Getting Past the White Paper

Fifty years after the 1969 White Paper, and 4 years after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report and calls to action, teacher educators in Canada are engaged in the profound work of decolonizing a series of notions and frameworks underpinning their work, their institutional cultures and student expectations. This chapter explores some of the premises and frames of equity, antiracism and social justice education that come into question when educators take up pedagogies oriented towards reconciliation, decolonial, anticolonial, or treaty education. A turn to settler colonial studies and theories of racial and colonial capitalism points to the ways racism figures within colonial modernity and the implications for antiracism and decolonial education. The discussion is springboarded from the question, Are Canadian teacher educators getting past the White Paper? Or are we working within a framework that equates the struggles and aspirations of Indigenous people with those of other communities facing racial discrimination or that presumes the ameliorability of this settler-colonial society, through the curricular and pedagogical removal of barriers to Indigenous student empowerment, educational success, and upward mobility? Are our projects—supporting teachers to engage in curriculum inclusion and culturally responsive pedagogy—framed within settler futurities or Indigenous ones? What’s the difference, and why does it matter?