This book seeks to clarify postcolonial Indigenous thought beginning at the new millennium. It represents the voices of the first generation of global Indigenous scholars and converges those voices, their analyses, and their dreams of a decolonized world. -- Marie Battiste, Author.

The essays in Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision spring from an International Summer Institute held in 1996 on the cultural restoration of oppressed Indigenous peoples. The contributors, primarily Indigenous, unravel the processes of colonization that enfolded modern society and resulted in the oppression of Indigenous peoples.

The authors -- among them Gregory Cajete, Erica-Irene Daes, Bonnie Duran and Eduardo Duran, James Youngblood Henderson, Linda Hogan, Leroy Little Bear, Ted Moses, Linda Tuhiwai Te Rina Smith, Graham Hingangaroa Smith, and Robert Yazzie -- draw on a range of disciplines, professions, and experiences. Addressing four urgent and necessary issues -- mapping colonialism, diagnosing colonialism, healing colonized Indigenous peoples, and imagining postcolonial visions -- they provide new frameworks for understanding how and why colonization has been so pervasive and tenacious among Indigenous peoples. They also envision what they would desire in a truly postcolonial context.

In moving and inspiring ways, Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision elaborates a new inclusive vision of a global and national order and articulates new approaches for protecting, healing, and restoring long-oppressed peoples, and for respecting their cultures and languages.

Dr. Marie Battiste is a Mi’kmaw educator and professor in the Indian and Northern Education Program at the University of Saskatchewan. Her historical research of Mi’kmaw literacy and education as a graduate student at Harvard University and later at Stanford University, where she received her doctorate degree in curriculum and teacher education, provided the foundation for her later writings in cognitive imperialism, linguistic and cultural integrity, and the decolonization of Aboriginal education. A recipient of two honorary degrees—from St. Mary’s University, Halifax, and from the University of Maine at Farmington—she has worked actively with First Nations schools as an administrator, teacher, consultant, and curriculum developer, advancing Aboriginal epistemology, languages, pedagogy, and research. Her research interests are in initiating institutional changes to decolonize education, language, and social justice policy and power, and in devising educational approaches that recognize and affirm the political and cultural diversity of Canada. She is senior editor of First Nations Education in Canada: The Circle Unfolds, a 1995 publication from the University of British Columbia Press, and editor of Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision, published by the University of British Columbia Press in 2000. She is a board member of the International Research Institute (IRI) for Maori and Indigenous Education in New Zealand and a member of the Board of Governors for the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) in Canada. (Update 2010: In 2008, Dr. Battiste received a National Aboriginal Achievement Award, National Aboriginal Achievement Foundation. She is currently Academic Director, Aboriginal Education Research Centre (AERC), College of Education, University of Saskatchewan.)

Marie Battiste's profile page