Dr. Dwayne Donald

In Episode 73, Dr. Nicholas Ng-A-Fook hosts Dr. Dwayne Donald, Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Alberta who holds a Canada Research Chair in Reimagining Teacher Education with Indigenous Wisdom Traditions. His research focuses in part on the different ways Indigenous wisdom traditions can expand and enhance understandings of curriculum and pedagogy. His scholarship engages curriculum studies, teacher education, and the ongoing effects of colonialism on educational thought and practice, while asking how educators might rethink relationships among Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples through ethical relationality, treaty sensibilities, kinship, and wâhkôtowin. Recorded live during the annual CSSE conference at the University of Winnipeg, this episode took place on Treaty One Territory and the National Homeland of the Red River Métis, in Wiiniibak, Manido Abi, ancestral lands of the Anishinaabeg, Anisininew, Ininiwak/Nehethowuk, Oceti Sakowin/Dakota Oyate, and Michif Peoples. Building on earlier conversation, they return to Dwayne’s evolving thinking about one’s standpoint, treaty sensibilities, kinship, and relational accountability. Drawing on his family history as a descendant of Treaty 6 signatories and his ancestor Jimmy Jock Bird, an interpreter and translator in Blackfoot homelands, Dwayne reframes treaty as a kinship covenant oriented toward love, responsibility, and cultivating more life-honouring forms of humanness.