By CATHERINE PORTER JUNE 19, 2017
SASKATOON, Saskatchewan — On a recent brilliant morning, the University of Saskatchewan transformed its college green into a powwow arena, with white canvas tepees, drum circles and lines of young women braiding their hair and affixing eagle plumes in preparation for graduation festivities.
The university’s founders could hardly have imagined such a sight. The college was built in the last century, modeled on the great American and British universities. It was imagined as a grand preserve of Western thought for the children of Canadian settlers, then flooding into the country’s youngest province in the prairies. Indigenous students were not banned, but they were not welcomed either.
Now, all that has changed. The powwow graduation in May was one example of how universities across Canada are “indigenizing” — a new, elastic term that means everything from drawing more aboriginal students and faculty members onto campuses built largely for white settlers, to infusing those stodgy Western institutions with aboriginal belief systems and traditional knowledge. …
The University of Saskatchewan is leading the charge to become a kind of Reconciliation U, committing to change in areas including scholarship and governance, and envisioning itself as an institution of “knowledge-keeping,” as well as research and learning. …
Even Peter Stoicheff the university’s president, recognizes the challenges.
“Universities are so inherently white and Western, when you start to push against it, you realized how intractable a lot of that is,” Mr. Stoicheff said.
“Everything is based on reading stuff,” he explained. “Everything is laid out in a hierarchical and linear fashion. Look at the aboriginal ways, from visual expression to the wampum belt, dances and oral storytelling. It’s not linear. Everything is based on the circle.”
… Last year, the academic governing body agreed that all of the 17 colleges and schools, from dentistry to engineering, should include indigenous knowledge. …