Pedagogies of Inheriting: Kitchen Table Conversations

As an Indigenous and settler research collective, we explore the ways in which our positionalities as university educators, as well as our Indigenous and settler students' positionalities, shape the pedagogies we employ to create spaces for decolonization, Indigenization, and reconciliation.The concept of inheriting opens up a critical analysis of how we are differently positioned within historical and ongoing forces of settler colonialism, as well how we each engage particular relationships, responsibilities and processes of change as the "doing" of inheriting.We contemplate the concept of inheriting as a potential framework to approach decolonizing and Indigenizing our pedagogical practices as scholars and educators.We come from different disciplinary roots (Indigenous Studies, education, social work, linguistics) and theoretical perspectives (Indigenous theories, continental memory studies, settler colonial theories) and we have brought diverse ideas into a common space that we refer to as our kitchen table, a relational space that hosts and holds the resonances, tensions, and incommensurabilities between traditions of thought and accountabilities within which we each situate ourselves as educators.Each of us offers concrete examples of the praxis of inheriting and relationality in three types of classrooms: with Indigenous students only, with both Indigenous and settler students, and with settler majority students.Our exchanges have led to a series of critical questions that include: what does it mean to actively, intentionally, and critically inherit the settler colonial structures and diverse relationships in which we teach and learn?What kinds of practices of inheriting open up pedagogically, in terms of taking responsibility, foregrounding the relations of settler colonial capitalism and ongoing occupation of Indigenous land?How might inheriting be a site of contextualized and embodied learning for differently positioned students?These generative questions have helped to animate our discussions using our kitchen table methodology.