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Paulo Freire, Critical Literacy, and Indigenous Resistance
Paulo Freire, Critical Literacy, and Indigenous Resistance
Paulo Freire, Critical Literacy, and Indigenous Resistance
J. Celeste Kee
jcelestekee@gmail.com
Davin J. Carr-Chellman:
University of Idaho
Moscow, ID 83843
dcarrchellman@uidaho.edu
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FREIRE AND INDIGENOUS RESISTANCE
Abstract
Using several case studies drawn from Freire’s cultural context and contemporary
Canadian indigenous resistance movements, this paper questions whether a Freirean approach to
critical literacy can work with indigenous literacy needs without reproducing colonial power
structures. It also seeks to examine current scholarship in the literacy education of Maritime
Aboriginal people in Canada, and to illustrate the need for critical pedagogies honoring multiple
Of all the groundbreaking and transformative concepts Paulo Freire brought to 20th
century educational philosophy, perhaps his best-known contribution was the development of
literacy campaigns designed to foster critical consciousness in the mass of people he deemed ‘the
oppressed’. As a Brazilian educator aligned with the political Left, this critical consciousness
was overtly politicized and served to induct the largely apolitical rural population into national
class awareness. However, Freire’s critics have pointed out the potential dangers of ethnocentric
and nationalistic distortions within such an approach; his implicit assumptions that rural people
were powerless, naïve, and unaware of their class status without the intervention of literacy
education has also been critiqued by recent scholarship. Additional criticism has emerged around
popular education’s assumptions of “literacy” as the ability to read and write in the dominant
language. These constructions are challenged by Indigenous critical pedagogues who suggest
that far from being pedagogically neutral, literacy campaigns based on such assumptions can
work to undermine and destroy Indigenous and vernacular forms of language, knowledge and
literacy.
This paper addresses these concerns in the context of global indigenous resistance
movements, and examines whether Freirean critical pedagogy still offers a valid framework for
schooling. Moving in this direction, it is necessary to examine the effects of Freire’s literacy
campaigns on rural cultures of his time. As it spread beyond Brazil, Freire's critical pedagogy
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FREIRE AND INDIGENOUS RESISTANCE
interacted (and at times conflicted) with indigenous knowledges? In this light, we will explore
the possibilities of combining Freirean literacy principles with indigenous knowledges without
reproducing underlying colonial power structures. And, in particular, the ways these principles
This paper uses historical textual analysis to argue that while Freirean pedagogy has at
times reproduced and reinforced colonialist ideologies, it remains relevant in applying critical
pedagogy to the context of indigenous resistance. It also argues that the problematic
demonstrate a much larger tension between the global indigenous need to learn dominant
languages for the purpose of self-advocacy, participation, and representation in the dominant
culture, and the ways uncritical assimilation of these dominant languages can alter, diminish and
and describe the historical background for his literacy campaigns. We will also discuss research
addressing indigenous resistance and literacy within the larger context of neoliberal
globalization. Next, we will examine Freirean literacy campaigns in Guinea-Bissau and other
regions and analyze issues that arose when these campaigns misunderstood local indigenous
culture and values. Finally, we will draw parallels between contemporary applications of
We must note several key terms used in this paper, including “indigenous” and
“literacy”, have been contested and problematized by recent scholarship. In this paper, the term
“indigenous” refers generically to groups of people whose societies predated Western colonialist
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FREIRE AND INDIGENOUS RESISTANCE
presence in the countries described; at times, the terms “First Nations” or “Aboriginal” will be
used in the context of contemporary Canadian scholarship. The term “literacy” will remain
ambiguous, its usage clarified only when necessary; it refers both to strict Western definitions of
reading and writing skills in the dominant language, and to New Literacy Studies constructions
“where literacy is seen as consisting of fluid, purposeful social practices which are embedded in
broader social goals, cultural activities, power relationships, and historical contexts” (King &
Benson, 2008, p. 344). This deliberate ambiguity illustrates the continuous tension and blurring
Freirean Philosophy
emerged at particular times and in particular places, relying on particular ideas. These
philosophical and historical contexts help explain the complicated and problematic legacy of
Freirean critical literacy as well as its continuing relevance to indigenous literacies. Freire’s
central philosophical tenets were groundbreaking in the field of critical pedagogy; his most well-
strategies and a dialogic process, the fostering of solidarity through collaboration, and a
rigorous and demanding curriculum that focuses on reflecting and acting on the world, or
Central to his philosophy was an assumption that the ontological vocation of men and
women was to become more fully human by liberating themselves from oppressive states of
dehumanization. This state of fully realized “humanness” existed in dialectical opposition to the
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animal state, which Freire considered atemporal and ahistorical (Blackburn, 2000, p. 4). The
specific vocation of the oppressed—those held back from achieving their potential due to
dehumanizing conditions—was to restore both their humanity and the humanity of their
oppressors through liberatory reflection and praxis. “The pedagogy of the oppressed is an
instrument for their critical discovery that both they and their oppressors are manifestations of
and passionate terms, was highly attractive to various anticolonial movements of Freire’s time.
He also addressed the problem of oppression in the form of critical pedagogy. He distinguished
between ‘banking’ education, which dehumanized students by treating them as empty vessels to
be filled with deterministic knowledge, and ‘problem posing’ education, which rejected
education anesthetizes and inhibits creative power, problem-posing education involves a constant
unveiling of reality. The former attempts to maintain the submersion of consciousness; the latter
strives for the emergence of consciousness and critical intervention in reality” (Freire, 1993, p.
62). This concept provided both the inspiration and the blueprint for a pedagogy grounded in the
existential realities of the oppressed rather than false realities imposed from above by oppressors.
However, within this dialectic was an essentialist blind spot that continues to
draw critical questioning. Freire (1993) argued true liberation could only be achieved when the
oppressed engaged in “critical reflection which increasingly organizes their thinking and thus
leads them to move from a purely naïve knowledge of reality to a higher one which enables them
to perceive the causes of reality” (p. 112). Many critics have pointed out the essentializing
teleology within this concept, which posits the oppressed as inherently naïve, uncritical and
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powerless. This concept erases indigenous forms of power and knowledge while seeking to
induct the oppressed into a class awareness based in European Leftist constructions of political
power. “(A)ny pre-determined vision of liberation introduced from the outside is ultimately
paternalistic, since it presupposes that the oppressed are incapable of determining their own
endogenously produced vision of liberation” (Blackburn, 2000, p. 12). This concern will be
dominance.
campaigns in his home country of Brazil, and later in other countries engaged in anti-colonial
struggles. The Brazilian campaigns began under the modernizing dictatorship of Getúlio Vargas
(1930-1955) and were continued by the Goulart administration into the 1960s. Freire began
working in the Brazilian education system in the 1950s, when the national government was
concerned about the large percentage of peasants who were unable to read and write in
Portuguese and thus unable to fully participate in the democratic process. Freire, whose beliefs
(Kirkendall, 2010, p. 18). Freire’s Marxism provided the historical and dialectical materialism
that framed the liberation of an oppressed group as occuring through the very people and forces
behaving oppressively. Freire’s Christianity saw Jesus as a model of the humanity required for
the oppressed to liberate both him/herself as well as the oppressor. Freire’s liberation theology
translated the Christian Marxist message of salvation specifically for the context of Brazil and
Freire’s method, which promised ‘basic literacy in forty hours using minimal resources’,
became central to Brazil’s national literacy campaign. His method was based in a problem-
reality through extensive interviews and participant observation and then produced ‘generative
themes’ based in that reality. Participants first decoded thematic pictures designed to provoke
critical dialogue about their conditions, then learned generative words introduced to teach
syllable families and provoke further dialogue. “The method, in terms purely of teaching literacy,
is very efficient. The success of the method is due in large part to the creativity it allows its
participants, and to the broader process of conscientization taking place at the same time”
(Blackburn, 2000, p. 10). Thus this method was designed to promote both literacy and
conscientization (class consciousness and awareness of the forces and processes creating
Although Freire’s method was broadly popular in Brazil by the mid-1960s, he (and the
politics, which led to the withdrawal of American support and backlash among the military and
right wing political sectors. In the resulting military coup and overthrow of Goulart, Freire was
arrested and exiled to Bolivia. From there he spent several decades further developing his
populations in Guinea-Bissau, Nicaragua, and other contemporary settings, we must situate them
in the broader context of indigenous resistance to colonization. This resistance sheds light on the
response to those campaigns. We will describe this context through the three interpretive lenses
Even though the word “indigenous” derives from European etymology, recent
term of global solidarity among diverse cultural groups who have all experienced the negative
difference and the rejection of primitivist assumptions that indigenous cultures, beliefs and ways
of knowing are less developed or inferior to dominant Western epistemologies. This resistance
also means rejecting deterministic assumptions by scholars such as Freire that “cultures have
evolved from a prerational state of existence (i.e., indigenous) to the higher state of complexity
marked by literacy, critical reflection, and individualism.” Instead, indigenous scholars argue
these cultures “have developed sophisticated knowledge of local ecosystems and patterns of
considered on their own merits (Bowers & Apffel-Marglin, 2005, p. 4). Additionally, many
groups have launched community-based forms of legal, political and personal resistance to
Western imperialism: “As indigenous peoples have remained targets for mistreatment, their acts
Instead of standing by passively, the indigene has demonstrated countless acts of opposition over
several centuries” (Fenelon & Murguía, 2008, p. 1658). Within the education sector this
resistance has taken the form of pedagogies of critical consciousness among indigene youth, as
well as advocacy for indigenous languages and literacies to be taught alongside the dominant
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FREIRE AND INDIGENOUS RESISTANCE
language (McCarty, T.& Lee, T., 2014; Anthony-Stevens, V. E., 2013; Anthony-Stevens, V. E.,
2017).
inhabiting over 70 countries and speaking 4,000–5,000 languages (King & Benson, 2008).
International comparative research has uncovered significant disparities between indigenous and
non-indigenous populations in terms of literacy (reading and writing) skills; while unequal
access is certainly a factor in this disparity, language of instruction is also a major concern.
Although “(e)xtensive empirical international research affirms the efficacy of providing initial
literacy instruction in learners’ first languages” and many international policy documents support
this recommendation, a majority of indigenous people are still forced to attend schools in which
the dominant language is the only language taught (King & Benson, 2008, p. 341).
Why are monoculturalism and monoliteracy still major concerns in indigenous literacy
scholarship? A combination of factors exists, including Western “English only” ideologies that
monolingualism; and the increasing domination of public spaces and visual media by major
world languages, especially English (King & Benson, 2008; Romero-Little, 2006). This
contributes both to decreased literacy among indigenous population and the erosion of minority
imperialism.
These concerns have led to calls within indigenous education scholarship for the
development of critical pedagogies rooted in indigenous cultural resistance. Garcia & Shirley
(2012) expand on Freirean concepts to discuss a “Critical Indigenous Pedagogy (CIP)” based in
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Tribal Critical Race Theory and “theoretically grounded in critical methods that resist the
injustices caused by colonization and oppression experienced by Indigenous peoples” (p. 80).
dialogue and self-reflection to sustain and privilege Indigenous knowledge systems while
simultaneously addressing contemporary goals and issues within the schooling context” (p. 76).
Their ethnographic research with American Diné youth resulted in the following
and culture; and developing a sense of personal agency leading to self-determination and self-
pride.
In a similar vein, McCarty, T., & Lee, T. (2014) and Anthony-Stevens, V. E. (2013)
indigenous serving charter school’s successful approach to culturally responsive teaching. She
argues,
Careful examination of student, educator, and parent narratives about the school during
its years in operation illuminate how adults and youth co-authored a unique
The transformational potential of the school’s both/and approach offered students access
Supporting both Garcia and Shirley and Anthony-Steven’s frameworks, McCarty and Lee
draw on Paris’ notion of a culturally sustaining pedagogy to argue for critical culturally
process, implementing this pedagogy seeks to enable cultural reclamation that exposes
In addition, CIP and indigenous qualitative research can be viewed within the broader
to neoliberal expansion and its accompanying destruction of the environment and minority
In the context of these changes, educators are called upon to play a central role in
constructing the conditions for a different kind of encounter, an encounter that both
opposes ongoing colonization and that seeks to heal the social, cultural, and spiritual
This encounter might both acknowledge and supersede the Freirean dialectical relationship of
oppressor and oppressed to a mutual recognition of alterity, empathy and vulnerability. It might
also involve unmasking and questioning hidden power structures within pedagogical praxis in
schools and government-sponsored literacy campaigns (however liberatory their stated aims).
This questioning and unmasking is where indigenous scholarship both builds upon and
challenges Freire’s assumptions about the possibility of liberation through outside intervention
(Anthony-Stevens, V., Stevens, P., & Nicholas, S., 2017; Anthony-Stevens, V., 2017). These
assumptions were also put to the test in Freirean literacy campaigns with indigenous populations
as Freire’s pedagogical influence spread beyond Brazil; the campaigns will serve as case studies
to inquire further about the complicated relationship between Freirean critical pedagogy and
indigenous literacies.
campaigns spread beyond Brazil. Although Freire claimed he had remained both philosophically
consistent and aware of the impossibility of transplanting Brazilian methods into diverse settings
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FREIRE AND INDIGENOUS RESISTANCE
(Taylor, 1980; Freire & Macedo, 1987), some popular educators noticed complications and
unexpected outcomes when attempting to apply Freirean critical pedagogy in rural indigenous
contexts:
They were at first deeply motivated by Freire's vision of empowerment, which they
cultures, they became aware that Freire's ideas are based on Western assumptions and
that the Freirean approach to empowerment was really a disguised form of colonization.
at times resulted in the devaluation of oral languages and other indigenous systems of
knowledge; in a few cases, rural indigenous people rejected the literacy campaigns outright as
they neither wanted nor needed to learn the dominant language. These case studies examine the
Guinea-Bissau
Freire first became involved with Guinea-Bissau’s politics when the African
nation successfully achieved independence from Portugal in 1974 after a long and bitter colonial
struggle (Davidson, 1981). The anti-colonial army (PAICG), led by charismatic leader Amílcar
Cabral until his assassination in 1973, rose to power due to mass dissatisfaction with oppressive
conditions under Portuguese rule: in 500 years of colonial presence, only fourteen Guineans had
graduated from university and illiteracy rates exceeded 90% (Taylor, 1980). Freire gained most
forged in the revolutionary struggle” (Kirkendall, 2010, p. 107). Although he spent little time in
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FREIRE AND INDIGENOUS RESISTANCE
emerges in Freire’s writings. This comment regarding the training of popular educators reveals a
The team attempting such an undertaking would be attentive to the general political
principles of the Party and the government—the social plan that determines what needs to
be known, how, why, and in whose benefit, as well as what needs to be produced, how,
Here we find Freire and his colleagues employing adult literacy education in the service
of anti-colonial reconstruction. But as we will see, these political aims were not necessarily
failure (Harasim, 1983; Kirkendall, 2010) due to a series of complicating factors. There was a
lack of material support and commitment from higher authorities, and ongoing class tension
resulting in a lack of urban youth willing to work as popular educators. Perhaps the most crucial
factor was the decision of the PAICG-led government to launch the campaign itself in
Portuguese (possibly against Freire’s wishes). The 5% of Guineans who spoke Portuguese were
already literate, and the rest (most of whom spoke Creole and/or one of many indigenous African
languages) worked in subsistence agriculture and had no need to learn Portuguese. Freire’s
program was designed to build literacy in educands’ native language, not to teach a new
language.
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class consciousness in areas where they had never fully assimilated to colonialism in the first
place: “In the countryside, in particular, the European presence was virtually nonexistent and
there was little interest in or necessity for learning to read and write in Portuguese” (Kirkland,
2010, p. 111). To some critics, this lack of sensitivity to the realities of rural indigenous life
reaffirmed the ethnocentric assumptions underlying the political aims of the Freirean literacy
campaign, which “(did) not consider in depth the cultural problem of the country…there would
seem to be a lack of profound knowledge of the cultures which shape this emerging nation called
Guinea-Bissau” (Freire & Faundez, 1989, p. 103). These concerns about the efficacy of Freirean
pedagogy in addressing the needs of ethnically diverse communities also emerged in other
campaigns.
Other Campaigns
The 1980 literacy campaign in Nicaragua was seen as a major victory for the
Sandinista regime (Blackburn, 2000); although Freire only spent nine days total in Nicaragua,
most accounts name him as a main architect of the campaign. In truth by the time Freire was
involved, Sandinista popular educators (known as brigadistas) had moved beyond generative
words to explicitly teaching revolutionary political slogans. Ultimately his involvement in the
Nicaraguan campaign faced the same criticism as in Guinea-Bissau: “he passed so quickly
through Nicaragua that he failed to see how his campaign fit into the country's internal political
dynamics" (Kirkland, 2010, p. 118). An analysis of one such dynamic reveals the need for more
indigenous scholarship around the impact of Freirean campaigns on rural vernacular literacies.
In 1981, the indigenous Miskito group engaged in armed rebellion against the
Sandinista regime; political tribal leaders “claimed territorial rights as an indigenous people and
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called for Miskito political and economic authority over Nicaragua’s traditionally isolated and
multiethnic Atlantic coast” (Meringer, 2010, p. 3). The Miskito people did not embrace the
Freirean literacy campaign but instead saw it as interference from the central government
infringing on their cultural and linguistic sovereignty. The campaign’s attempt to create a
revolutionary national culture unified around pro-Sandinista aims was interpreted as an attempt
to “homogenize” the Miskito culture and language resulting in “a loss of identity and regional
power” (Blackburn, 2000, 12). Although the majority of literature represented Miskito voices as
a unified front of rebellion, Meringer (2010) argues against such homogeneity and instead calls
for the inclusion of alternative voices (e.g. those of collusion with the government) as well as
representations of intraethnic competition and disagreement. This illustrates a larger need for
scholarship to move beyond mere multiculturalist reconstructions and recognize “cultures” are
not discrete categories, but porous, rhizomatic and marked by experiential and epistemological
border crossings.
The Andes, which span the entire length of South America, are home to multiple
indigenous cultures and languages that have survived and adapted to Spanish rule. Sichra (2008)
provides an overview of Andean indigenous literacy from the Spanish invasion and defeat of the
Inca empire in the sixteenth century to contemporary Hispanic literacy movements. She also
charts Andean literacy from the Freirean pedagogical current of the 1970s to the indigenous
resistance movements of the 1980s: these “movements with social and later ethnic demands
questioned the state’s homogenizing and unifying character and challenged nation-building aims
that adopt a ‘one language, one culture’ ideology” (p. 288). One of the major challenges in
adopting Freirean literacy methods in Andean popular education was adapting to diverse
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indigenous philosophies, concepts and systems of knowledge that were not always compatible
with Freire’s strictly dialectical construction of knowledge as a critical and reflective process.
Bejarano (2005) is a Bolivian popular educator who was at first enthusiastic about
implementing Freirean pedagogies with Andean campesinos (peasants), but soon became
knowing, unconsciously affirming and privileging dialectical thought over the cyclic patterns of
We were not prepared for the diversity and heterogeneity of the ways of being and doing
between them and ourselves ran along parallel lines that most of the time never crossed
Freire’s supporters were never able to fully resolve these concerns of unconsciously
reproducing Western hegemonic assumptions in the name of liberation. Although it seems that
Freire himself was sincere in his aims of liberation, he was not always critical of what
‘liberation’ might look like in diverse contexts, or even why the oppressed would necessarily
choose the specific form of liberation (i.e. critical class consciousness) favored by their teachers.
deserves more critical scholarship, Freire himself contributed a rich language for describing the
existential and spiritual experience of oppression and liberation, and an array of methods for
addressing these conditions, that have been drawn upon in subsequent decades by both
indigenous and Western critical pedagogies. After Freire left Guinea-Bissau, teachers and
participants in the literacy campaign shifted to more student-driven aims, such as linking the
program to agricultural production and using the generative word method to develop literacy in
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their native language of Creole. We have examined several case studies of the complicated
relationship between Freirean critical literacy and indigenous literacies in his time. Do the
so, what new forms might it take in this era of globalization, and how might these forms expand
resistance?
the past 40 years with the slow, difficult process of decolonization and revitalization of
traditional languages and cultures. The historic conditions that precipitated this process can be
viewed through the lens of what Freire (1993) called cultural invasion: a dehumanizing and
domesticating process in which “the invaders penetrate the cultural context of another group, in
disrespect of the latter’s potentialities; they impose their own view of the world upon those they
invade and inhibit the creativity of the invaded by curbing their expression” (p. 133). This
process describes the colonialist policies imposed on Canadian Aboriginal nations in the
Maritime provinces, from first contact with French settlers through the 17th-century British
The Indian Acts of 1867 and 1880 served to dissolve Indigenous rights to self-
government and render their children wards of the state (Curwin Doige, 2001). This resulted in a
which executed paternalistic aims by force: “First Nations children were removed from their
homes, taken away from the influence of their parents, their Native language and their culture, to
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FREIRE AND INDIGENOUS RESISTANCE
schools where they could learn to be white” (Pushor & Murphy, 2010, p. 28). The policies
underlying such practices constituted acts of institutional and cultural genocide against the
The deleterious effects of these policies, which resulted in the forced removal and
re-education of approximately 150,000 Indigenous children across Canada between 1880 and
1970, are long-ranging and worth examining through the lens of Freirean critique. Aboriginal
speech language pathologist Sharla Peltier (2010) identifies the negative individual effects of
internalized oppression: “(t)he powerful forces of cultural conflict can lead the Aboriginal child
to reject his or her own language and culture. It is not uncommon for Aboriginal students to opt
out of Native language and culture courses offered at school” (p. 125). When viewed through a
Freirean lens, this internalized passivity, self-violence and sense of cultural inauthenticity and
inferiority are the inevitable side effects of cultural invasion and the forcing of previously
independent peoples into the violent dialectic relationship of oppressor and oppressed. In
The more invasion is accentuated and those invaded are alienated from the spirit of their
own culture and from themselves, the more the latter want to be like the invaders: to walk
like them, dress like them, talk like them. (p. 134)
In terms of Maritime Aboriginal education and literacy, this would suggest the promotion
of cultural invasion and perpetuates the false generosity of the oppressor. A body of indigenous
Canadian research and scholarship has arisen in resistance to cultural assimilationist forms of
Aboriginal English dialects as well as native language immersion into Aboriginal schooling
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FREIRE AND INDIGENOUS RESISTANCE
(Battiste, Kovach & Balzer, 2010; Peltier, 2010; Usborne, Peck et. al., 2011). Battiste, Kovach &
Balzer (2010) examine current research that indicates building on Aboriginal literacies and
knowledge students already possess “enables them to use their linguistic understandings to
access standard English as a language of power in the educational and political realms without
relinquishing their local language, a language of power in community” (p. 8). This approach, in
which literacy is not measured by reading and writing skills in the dominant language but in the
approach which seeks to increase cultural literacies in Aboriginal students rather than limiting
provinces, we also find Freirean applications within contemporary Mi’kmaq literacy issues. The
independent Mi’kmaq nation, which was traditionally comprised of seven districts legislated by
their Grand Council, attempted to ally with French colonialists (who first arrived in Nova Scotia
in 1605) against the 17th-century British invasion of the Maritime provinces. Although the
Mi’kmaq initially hoped to coexist with the victorious British colonizers through treaty-making,
British encroachment threatened and eventually subsumed Aboriginal sovereignty. Since the
1970s, provincial and national First Nations initiatives have resulted in indigenous activism and
among the Mi’kmaq. Mi’kmaq scholar Marie Battiste “maintains that the Mi'kmaq displayed a
well-developed literacy in their pictographs, petroglyphs, notched sticks, and wampums, all of
which existed long before the arrival of the first French settlers” (Curwin Doige, 2011, p. 118).
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existent Aboriginal literacies and its rejection of banking models of literacy rooted in
(2006) study of Mi’kmaq students’ attitudes toward education found “they preferred a multi-
modal approach to acquiring knowledge, which included both visual and verbal methods of
learning” (p. 66); these findings support contemporary Aboriginal research suggesting
educational success comes when Indigenous students are allowed to learn and think in both
native and standardized dialects. Similar studies found teaching Aboriginal cultural literacies
honoring the Mi’kmaq language and dialects fostered student self-pride in their Mi’kmaq
heritage (Critchley, Timmons, et. al, 2007); others found native language immersion programs
increased abilities in the Mi’kmaq language without harming abilities in English, suggesting
such programs may be beneficial both in increasing students’ cultural literacies and in native
These findings suggest an ongoing need for the development of critical pedagogies that
honor and respect the multiple cultural literacies indigenous students already bring into the
educational encounter. Programs that allow students to switch between indigenous and Western
modes of thinking without deeming one culturally inferior or inappropriate for the classroom
environment are crucial to the development of self-pride and critical awareness among the
current generation of young indigenous Canadians; such programs can only help in addressing
the gross human rights violations visited on the previous ‘boarding school generation’.
In many ways, the tension between teaching indigenous and Western systems of
knowledge reveals the tension Freire himself encountered in trying to introduce dominant-
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language literacy campaigns into indigenous regional contexts. We have analyzed and
Nicaragua and rural Andean societies; we then applied a Freirean critical lens to current issues in
inequalities between indigenous and dominant literacies implies the need for more scholarship,
dialogue, and activism in favor of a critical pedagogy rooted in multiple cultural literacies and an
It is not enough to hear the Aboriginal voice and to acknowledge the Aboriginal
presence; Aboriginal people must be valued as an integral, important part of their own
education. Also, who Aboriginal people are as human beings must be valued and
determination and the transformation of his/her own reality through critical praxis is aligned both
ethically and spiritually with Freire’s (1998) Pedagogy of Freedom, in which he argued against
dehumanizing policies from an ethic of human agency: “Respect for the autonomy and dignity of
every person is an ethical imperative and not a favour that we may or may not concede to each
other” (p. 59). This ethical position, which seeks to decentralize and decolonize education, calls
for an approach to indigenous literacy focusing on the expansion and equal honoring of multiple
cultural literacies instead of the oppressive, dehumanizing effects of a pedagogy based solely in
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