Abstract

This qualitative study seeks to understand and reframe responses to reconciliation in the public English-language CÉGEP network in Québec, Canada through an analysis of publicly available documents from three major institutions in the network, posts on institutional social media accounts, and interviews with participants from one of the institutions represented in this study. While the primary research question “What reconciliation initiatives exist in the English-language CÉGEP network?” guided this work, it also raised a more fundamental question about the nature of reconciliation and what it means. This paper asserts that true reconciliation in education requires a fundamental transformation of our educational system in order to support Indigenous resurgence, and create, what Mi’kmaw scholar Marie Battiste (2013), calls an ethical trans-systemic educational space. This transformation involves unlearning colonial practices, making space for Indigenous knowledges and ways of knowing and being, and establishing systems of shared governance. Guided by a Two-Eyed Seeing (Bartlett et al., 2012) approach, this study examines current reconciliation initiatives in the English-language CÉGEP network—initiatives that have largely been developed and implemented by non-Indigenous people—and considers these through the lens of unlearning, making space, and shared governance in order to contribute to an understanding of how the network is working meaningfully towards reconciliation. While there is evidence of some of this work occurring in the English-language CÉGEP system, overall efforts are still limited and in early stages.