During her political science and anthropology undergrad at SFU, Dr. Amy Parent was still planning to go to law school. However, as she moved closer to that goal and began taking upper-year political science courses, she found herself caught up in “white, male hegemony.” To her, it seemed like a space where everyone wanted to argue with each other and prove they were right — not one where she felt capable of accomplishing anything truly productive.
Around this time, she attended a Supporting Aboriginal Graduate Enhancement meeting — a mentorship program for Indigenous graduate students — where she met “academic rock stars” like Dr. Graham Smith and former UBC Associate Dean for Indigenous Education Dr. Jo-Ann Archibald. After hearing all the graduate students share research they had been working on in their communities, Parent switched to the “dark side,” as she called it. Instead of going into law, she pursued a PhD in education at UBC.
The other thing that sparked her interest in education was her time with the Urban Native Youth Association (UNYA). She worked in around 13 different schools, primarily on the east side of Vancouver, to support after-school programming for Indigenous students and encourage families to engage with their child’s education.
“[I] was recognizing what was happening with our youth, seeing the racism within the school districts,” she said. “But [I was] also seeing them very much engaged with the programming at UNYA and seeing what a holistic education can do outside the colonial system. That also drove some of the questions that I had, and my interest in doing educational research.”
After completing her PhD, Parent worked at SFU and UBC implementing Indigenous education within the teacher education program, where she witnessed a pattern of uncertainty among teacher educators when it came to engaging with Indigenous knowledge.
“The first emotion we usually receive is that of fear and of not knowing,” she said. “Sometimes it’s couched in the settler colonial innocent narrative, and other times it’s just full-on fear … But [there is] also a desire to move beyond that.”
A lot of Indigenous knowledge, Parent explained, is centred on ancient origin stories about relationships with spirituality and the natural world, and can be inaccessible to people if they do not put in the time to learn how to treat these stories with respect. Watching people’s reluctance to learn reminded her of her background working with youth — young Indigenous men, she noticed, didn’t want to engage with these “typical types of literature.”
There seemed to be a surge in the popularity of the graphic novel genre at the time — many of them “relevant [to] contemporary issues with Indigenous peoples” — and Parent saw this as a potential solution. Pairing creativity with academic literature, Parent created a course on Indigenous graphic novels and storytelling.
Although she has mostly stepped away from teaching university courses for the moment, Parent is still making strides in the field. Last month, she was appointed a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Co-Chair in Transforming Indigenous Knowledge Research Governance and Rematriation. In this role, she’ll be working to advance research in these areas.
Parent sees her work now as a sort of public pedagogy — communicating “dense, $100 academic terms” to policymakers in order to support larger policy changes needed to “continue supporting Indigenous knowledges [and] language revitalization, as well as our ongoing rights for self-determination.”
Parent’s fellow co-chair is Dr. Sonajharia Minz, a professor of computer science at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi and a member of the Oraon tribe. Despite herself and Minz having diverse disciplines, languages and lands, they both experience the impacts of colonialism in different, yet similar ways. Colonialism manifests uniquely in each region, Parent explained, but its structural forces share many of the same qualities, no matter where you look. Although different, their approaches to the work complement each other well.
“I think we’re always, as Indigenous scholars, trying to move beyond these silos and the compartmentalization that happens when we get placed within these academic settings. We very much want to forefront Indigenous knowledge as transdisciplinary,” she said.
Parent said Minz has been teaching her a lot about artificial intelligence, which they hope will accelerate language revitalization through the development of tools “directly controlled by us, as Indigenous peoples,” Parent said. Minz’s role is largely focused on Indigenous data sovereignty — the rights of Indigenous people to govern the collection, ownership and application of data about their communities, lands and cultures — as colonial institutions continue to extract and misuse data and misrepresent Indigenous peoples.
While chair, Parent hopes to work with international bodies within UNESCO, the UN and the International Council of Museums to bring forth strong policies for the return of Indigenous belongings.
In 2022, she was part of the delegation that returned her family’s memorial pole back to the Nisga’a Nation from the National Museum of Scotland. At the beginning of the journey, Parent remembers using the word “repatriation,” but has since realized the word is steeped in eurocentric, patriarchal practices.
Joanna Moody, Parent’s ancestral grandmother, had the totem pole carved — she did so at “one of the heightened times of genocide that we would have experienced as Nisga’a peoples,” Parent said.
“Repatriation really doesn’t apply to us as Nisga’a peoples. This should be a rematriation,” Parent said. “Rematriation is not just the return of stolen belongings, but it’s the restoration of our laws, languages, responsibilities and our governance systems as matrilineal peoples.”
While working on the project, Parent said she learned a lot about diplomacy. The delegation did not tell the federal or provincial governments they were going to Scotland to retrieve the pole. Parent laughed while recalling how then-BC Premier John Horgan tweeted one of the team’s negotiators while they were on the plane to find out what was happening. The trip was full of press chaos and many sleepless nights, but Parent said it was the journey of a lifetime — one that made her reflect on her goals.
“The biggest thing I like to tell people is ‘May we make our decisions based on our hopes and not our fears,’” she said. “It’s our hope that’s going to get us one step closer to our happiness and to the outcome that we hopefully want to achieve.”
