Colonial battlegrounds of the self: state-organized adult education in the Kitikmeot region of Nunavut, Canada

Abstract (English)

This presentation analyzes colonial encounters that transpired in the classrooms of state-organized adult education programs in the Kitikmeot region of Nunavut (Canada) from the 1970s through the 1990s. This region is distinct due to its geographical remoteness and the very late date of direct contacts by state representatives. The objectives of the presentation are to raise awareness of strategies of colonial governance that were employed by the Canadian state in the Arctic and to provoke reflection about the shape that anticolonial forms of adult educational practice should take. The presentation begins by describing the context of the establishment of colonial rule in northern Canada and by setting the stage for the analysis of individuality as a colonial battleground by reviewing comparative ethnographies of the self. The key findings to be presented involve (1) an institutional ethnography of the colonial state as it operated through adult education in the Kitikmeot and (2) an auto-ethnographic study of Inuit resistance to that colonial state (the presenter worked as an adult educator during this time). The institutional ethnography reconstructs the pedagogical, administrative, and evaluative practices that were used to position Inuit adults as deficient individuals. The auto-ethnographic study describes how Inuit adults resisted such practices through strategies that included avoidance, contestation, and the re-appropriation of space. This presentation is relevant to anthropological sciences because it links comparative ethnographies of the self to the study of adult education as a site of colonial governance. It will be of interest to scholars and activists working in fields of decolonization and the anthropology of education. It will deconstruct strategies and technologies of colonial governance and provoke reflection about how to develop anticolonial forms of adult educational practice.