Battiste will deliver the third lecture in the University’s annual President’s Speakers Series

Noted Mi’kmaw scholar Dr. Marie Battiste headlines the third event in the annual President’s Speakers Series celebrating the Year of Indigenous Knowing at Mount Allison University.

Battiste’s lecture, Decolonizing and Indigenizing the Academy: Toward Cognitive Justice, takes place on Monday, Oct. 24 at 7 p.m. in Brunton Auditorium, Marjorie Young Bell Conservatory of Music. Everyone is welcome to attend.

Her presentation documents the nature of Eurocentric models of education, their devastating impacts on Indigenous knowledge and peoples, and the losses they entail for improved learning for all.

“Marie’s knowledge, experience, and insight will be invaluable as we explore what indigenization means for Mount Allison during this Year of Indigenous Knowing,” says Dr. Robert Campbell, Mount Allison President and Vice-Chancellor. “The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has raised important questions for all universities. We can learn much from scholars like Marie that will help us begin to answer these questions, and we very much look forward to her visit to campus.”

Battiste is a professor in the Department of Educational Foundations at the University of Saskatchewan. She is a Mi'kmaw educator and a member of the Potlotek First Nations, Nova Scotia. She holds graduate degrees from both Harvard and Stanford, and is a senior Indigenous scholar whose work in Indigenous knowledge and decolonizing pedagogies has opened new areas of research and inquiry in Canada and beyond. She is the author of a number of books and has won several national awards for her contributions to education.

“Indigenizing the academy is not solitary work of the academics and professions and universities,” Battiste says. “It requires dialogue and policy frameworks drawn with Indigenous peoples and a willingness to be reflective and critical of the conventional structures drawn from Eurocentric traditions.”

The lecture is co-sponsored by the Wilford Jonah Lecture Fund.

Mount Allison’s Year of Indigenous Knowing aims to encourage the campus and wider community to explore Indigenous issues relating to their historical and current surroundings through several lenses — societal, cultural, and humanitarian on a local, national, and international scale.

The Year of Indigenous Knowing will see several noted speakers, activists, and artists visit campus through the annual President’s Speakers Series, as well as through other related activities and events.

For updates and a full list of President’s Speakers Series events, please visit mta.ca/pss