Leadership in a First Nations Community: Learning from Leaders’ Stories and Building Capacity in Support of First Nations Children and Youth
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Abstract
The history of Canada, much like that of the United States, is mired in colonialism. One outcome of colonialism was the cultural genocide of the First Nations persons who lived on Turtle Island Millennia before the arrival of primarily European settlers (Battiste, 2010). Through policy decisions and actions, First Nations persons experienced—and continue to experience—discrimination, racism, harassment, violence, trauma, and death at the hands of white settlers (Duthie et al., 2019). The educational realm, including leadership, has been Eurocentric, centering European thinking, lifestyles, contributions, representation, and more (Khalifa et al., 2019). A scan of the literature in the area of community leadership is sparse in Indigenous representation. This paper endeavours to work with one indigenous community to explore and highlight First Nation leadership. Specifically, how educational and community leadership occurs among one First Nations community in Ontario, Canada. This single-case study comprising eleven qualitative interviews seeks to understand, through the eyes of First Nations leaders, how adult First Nations leaders engage in and foster leadership with children and youth in the Chippewas of the Thames First Nation community, and how the children and youth in turn provide shared leadership in their community. This study is of significance in that it aims to add to the discourse of decolonization (Diversi & Moreira, 2016), specifically the decolonization of First Nations leadership, which is not widely studied in the literature. The implications of this small case study are of particular significance in the Ontario educational realm, where the work continues to for First Nation leaders and could perhaps be expanded to include other First Nations communities with a view to informing policy that would decenter white worldviews and make space for centering and including conceptions of leadership from First Nations people.