The Provocations of Indigenous Cultures within a Conference: Using Métissage to Explore the In/Compatibility of Indigenous Ways of Knowing with Open Education

At OE Global 2023 Indigenous ways of knowing and being were a fundamental component of the conference design and organization. Indigenous and non-Indigenous organizers established a collaborative governance approach to foster partnership and mutual guidance throughout the planning and execution stages.

In this session, Dawn Witherspoon, Darrion Letendre, and Robert Lawson will perform métissage to recount the design and implementation of, and personal experiences with, a conference program that reflected the concept of two-eyed seeing, navigating Indigenous and non-Indigenous worldviews. We will explore the incompatibility and compatibility of Indigenous ways of knowing with the ontological and epistemological assumptions embedded into open education. A fundamental question we examine is how the braiding of conference stories can unearth the interplay of Indigenous (nêhiyawîhcikêwin Plains Cree) ways of knowing with the values and practices of open education.