Cash Ahenakew

• Professor (Associate) at University of British Columbia

There is growing interest among Western-trained scientists in engaging with Indigenous sciences. This interest has arisen in response to social pressures to reckon with the colonial foundations of Western science and decentre Western ways of knowing, as well as recognition of the need to draw upon the gifts of multiple knowledge systems to address...

Despite the continued popularity of education for sustainable development (ESD) and expanded calls for educators to inspire hope in the face of the climate and nature emergency, scholars from varied disciplines and knowledge systems have pointed to the disavowed social and ecological costs of the promise that we can continue pursuing infinite econo...

This conceptual paper reviews recent efforts to confront colonialism in conservation, with an emphasis on the challenges and complexities that have emerged among settler organizations engaged in this work. We consider recent academic and grey literature in the field in order to map different approaches to conservation, including the emerging interf...

In response to the mainstreaming of reconciliation as well as growing demands for decolonization and #LandBack, settler conservation organizations in what is currently known as Canada have begun to confront their historical and ongoing complicity in colonialism, including the displacement and dispossession of Indigenous Peoples. However, in practic...

In this text we address the dynamics of struggle over the direction and purpose of education today, with an emphasis on global and Indigenous education. To do so, we contextualize the systemic and historical grounds of these struggles, emphasizing how western schools and universities rooted in a modern/colonial system have entrenched universalizing...

The Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures (GTDF) research/arts/ecology collective is a transnational and intergenerational collaboration among researchers, artists, educators, students, social justice and environmental activists, and Indigenous knowledge keepers. The work of the collective is multifaceted, but one of our primary orienting concerns i...

The growing traction of decolonization as a discourse and practice within and beyond the context of academic scholarship has generated important spaces for critical, self- reflexive engagements with the role of systemic, historical, and ongoing colonial violence in the foundations of various scholarly fields. Although the overarching area of “decol...

From the nineteenth century to the present day, external peoples, companies, and governments have perpetrated disrespectful attitudes and behaviours toward Amazonian Originary Peoples. In response, Originary Peoples have increasingly adopted their own protocols of respectful interactions with external actors. However, research on the development an...

Cognisant of the globalising context in which we find ourselves, as intellectuals we ought to ensure relevance in what we teach. This orientation, that prizes pedagogic relevance, has been raised as an objection to the decolonial call, being – at times – used to resist democratic change in the South African University. The contributions in this vol...

New and resurgent movements to decolonise higher education are increasingly found throughout the globe in the context of settler colonies, former colonies, and former colonial metropoles alike. As Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars located in what is currently known as Canada, in this chapter, we reflect on what we have learned from mainstream...

This chapter presents a selection of theoretical and pedagogical frameworks for global citizenship education (GCE) otherwise of the “Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures” (GTDF) collective. The authors discuss the challenges of addressing the depth and complexity of existing global challenges, in particular as they relate to the questions of (un)su...

This workbook is for people who have some sense that decolonizing higher education is important, including those who have not yet begun this work and don’t know where to start, as well as those who have already begun the work and have become confused, frustrated, or disillusioned along the way. Decolonization does not simply involve intellectual wo...

In this article, we address the limitations of sustainable development as an orienting educational horizon of hope and change, given that mainstream development presumes the possibility of perpetual growth and consumption on a finite planet. Facing these limitations requires us to consider the inherently violent and unsustainable nature of our mode...

In this article we review learnings from our collaborative efforts to engage with the complexities and challenges of decolonization across varied educational contexts. To do so, we consider multiple interpretations of decolonization, and multiple dimensions of decolonial theory and practice – in particular, the ecological, cognitive, affective, rel...

The growing traction of decolonization as a discourse and practice within and beyond the context of academic scholarship has generated important spaces for critical, self-reflexive engagements with the role of systemic, historical, and ongoing colonial violence in the foundations of various scholarly fields. Although the overarching area of “decolo...

Many Indigenous Peoples around the world find the dominant model of sustainable development disrespectful and hypocritical. The terms ‘sustainable’ and ‘development’ when combined reproduce patterns of exploitation that destroy Mother Earth while imposing a regime of colonial praxis on Indigenous Peoples and Lands under a benevolent appearance of c...

In this article I offer a series of critical reflections about existing efforts and achievements in Indigenous Education, with particular emphasis on the risks, tensions, and paradoxes that arise where different knowledge systems meet, and when Indigenous peoples ourselves hold contradictory educational desires. I focus on the idea of the land as f...

Higher education institutions have used the banner of "diversity" for a wide range of initiatives that aim to support the presence of "different" bodies and perspectives within academic spaces. However, these initiatives tend to reproduce rather than transform dominant ways of knowing and being. Drawing on the work of Sara Ahmed, Pasifika scholarsh...

This article examines issues that arise when Indigenous epistemologies are interpreted through non-Indigenous ontologies in research settings. I use the concept of grafting to refer to the act of transplanting ways of knowing and being from a context where they emerge naturally to a context where they are artificially implanted. I start exploring t...

The historical universalization and naturalization of Western ways of knowing and being, disseminated violently through colonialism is very resistant to change, particularly when it sees itself as ‘open’ to diversity. This creates what can be thought of as an invisible ‘brick wall’ of resistance, which creates great frustration for those hitting th...

This article explores some of the tensions at the interface of nationalist and global orientations in ideals of global mindedness and global citizenship looking specifically at the Finnish context. We engage with discussions related to the social-political and historical context of national identity in Finland and outline the conceptual framework o...

This article presents an analysis of journal entries of student teachers in a course on multicultural and language studies in primary education in Aotearoa/New Zealand, which was informed by a discursive strand of postcolonial theory, in particular Gayatri C. Spivak’s ideas of education ‘to-come’ as an ‘un-coercive rearrangement of desires’ towards...

This article is part of a transnational collaboration between Indigenous scholars concerned about the provincialization of Indigenous struggles within modern metaphysics. This can be seen at work in notions of land as property, tribe as (modern) nation, and sovereignty as anthropocentric agency grounded on rational choice. Drawing on critiques of m...

This paper offers a brief analysis of aspects related to the significance and the complexities of introducing “different” epistemologies in higher education teaching and learning. We start by introducing the metaphors of abyssal thinking, epistemic blindness and ecologies of knowledge in the work of Boaventura de Souza Santos. In the second part of...