Marie-Ève Drouin-Gagné and Mika Goodfriend are conducting research in Montana and Florida, respectively.
“I’m going to compare experiences of Indigenous higher education in the Andes, specifically with cases in Ecuador, to North American Indigenous education. I’ll look at how the content, objectives and specificities of these Indigenous programs differ and challenge what we teach in mainstream social sciences.”
Drouin-Gagné received her BA in Anthropology from the Université de Montréal, with a semester at the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés, in Bolivia, before completing her MA at the Université de Montréal in Religious Studies.
“I’m not Native. I’m part of the settler society. I was born and raised in Montreal, in Mohawk territory, and that’s something I ignored for most of my life,” says Drouin-Gagné, explaining how her research interest first arose.
“It took living in Bolivia — where 60 to 80 per cent of the population is Indigenous — and studying at an institution where most of my colleagues were Indigenous students, asking me questions about Canada’s Indigenous people to realize I was unable to answer, that I was ignorant.”
When she came back to Montreal one of her goals was to learn about the first peoples in her own country.
Currently, Drouin-Gagné is doing fieldwork on the Flathead reservation in Montana, and has been interviewing faculty and observing classes at the Salish Kootenai College.
There are 36 tribal colleges in the United States. They aren’t exclusive, but the idea is that they embody the Indigenous nations’ own systems of higher education. Each college is handled by a tribe.
“These institutions stand as testaments to the sovereignty of these nations, and serve as places that sustain tribal histories and cultures throughout the United States,” says Drouin-Gagné.
She hopes her research will help create bridges between educational experiences in North and South America in the context of colonization and decolonization. Ultimately, Drouin-Gagné says, she aims to inform the way mainstream social sciences approach the topic of Indigenous peoples and cultures.
A photographer investigates the snowbirds
Mika Goodfriend, an MFA student at Concordia, is pursuing his research project in Deerfield Beach, Florida, where he’ll be stationed until late September 2016.
During this period, Goodfriend will take on the role of visual anthropologist as he observes, interacts with and chronicles the daily lives of Québécois snowbirds who spend their winters at the Breezy Hill RV Resort trailer park.
