Visiting researcher Samara Hand.
Researching Educational Genocide in Canada and Australia
Visiting Doctoral Student Samara Hand on Indigenous Education Reforms
As a child growing up in Australia in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Samara Hand wasn’t taught much about Indigenous peoples or cultures in school. “There was very, very little in the curriculum,” she says. “The narrative I learned was that Captain James Cook arrived in Australia, met some Indigenous people, and tried to establish friendly relationships with them. It didn’t work, and they eventually all died out from disease and starvation.”
But Samara herself is a Worimi/Biripi Indigenous woman from Awabakal Country in New South Wales. Her family and extended family are Indigenous. “I always struggled to reconcile this idea of the dying out of Indigenous people. I felt a disconnect between the things I was being taught in school, and the reality I knew,” she says.
Today, as a visiting doctoral student in the University of Manitoba’s sociology and criminology department, Samara identifies this experience as an example of educational genocide, a phrase she uses in her research to describe “the ways in which education systems are used to try to assimilate Indigenous people and destroy Indigenous knowledges and practices.”
Samara’s research has found that both Australia and Canada have histories of overt educational genocide. Parallel residential school systems in each country pursued policies of forcible assimilation intended to “kill the Indian in the child,” policies that systematically undermined Indigenous cultures by severing the ties through which Indigenous culture is taught and sustained. Survivors’ accounts describe routine physical, sexual, emotional and psychological abuse that caused profound intergenerational trauma.
Samara came to the University of Manitoba in 2023 to conduct doctoral research on current day educational law and policy in both countries to see how educational policy has evolved. Her research asks, “what is the constitutive role of education law and policy in genocide against Indigenous people, and does that assimilative impulse still exist in more covert ways?” She planned to visit for six months but ended up staying for two years – time that was necessary, she says, to build relationships to ensure the research took place in a non-extractive way.
At UM, Samara worked with genocide scholar Dr. Andrew Woolford, sociology and criminology department, and the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation to identify insights about the process of reconciliation and the historical treaty relationships between Indigenous people and the Government of Canada. She interviewed academics, teachers, First Nations educators and reconciliation professionals to collect qualitative data about the current state of education and found that the foundations of the Canadian education system are still very much rooted in western philosophies, values and knowledge systems.
Samara explains that western educational values typically emphasize individual achievement and economic productivity, while Indigenous education values “holistic spiritual and community wellbeing.” Because of this, she explains, “even though there’s a lot of effort to incorporate Indigenous knowledge into curriculum, it’s quite literally assimilated by western frameworks within the level of law and policy.”
While including Indigenous perspectives in standard curriculum is a positive step, Samara observes that material “is always being selected in ways that validate existing subject areas and systems. This risks doing a disservice to Indigenous knowledge because it’s being disembodied from its whole and being placed into western disciplinary frameworks.”
Instead, Samara suggests, educational reforms could “start from a foundation of Indigenous knowledge.” Instead of looking for Indigenous perspectives to include in the existing curriculum, she wonders “how can we develop a curriculum entirely from Indigenous knowledges? It would be a completely different starting point.”
Her research argues that exploring the fundamental assumptions of education systems and considering alternative models could open possibilities for an education system (in Canada, Australia and beyond) that is grounded in, and honours, Indigenous ways of knowing.
Samara has returned to Australia where she will continue her research as she teaches in the Faculty of Law and Justice at the University of New South Wales.