Indigenizing work as “willful work”: Toward Indigenous transgressive leadership in Canadian Universities

Journal article

Ahnungoonhs / Brent Debassige, Candace Brunette-Debassige
Cultural and Pedagogical Inquiry, vol. 10(2), 2018, pp. 119-138

DOI: 10.18733/cpi29449

Cite

APA Click to copy
Debassige, A. / B., & Brunette-Debassige, C. (2018). Indigenizing work as “willful work”: Toward Indigenous transgressive leadership in Canadian Universities. Cultural and Pedagogical Inquiry, 10(2), 119–138. https://doi.org/10.18733/cpi29449

Chicago/Turabian Click to copy
Debassige, Ahnungoonhs / Brent, and Candace Brunette-Debassige. “Indigenizing Work as ‘Willful Work’: Toward Indigenous Transgressive Leadership in Canadian Universities.” Cultural and Pedagogical Inquiry 10, no. 2 (2018): 119–138.

MLA Click to copy
Debassige, Ahnungoonhs / Brent, and Candace Brunette-Debassige. “Indigenizing Work as ‘Willful Work’: Toward Indigenous Transgressive Leadership in Canadian Universities.” Cultural and Pedagogical Inquiry, vol. 10, no. 2, 2018, pp. 119–38, doi:10.18733/cpi29449.

BibTeX Click to copy

@article{debassige2018a,
  title = {Indigenizing work  as “willful work”: Toward Indigenous transgressive leadership in Canadian Universities},
  year = {2018},
  issue = {2},
  journal = {Cultural and Pedagogical Inquiry},
  pages = {119-138},
  volume = {10},
  doi = {10.18733/cpi29449},
  author = {Debassige, Ahnungoonhs / Brent and Brunette-Debassige, Candace}
}

Abstract

As Indigenous peoples employed at a university who are working to Indigenize it from within, in this article, we share our experiences, discuss some of our challenges, and show how we draw meaning and strength from Indigenous stories to ground us in our approach. We use Indigenous, anti-oppressive, anti-racist and decolonizing theories, Indigenous standpoints, embodied experiences, and emotive responses to make explicit the lived work realities of Indigenous people in mainstream universities. Through a dialogic approach, we trace one pathway for explicating Indigenous transgressive leadership in Canadian universities. In our discussion, we situate Indigenizing work as “willful work” (Ahmed, 2014). We call for a “strategic willfulness” as a constructive orientation, for Indigenous leaders to embrace, as we continue to confront the colonial, hetero-patriarchal and whitestream nature of Canadian universities. Most importantly, we underscore the need for Indigenous leaders involved in Indigenizing work in the university to draw from Indigenous epistemological and relational ethics in their leadership work, and to be strategically willful, interruptive and transgressive.