ABSTRACT
As a growing number of Canadian provinces move to include oral histories and survivor testimony of Indian Residential Schools into history curricula, the challenge lies in how teachers work with these narratives’ disciplinary and generic qualities and agencies within larger educational agendas of redress and reconciliation. This demands pedagogies informed by the methodologies, and knowledge traditions of oral history, Indigenous studies, socio-narratology, historical memory, and remembrance pedagogies, starting by asking what storying does to historical consciousness, how testimony acts, what kinds of learning and relationality testimony demands, and how pedagogy might condition, hold, tolerate, and guide student responses to those demands. It also implies honouring Indigenous ways of knowing and learning that embody, enact, are taught by, and affirm values of relationality, kinship, and the sacred ecology among all forms of life as well as the pedagogical impulse of Indigenous storytelling traditions. I explore this question with selected references to a multi-year qualitative case study in a preservice Indigenous literature course.
