.
I completed my bachelor’s at Concordia University, I was at an indigenous educational course and the whole course was about Indian Residential Schools. I realized there is little data on Indian Day Schools. While many of our community went to residential schools, the majority of my community had to go to Indian Day Schools. My initial research took me to the archives, just to be able to find sources to write an undergraduate paper. So, I continued pulling at this thread, completed my master’s on it and now I am completing my Ph.D. on it.
I feel like we are born with the burden of the colonial history and its impact on us. Currently, there is this obsession with the pain and suffering of Indigenous communities. While it is important to learn, I also understood that it is important how and when we tell our stories; especially to our children. I did not understand this most of my life, as a young mother. I only realized later how the unstructured, unfiltered information or the meta-narrative about indigenous trauma that dominate our lives impact our health well being. So, I wanted to listen to my own community, to the many voiceless people who have never told their Indian Day School stories, I wanted to do it with respect, knowing how it will negatively impact us, if we do not handle this information with care.
Wahéhshon Shiann Whitebean
This has been a long and a challenging journey for you. So, how do you manage your approach in research, balancing this effort to share information about injustices impacting health and wellbeing but also making sure that it is not reinforcing sensationalism of your trauma?
When I started this work, I had no idea how important it was for health and well-being. Personally, what I ended up doing was re-contextualizing my own personal and family traumas. Because you also begin to better understand the origin of cycles of violence and addiction. So, through my work, I was trying to trace back the roots of violence and trauma. In my research I try very hard not to reinforce our trauma, because it is re-victimizing and re-traumatizing for the community. One example is the recent uncovering of the burials of the stolen and murdered children of our communities taken to Residential Schools, and it is painful to experience. I try to remind our people that our strengths go deeper than the harm that was done to us since contact with the colonizers.
Also, when I talk to people about Indian Day schools and their experience, I try to balance it with what can help them get through reliving those experiences or learning about the past. I try to help them see where our community wants to go – a vision for the future.
Since your Ph.D. work is focused on Indian Day Schools, can you speak about the importance of learning about Indian Day Schools and how it is connected to the goals that you mentioned?
Through my Ph.D. research, I am doing a more comprehensive study on Indian Day Schooling and educational history in Kahnawà:ke which is my own community. I explore the impact that Indian Day Schooling had on our community and how the surrounding culture related to those structures affected us. I do this partly by exploring archives but also by speaking to the community, which carries an emotional burden. It is difficult work, because of the harm and the injustice you observe in each and every story.
When you explore the impact of Indian Day Schools, you learn about the broader oppressive context in our community at the time. The presence and actions of Indian agents, the police, different colonial authorities, and the clergy did more harm than good. So, we start to understand what a challenge it was for our people to break away from a system that was built to dominate, re-educate us, and discriminate against us. It has taken us fifty years of struggle to meaningfully reform our education system, and we continue to revitalize our language and culture.
Building off of the previous answer, can you talk about revitalizing your language and culture and your role as the research committee chair in Kahnawà:ke?
Because my Ph.D. work carries a heavy emotional burden, to balance out I also work in the community to see immediate change and impact in the community. I work on a lot of language and cultural revitalization projects for the Kahnawà:ke Education Center. It is my sixth year working with them.
In November 2021, I took on the role of being the educational research coordinator and research ethics committee chair. I recently co-authored the first research ethics policy for our educational system. It is called the Kahnawà:ke Education Center research policy and code of ethics. Our purpose is to protect our community, ensure ethical research, and push for priorities that are meaningful to the children and families that our community schools serve.
The work of the research ethics committee is also about empowerment. It is about strategically building our own community capacity to become leaders in research and education. Education was introduced through Indian Day Schools as a mechanism of assimilation. However, we now govern our own education system. So, by managing our partnerships, it allows us to become leaders of our education processes, and it is research for us by us, on our terms. Looking ahead we hope to build mentorship and training program for indigenous graduate students and researchers. The long-term goal is to strengthen our ability to systematically identify the needs of our community and create opportunities for our future generations.
As you build towards the future and try to preserve your culture, how do you navigate the current structures of education especially?
We cannot just withdraw from the current Euro-Canadian system. It will make us outliers and reduce access to opportunities. So, we have this ebb and flow of educational reform because it is a balancing act of preserving our language and our culture while also learning about the current system. So, we are trying to give strength, support and empower our youth to succeed in any path they choose. This path can be a traditional one within our community, as well as opportunities within the dominant system in society.
We try to preserve our culture through teaching, by correcting the wrongs done to us by Indian day schools and residential schools. I feel like this is up to our generation, because Indian day schools ended with us. This generation, the generation of my children, is the first generation that is able to attend school in our community without teachers or clergy forbidding them from speaking our language. Outside of Kahnawà:ke it might be different, where forces may be pressing them to assimilate or not speak our language or practice our culture.
As you try to preserve your language, build an educational structure that preserve your community culture, you also face many challenges within the structure. Can you expand on some of these challenges?
Pictures of the recent protests against Bill96 by Indigenous communities.
Picture credit: Wahehshon Whitebean
Bill 96 – Quebec’s new language law – is actually one of the major challenges we are facing currently within so-called Quebec. We use decolonizing as a buzzword and we think now that the Residential Schools are closed and Indian Day Schools are closed, so the threat is gone and all is going to be okay – which is not the truth. Bill 96 is one of those things that threaten our culture, language preservation and the future of the children. Now students and families are being pressured yet again to learn another colonial language that competes with our ancestral language. We are already under-represented in many professions and at educational institutes due to years of structural oppression. Now students are torn between do I study my own language or study French. It is essentially forcing students to choose between who they are and government mandated preferences, which is tied to their financial success in life. Our children should not have to choose between being who they are and living a healthy fulfilling life.
Wahehshon at the Bill 96 protests
It is also interesting to note how invisible indigenous communities are in this conversation at the policy table and in the media. The polarization that is often reported in media is French versus English. Indigenous community challenges are rarely brought up or discussed. So, we continue to be invisible, and our concerns continue to be pushed to the side, dominated by the narrative of colonial forces. Bill 96 is one example of many of these structural challenges.
If I can touch upon the ‘growth’ you mentioned in the earlier question. It seems opening up to communities also contained positives. Can you speak to this growth?
For me personally, opening-up also helped me confront my trauma, understanding of the impact of structural violence done to us. I am also a claimant in the Federal Indian Day School class action lawsuit having begun my education at the tail end of Indian Day & Residential schooling. Accepting this contributed to my mental and spiritual growth, which in turn, also helped me improve my physical health as well. It showed me how interconnected generational trauma and our health is – and the sheer weight of the burden we carry is often underestimated.
This is also reflected in the stories of elders. One community elder told me that he became a community leader and a teacher because of the negative experiences he had at Indian Day School in Kahnawà:ke. He realized how these schools are so wrong, he wanted to course correct. This pushed him to become a cultural leader and an elder in our community. These stories provide me with perspectives that really illuminates the root causes of structural challenges our communities face. Many of the community members found our cultural practices, re-learning them, re-learning language as a healing process that countered what they had experienced.
I know you have been an activist throughout your career. You also touched upon academia using ‘decolonization’ as a buzzword. Can you explain more and connect it with your experiences of decolonization efforts?
I think many envision decolonization to be this constant forward motion of making progress and that we are endlessly becoming less colonized. However, as I mentioned earlier when you live it, like education reform, decolonization is actually a process of ebb and flow. It is actually a balancing act of what you reclaim what is ours and how do you move forward in the realm that it is now. Because the colonial structures, powers, value systems are all still exist and hold power. So, nothing is neutral from media to education and there are always many things to fight against.
I think there is value in these efforts at institutional level, but it is also about setting priorities around goals that translates into meaningful action. I was initially involved with a lot of decolonial activities. At Concordia university, I was a student leader in decolonizing efforts, I founded two student groups, the First Peoples Studies Association and the Indigenous Student Council, and I worked hard towards decolonizing goals connected to indigenous communities.
It sounds like you are working hard to maintain a balance between decolonizing efforts outside and working within your own community. Can you tell us more about this approach?
I think you need to have one foot grounded in the communities that you care about otherwise you can get lost out there in bigger movements without much substance. Especially when you invest your energy to places and movements that use you as a token. Indigenous, racialized and marginalized students should be protected from exploitation. There are many within these structures who aim to exploit these movements for personal gain resulting in tokenism, exploitation, appropriation, or fraud even. If you have not lived with the impacts of discrimination, if you benefit from existing structures, how can you possibly understand the structural changes that need to be made? I live on the reserve and my experience of being isolated, facing micro-aggressions, experiencing discrimination cannot be understood by people who didn’t live it.
Also, institutional buy-in is important, without institutional buy-in our efforts are often wasted. I asked the president at the time of Concordia University “why are you off the hook?” While I do not regret time and effort I invested in decolonizing efforts, why are the boards of governance or administrations off the hook? Why is it when it comes to decolonizing and indigenizing, the burden is on a few Indigenous people or minorities, whether it is faculty, students, or staff? As a graduate student, I spend more time and energy at home in Kahnawà:ke. I am helping set the groundwork to protect my community from the impacts of colonial structures, through things like our new ethics policy. I want to be a meaningful steppingstone to build something better for my community.
You have dissected so many critical challenges for institutes and the research world in general. So, if we were to push for better approaches to decolonizing and equity what priority actions would you highlight as key?
I think of course these changes are context specific. Each community faces different levels of institutional support or discrimination. We have a tendency to generalize solutions and we must be aware of it when discussing pathways to make change. Based on my experience I consider creating space and being aware of superimposing on space of oppressed communities as an important factor. In my experience in Quebec, I fought very hard to create space for us as indigenous community members. And then there is this tendency in settler societies to take up that space.
Connected to the above goal is creating meaningful engagement and opportunities to make change. For example, when the truth and reconciliation commission report came out there were a lot of task forces formed. Much of that was checking the boxes and lip-service. You will not make any structural changes within universities or academia or research if you are not building meaningful relationships from the ground up with communities. This starts with local Indigenous communities where institutions are based, and includes the urban Indigenous community as well.
To me decolonization is also healing. When I do my language revitalization work, when I listen to stories of Indian day schools, I stress the importance of healing and recognizing the grief we carry. Part of the healing process is doing that difficult, ugly, and painful work of re-opening old wounds and being able to see where the generational harms came from and letting go of the shame that doesn’t belong to us. It is also giving indigenous communities access to things that will help fill up spaces and be whole, rather than just asking to let go of the past and leaving them barren.
Thank you. Adding to that I want to ask if there is anything else you want to say to researchers both established and upcoming?
I think in general when it comes to Onkwehón:we research, it should be needs based. At this point I think research should be about empowering, reclamation, growth, and resurgence. Onkwehón:we research centers on our cultural identities and communities, it is not something outside of it. This allows us to build partnerships, develop research to support needs of the people. This is the philosophy of research I hope that becomes more and more prominent with regard to our (indigenous) research – a research agenda we create, amend and govern. We have to remember that indigenous is a made-up word that lumps us all together. I want to see universities engage with distinct local communities, supporting the research priorities of those communities rather than taking generalized approaches.
Personally, the injustices I faced, the poverty I experienced, the cultural heritage of my community that fights for justice - pushes me to always take action. I feel as if we are in constant survival mode within these systems and we extend ourselves to survive and correct the burden of injustices we have faced. This happens to any racialized or marginalized person in academia, on top of disparities in health and socioeconomic factors. So far, what we have is allyship with similar racialized or marginalized minorities. So, institutions structurally should improve. This is why I decided to commit to McGill mentorship program for indigenous students this summer, and I told them to pair me up with rez kids – those I can relate to the most who are also the most underrepresented in the institution. There is a long way to go in normalizing, non-tokenizing and reducing emotional burdens. We as Indigenous, marginalized and oppressed peoples cannot take ownership or responsibility for all of the work that remains, yet some of us are out here clearing a path for our future generations. I hope to encourage everyone who has their heart in their work, to keep moving forward, we’re worth it.
Wahéhshon Shiann Whitebean tweets at @SheWalksAbout
About the Author(s):
This is a collective effort of the McGill Global Health Perspectives Team. Shashika Bandara led the interviewing and the writing for this conversation with Wahéhshon Shiann Whitebean.