Colonized Classrooms: Racism, Trauma and Resistance in Post-Secondary Education

In Colonized Classrooms, Sheila Cote-Meek discusses how Aboriginal students confront narratives of colonial violence in the postsecondary classroom, while they are, at the same time, living and experiencing colonial violence on a daily basis. Basing her analysis on interviews with Aboriginal students, Cote-Meek deftly illustrates how colonization and its violence are not a distant experience, but one that is being negotiated every day in universities and colleges across Canada. Cote-Meek traces how education for Aboriginal peoples has been, and continues to be, part of the colonial regime, which is marked by violence, abuses and poverty, and the ways this violence is experienced particularly by Aboriginal students and professors in universities. Drawing upon personal experience and qualitative research, the book essentially explores two questions: how do Aboriginal students confront curriculum on colonial history that is marked by violence? And what pedagogies might be useful in postsecondary classrooms for students that have suffered from colonial violence?