Indigenous refusals in educational leadership practices in Canadian universities

Introduction

Wachay. Waban Geesis nintishnikaasim. Peetabeck nitocheen. Mushkego-ininew iskwew. My name is Candace Brunette-Debassige. I am a woman of Mushkegowuk Cree and French lineage registered with Albany First Nation in Treaty 9 Territory. I am also an Indigenous scholar and a former administrator of Indigenous initiatives at a Canadian university. Here, I report findings from a study on the experiences of Indigenous women leaders working in Canadian universities subsequent to the release of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s (TRC, 2015) Calls to Action. In this article, I answer the following research question: How do Indigenous women administrators encounter and respond to the settler colonial academy in their leadership work? Specifically, I examine how some Indigenous women, through their leadership of institutional Indigenization processes, confront the boundaries of the settler colonialism (Wolfe, 2006) and enact Indigenous refusals (Grande, 2018; Simpson, 2014; Tuck & Yang, 2014) to assert Indigenous educational sovereignty (Aguilera-Black Bear & Tippeconnic, 2015; L. T. Smith & G. H. Smith, 2018). A powerful example of asserting Indigenous refusal in leadership occurred when Indigenous leader and scholar Lynn Lavallee spoke about her own such experience after taking on the first Indigenous Vice Provost position at the University of Manitoba (UofM) in 2018. In a public blog released after her premature resignation, Lavallee (2019) described how systemic racism and colonialism shaped her leadership experiences and limited Indigenization work at UofM. In this article, I share five thematic findings focusing on how Indigenous women administrators enacted Indigenous refusals by refusing (a) to participate in problematic reconciliation discourses; (b) to assimilate into apolitical approaches to administration; (c) to participate in co-optation of Indigenous agendas; (d) to participate in institutional performative approaches; and, finally, (e) to stay in toxic administrative environments in their administrative roles in Canadian universities.

Background

Efforts to Indigenize the university have proliferated across the world over the last 30 years (Mihesuah & Cavender-Wilson, 2004; Pidgeon, 2016). In Canada, the Indigenizing movement in universities has been emboldened by the release of the TRC in 2015 (Gaudry & Lorenz, 2018). There are 96 universities operating across 10 provinces and 3 territories in Canada, ranging from small teaching-focused universities to large research-intensive institutions that compete on a global level. The core mission of universities is generally to contribute to society through teaching, research and innovation. Considering this core mission, among the TRC’s 94 Calls to Action, 13 focus on postsecondary change with calls to create mandatory courses in law, health, education, and media to redress systemic social inequities faced by Indigenous peoples. While Canadian universities hold unique legal status operating on a complex funding model as both public institution and corporation, they are generally governed by a unique bicameral system, which divides daily operational and academic decision-making functions. This division of labour is meant to protect the autonomy of scholars and research from political interference, enabling faculty members to be both critic and conscience of administration, government and society. As a result of larger reconciliatory movements in Canada, several national higher education organizations now recognize that Indigenous peoples have been systemically marginalized from educational systems and that proactive change is needed to undo the impacts of colonialism. As a result, a number of Indigenous policy documents have been endorsed by higher education organizations in Canada since the release of the TRC (Canadian Association of University Teachers, 2016, 2018; Universities Canada, 2015).

At the same time, many universities have instituted Indigenous policies and created new Indigenous administrative offices and leadership positions to advance institutional change. Many of these new administrative positions, which report directly to a provost or president, have been filled by Indigenous women (M. S. Smith, 2019). For example, in one study 1.2% of senior executives in the top 15 research-intensive universities in Canada identified as Indigenous women (M. S. Smith, 2019). Media reports, however, have highlighted the intolerable conditions and challenges that some Indigenous women leaders have had to face in taking on these new roles (Kay, 2018; Lavallee, 2019; Prokopchuk, 2018). Exploring this matter further, my study of the experiences of Indigenous women administrators revealed stark gaps between Indigenous policy promises and the lived experiences of Indigenous women, and, further, pointed to a larger, ongoing struggle among Indigenous peoples who are striving to exercise Indigenous educational sovereignty in higher education.

Theoretical framework

Indigenous educational sovereignty is defined as the collective ability of Indigenous peoples to exercise control over their educational lives and futures; it calls for the decolonizing of Euro-Western educational colonial systems to make institutions responsive to Indigenous rights, epistemologies and methodologies (Aguilera-Black, Bear, & Tippeconnic, 2015; L. T. Smith & G. H. Smith, 2018). Decolonizing education involves deconstructing and decentring the primacy of Euro-Western colonial knowledge and ideologies in academia (Battiste, 2018); its political purpose is the transformation of educational institutions to be more inclusive of Indigenous peoples and Indigenous ways of knowing, doing, and being. With a decolonial political purpose in mind, I undertook research that involved gathering the stories of Indigenous women administrators who were working towards decolonizing universities. My aim was to amplify their voices and undo the deafening silence (Fitzgerald, 2003) surrounding Indigenous women’s perspectives in educational leadership research and practice. While some research on Indigenous leadership in universities has emerged in other Euro-Western educational colonial contexts (Coates et al., 2023; Povey et al., 2021), there is little research focusing on Indigenous peoples in Canada and Indigenous women leaders’ experiences in particular. My research made visible the dangerous epistemic and political borders that Indigenous women leaders must engage with when taking on university administrative positions, and highlighted the need for Indigenous leaders, as part of their leadership work towards institutional change to resist the settler colonial academy through Indigenous refusals (Grande, 2018; Simpson, 2014; Tuck & Yang, 2014).

In Canada, settler colonialism is not an event but an ongoing structure (Wolfe, 2006) tied to the Canadian nation state’s occupation of Indigenous lands and to its paternalistic control of Indigenous peoples—and Peoples—through settler laws and ideologies embedded and normalized in public institutions such as universities. Indigenous scholar Glen Coulthard (2014) describes settler colonialism as

interrelated discursive and nondiscursive facets of economic, gendered, racial, and state power—has been structured into a relatively secure or a sediment set of hierarchal social relations that continue to facilitate the dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their lands and self-determining authority. (pp. 6–7)

Settler colonialism is therefore enmeshed in settler logics and ideologies that normalize this authority in public institutions and society, and serves to deny Indigenous peoples their rights and sovereignty over their lives and futures. In its most insidious form, settler colonialism fabricates and strives to eliminate Indian problems, force Indigenous peoples individually and collectively to assimilate into settler norms and Canadian citizenship, and in turn to eliminate Indigenous peoples and legitimize settler control over Indigenous lands and resources. Public institutions such as the higher educational system play a powerful role in normalizing settler authority. In Canadian universities, settler colonialism is structured into the system through university acts, institutional and private ownership of lands, academic governance that denies Indigenous nationhood and rights, and ongoing settler colonial power dynamics that continue to privilege the democratic majority needs and rights over Indigenous rights. Such inherent assumptions serve to undermine the attempts of Indigenous peoples to determine their own rights in research and teaching, and inform societal educational priorities. Indeed, many Canadian universities have troubling historical state and church ties in attempts to missionize and assimilate Indigenous peoples, and the education system continues in many ways to drive the privileging of Euro-Western epistemologies over Indigenous epistemologies in teaching and research, continuously denying Indigenous peoples the right to define and teach Indigenous knowledges (Battiste, 2018). Within this academic system, settler colonialism operates to domesticate Indigenous peoples and Indigenous knowledges. Even when universities appoint Indigenous administrators into leadership positions, Indigenous education arguably becomes subsumed into ongoing settler colonial governance structures and agendas because Indigenous leaders continue to operate within the university system as shaped by settler colonial governance, leadership, and policy structures and norms.

Considering that universities are one of the most powerful institutions in Euro-Western society, they are rarely questioned for how they are driven by commonsense settler colonial approaches to administration rooted in long-standing administrative science ideals and management paradigms (Brunette-Debassige & Viczko, 2022). The system operates within an assumed ontology of hierarchy (Malott, 2010) that is tied to modern industrialization efforts and global capitalist economies. These underlying ideological and structural norms have become so normalized and naturalized in Euro-Western education institutions that they often lead to evidence-based regimes in education, reducing knowledge and learning to positivistic measures (Shahjahan, 2011). Furthermore, these interrelated logics drive neoliberal and neocolonial aims in education that tend towards commodifying knowledge, imposing western liberal property rights and universal standardization approaches (L. T. Smith & G. H. Smith, 2018). More troublingly, within this context, “good leadership” often gets defined and shaped by similar ideological and political frameworks that tend towards favouring individualist, masculinist and objectivist norms in leadership.

In Canada, numbers of Indigenous university administrators have been increasing since the release of the TRC. Despite growth in total numbers, however, Indigenous leaders continue to be underrepresented and marginalized in comparison with non-Indigenous administrators, particularly White men and women (M. S. Smith, 2019). Moreover, my research shows how they continue to face challenges as they operate within an educational system structured by racism, sexism, and colonialism. Furthermore, approaches to institutional educational change continue to be limited to structural functionalist and interpretivist notions of change (Capper, 2019). After all, universities have been heavily criticized in their performative nature and inabilities to enact deep decolonial reform (Andreotti et al., 2015; Gaudry & Lorenz, 2018; Stein, 2019). This systemic reality has placed newly hired Indigenous women administrators who are working to advance transformative decolonial-Indigenization (Gaudry & Lorenz, 2018) in precarious positions.

The dominance of Euro-Western administrative norms and logics places limits on Indigenous administrators who are trying to advance transformative change. In my study, Indigenous women often characterized the struggles they faced in their administrative work as being like the hitting of the infamous brick wall (Ahmed, 2012)—the brick wall of systemic racism, sexism and colonialism. The structural embeddedness of racism, colonialism and sexism emerged in university policies, and peoples’ misinterpretation of those policies resulted in Métis leader and scholar Lynn Lavallee having to continuously rationalize the need of approaching Indigenous education at her former university in distinct ways that recognize Indigenous rights and inequities. In another article (Lavallee, 2020), she explains how she endured systemic oppression and expectations that were imposed on her as an administrator to “socialize and mould other Indigenous peoples who d[id] not fall in line” (p. 27). “You are meant to deal with what is often perceived as the Indian problem on your own,” she said (p.27). Lavallee exposes deeply ingrained truths around administrative approaches to Indigenous education, truths that pressure administrators to uphold institutional authority and manage Indigenous peoples’ educational lives. Indeed, the managing of the Indian problem is one of the oldest self-proclaimed responsibilities of Euro-Western settler institutions, institutions that have historically relied on settler paternalistic and authoritarian approaches to controlling over partnering with Indigenous peoples. In this article, I show how some Indigenous women administrators encounter these logics in administration and in turn resist settler colonial tendency by enacting Indigenous refusals in their leadership work.

Indigenous refusal (Grande, 2018; Simpson, 2014; Tuck & Yang, 2014) is a term used to identify ways in which some Indigenous women administrators resist settler colonial administrative tendencies to control Indigenous education. In the academic literature, the notion of Indigenous refusals has been taken up in different ways, mostly in qualitative analytical research practices (Tuck & Yang, 2014) that guide researchers to actively refuse extractive or deficit approaches to Indigenous research and, instead, turn their gaze back on colonial power. Indigenous refusals can only be understood in relation to colonial power relations. Kahnawà:ke scholar Audra Simpson, for example, in Mohawk Interruptus (2014), exposes the ways in which citizens of the Kahnawà:ke Nation refused settler colonial legislation and its imposition of the infamous Indian Act 1876 in defining their membership. Kahnawà:ke Nation members also refused to participate in the Canadian passport system when crossing the border between Canada and the United States. Indigenous refusals help to explain the “stance [that] pushes us [Indigenous people] to limit settler territorialisation of Indigenous/Native/community knowledge, and expand the space for other forms of knowledge, thought-worlds to live” (Tuck & Yang, 2014, p. 817). Like Tuck and Yang (2014), I assert that Indigenous refusals are an intervention against dominant settler colonial authorities and logics. Moreover, I argue that Indigenous refusals in administration should not be misinterpreted as an extremist or prohibitive stance, but instead as a productive orientation in relation to unequal settler colonial power relations that can have an important purpose: to advance Indigenous educational sovereignty.

The refusal disposition as generative, however, does not mean that Indigenous refusals are not dangerous activities for Indigenous individuals and collectives to enact. After all, Indigenous refusals are a sign of unequal power relations and an unwillingness to submit to settler desire over Indigenous priorities. Refusals are dangerous acts; they take place, ultimately, at sites of struggle. The university administration becomes the site of struggle in my research. Like other forms of political resistance, however, Indigenous refusals among Indigenous women administrators indicate an assertion of agency and, when done strategically, have the potential to advance Indigenous decolonial political agendas and the resurgence of Indigenous ways of knowing. In this article, I apply the notion of Indigenous refusals to the context of Indigenous women’s administrative practices in the settler colonial academy. While Indigenous women administrators are not immune to settler colonial co-optation in their own leadership work, some refuse to participate in settler colonial approaches to administrative education.

Methodology

Grounded in an Indigenous qualitative paradigm (Kovach, 2009), my study took an Indigenous storying methodological approach (Ah Nee-Benham, 2007) to explore the lived and embodied experiences of 12 Indigenous women administrators—one of whom is myself—who have worked in formal leadership roles in Canadian universities since the release of the TRC in 2015. The administrative positions these women occupied ranged from senior executives such as Vice Provosts, Vice Presidents, Senior Executive Directors to departmental chairs and programme directors, and included interim leadership positions such as Special Advisors. The research process gathered these women’s stories through four methods: conversational interviews (Kovach, 2010), personal journals, object data and document data. I then conducted an overall hybrid analysis using Indigenous storying and thematic approaches. This article shares thematic findings related to Indigenous women’s accounts of enacting Indigenous refusals.

Findings

The Indigenous women administrators who contributed to my study reported five ways of refusing settler colonialism in the administrative academy. They refused (a) to participate in problematic reconciliation discourses; (b) to assimilate into apolitical administrative norms and practices; (c) to participate in uncritical co-optation of Indigenous agendas; (d) to participate in institutional performative approaches; and, finally, (e) to stay in toxic administrative environments by either leaving for a period of time or altogether.

Refusal as opting out of administration

In extreme cases, Indigenous women administrators refused to stay in university administration by leaving their appointments altogether. These cases were linked to particularly toxic work environments which left some Indigenous leaders feeling they had no other choice. Indeed, one-third of the participants in my study at some point left their administrative positions. While some stayed in academe and even at their own university as faculty members, others left the academy altogether or moved to other universities. Moreover, several participants referred to two prominent and public cases in Canada in which two Indigenous women senior administrators left their universities and spoke publicly about their experiences (Kay, 2018; Prokopchuk, 2018). One participant said,

Those resignations are happening because people are going into an institution with certain expectations. If you look at a [university’s] strategic plan, you think, “Wow, there must be some great non-Indigenous people there driving that.” But you [get there and realize] you can’t be a token. (Opaskowi Pisim)

This participant pointed to discrepancies between what her university displayed in its policy and public affairs statements and what she experienced in her own life as an Indigenous leader at that university. She argued that incongruences between speech acts and Indigenous experiences contributed to her resignation and, she suspected, likely contributed to the resignations of other Indigenous women at other universities. Another participant described her decision to leave her administrative appointment in this way:

I’m okay with walking away from these things, and I think they were stunned. Why would you walk away from this super-duper fancy club because this is the best thing since sliced bread? It’s like, no, it’s not. I think it’s partly because at the end of the day I go home. At the end of the day, we go home and there is no difference [in Indigenous communities]. (Nimitahamowi Pisim)

This participant’s narrative demonstrates that some Indigenous leaders struggled with the divergence and inequities between Indigenous communities and Euro-Western university contexts. Another participant insisted that she experienced such a stark contrast between these two worlds that she needed to walk away from the university altogether, preferring to return to her First Nation community and lend her leadership to doing land-based resurgence work:

I think it was just [that] I had enough. I was ready for a change. I think that was the biggest reason. I just wanted some openness to do something different. I don’t think my heart was in it anymore. I didn’t want to be in an admin role, so I left on a high note. (Opiniyawiwi Pisim)

Most participants who left university administration described their decision to leave as based on an incongruence between the university and their Indigenous values or Indigenous community expectations. One participant, for example, described a misalignment in goals that contributed to her decision to leave her university:

The expectation of [Indigenous] community and the expectation of the institution [are not aligned]. I think if the institution was in more alignment [it would have helped me], because I can’t choose to stand with the institution and stand against community. Sometimes those are decisions that you’re forced to make. Well, I’m being forced to make. I’m going to go stand with community. I don’t even want to talk about being a sell-out; it’s being authentic to who I am. I think that, in these positions, institutions do not want a social activist. But that’s sometimes what they need to get things done in order for change to occur. (Opaskowi Pisim)

In each departure story, Indigenous women administrators attested that their decisions to leave were not taken lightly. Moreover, it is important not to confuse Indigenous women’s departures with an absolutist sense of Indigenous refusal. After all, most of the participants continued to work in the university in different ways.

In addition, most participants in my study talked about the dangers and consequences they faced in enacting explicit Indigenous refusals in the academy. Indigenous refusals were rife with politics that surfaced the risk of being problematized as unruly, oppositional and disruptive to the administrative status quo. Participants often saw acts of Indigenous refusal as having the possibility of negatively impacting their credibility, professional reputation and even, in extreme cases, contributing to a justification for their dismissal or non-reappointment. Indeed, enacting explicit Indigenous refusals placed Indigenous women administrators on dangerous ground, requiring them to negotiate carefully and at times to be discreet.

Critical strategic engagement in Indigenous refusal

Considering the dangerous terrain on which they occurred, Indigenous refusals in administration sometimes took on subtle and strategic forms that enabled the refuser to avoid the negative colonial, gendered and racialized stereotypes and discrediting that often accompanied refusals. Because refusals are so contentious, several participants described negotiating their refusals in nuanced ways, an often unseen and underestimated dimension of their leadership work. As part of this negotiation, they carefully and critically assessed each situation and each potential refusal as an infraction with implications, weighing risks and benefits, and considering whether the issue was a “hill worth dying on” (Athiki Pisim). As one participant said,

Assessing things became a natural response. So, on a scale of 1 to 10, how significant is this particular issue? Should I say something or hold my peace? (Opawahcikianasis)

Underscoring the process of strategically assessing whether a refusal is necessary, another participant said, “So you have to pick your battles: Okay, I’ll let that one go; this one, I’m going to stand. You have to be conscious all the time” (Pimahamowi Pisim).

Examples of discreet Indigenous refusals commonly involved ignoring bad advice from senior colleagues, participating in collective social action but not necessarily taking the lead position, sharing non-confidential information with appropriate people and giving advice to Indigenous and allied groups who were involved in change work. One participant was discouraged by a senior administrative colleague from proceeding with an Indigenous strategy. The senior colleague encouraged her to focus on one or two smaller objectives within her overly ambitious plan. To justify not taking his advice, the participant talked about her refusal not as a refusal but as simply carrying on with her work with the support of her Indigenous Education Council.

Another way in which participants enacted discreet Indigenous refusals was by searching out settler allies who could support their efforts and who were willing to refuse alongside them. Refusing collectively was a stronger and less risky tactic than refusing individually, and Indigenous women recognized how sometimes non-Indigenous settlers were heard more readily than them. An even more subtle form of refusal involved mentoring Indigenous peoples and offering them advice about how to navigate their own refusal processes. One participant described this type of work as “softly supporting the fight” (Opiniyawiwi Pisim). In these instances, participants drew on the collective power of Indigenous voices in the larger resistance movement, including voices of students, faculty members and community partners, to work together strategically to refuse and call on the university to change. These more nuanced understandings of refusal operate at collective levels and start to shift conventional understandings of leadership and change away from individualist and positional approaches—one Indigenous administrator responsible for refusing the system alone—towards Indigenous conceptions of leadership that are arguably more less tethered to relational, collectivist and adaptive forces.

Future research

While this study focused on Indigenous women administrators’ experiences in Canadian universities, further research is needed to understand the unique experiences of Indigenous men in leadership. While it is likely that Indigenous men face racism and colonialism, there is little research that examined the gendered impacts of Indigenous women and men’s experiences in leadership overall. There are also opportunities to focus on research that examines the experiences of Indigenous leaders working in other parts of the higher education sector.

Discussion and conclusion

Interestingly, many of the participants in my study commonly described a need to engage in ongoing critical self-reflexivity around their use of refusals—to examine and evaluate on a case-by-case basis the implications of enacting Indigenous refusal. They also identified a need to reflect on their own intersectional positionalities and relational dynamics, and to examine the ethical implications of their leadership practices. Their insights offer critical direction for Indigenous educational leadership training in the context of reconciliation and decolonizing movements in the future. Their stories also reaffirm the overwhelmingly unsafe nature of the academic environment within which Indigenous leaders operate. Despite pressures to adopt dominant administrative norms, many participants reported that they approached their leadership role by drawing on their Indigeneity and connections to Indigenous communities to redefine dominant leadership approaches. This redefining process at times called on Indigenous women leaders to be more collectivist than individualistic, and more strategic than reactive. Such transformative change work also called on leaders simultaneously to challenge university structures and policies that do not serve Indigenous goals and to rebuild structures and policies that do serve Indigenous educational needs. Regardless of the labels they used to describe their work as Indigenization, decolonization or even resurgence, all the participants underscored their responsibility as leaders to proactively create space and align resources and people towards achieving Indigenous educational sovereignty. Enacting Indigenous refusals thus became an inevitable aspect of their leadership work.

While it is important to note that not all Indigenous women administrators refused all the time, my study underscores a need for Indigenous leaders to work to advance decolonial change in the university, and therefore to be willing to refuse. Moreover, many Indigenous women administrators underscore the need to be critical in their refusal practices. The need to be critical highlights the problems with the dominance of colonialism and westernized, individualistic and hierarchical conceptions of leadership which can easily co-opted and internalized. Maori scholar Margie Hohepa (2013) has similarly called for Indigenous educational leaders to critically Indigenize their leadership, while Hohepa asserts the need for Indigenous leaders to draw from a range of different leadership methods but to do so critically and cautiously and from within their Indigeneity. She also emphasizes the need to, carefully and continually, engage with critical self-reflexivity in relation to ongoing forms of settler colonialism in dominant educational environments.