Centennial College is located on the treaty lands and territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, and all year around, we pay tribute to the First Peoples of Canada. As a socially-aware student, you owe it to yourself to learn more about the Indigenous Peoples of Canada, especially during June, National Indigenous History Month. Stories are important, and these ones are especially important, but it can be hard figuring out where to even start.
Centennial College can help with our specialized library guides on Decolonizing and Indigenizing. You have access to a library full of resources, books, movies, and more, and library guides like these make it easier to sift through the wealth of knowledge that’s there for you.
Stephanie Power, a librarian at the College, has curated these Decolonizing and Indigenizing guides. We talked to her about how they came to be, what’s in them, and her own recommendations for books on the Indigenous Peoples of Canada, from those lists.
Building the Guides
“We have designated liaison librarians for every school in the College,” Stephanie explains. “So, I'm the librarian for the School of English and Liberal Studies (SELS). My area is social sciences and humanities guides. I also work closely with the folks in Innovation, Inclusion, Reconciliation And Healing (IIRH) to make guides around commemorative days or special topics.”
“The whole point of making a guide is making resources more accessible to people,” she says. “I hear a lot from students that feel overwhelmed when they first start looking for things in the library, so one of our methods of mediating that is to create these guides. We want to help people make use of all the awesome material that we have here, to spark some curiosity in people.”
Importantly, when it comes to the guide’s content, it’s been thoroughly vetted for cultural sensitivity by the professionals.
“If it's a guide around Indigenous issues, or any group that's been traditionally marginalized, we will consult with those different groups,” Stephanie says. “Our Indigenous Knowledges guides, all of our decolonizing guides, we run by our colleagues, the IIRH, or the Eight Fire. They always say, ‘nothing about us without us’, and we want to make sure that things are both academically represented, but also are culturally appropriate resources.”
How to use the Guides
Some of Centennial College’s Library Guides exist to help students in particular programs. For example, GNED 410, 411, 412: First Peoples' Stories is designed to go with our Indigenous Knowledges certificate, an extra credential you can get, no matter your Centennial College program.
“I created this guide in consultation with the faculty for that course,” Stephanie says. “It's full of really good resources that anybody who's interested in learning more about the First Peoples in Canada would find helpful.”
That’s what the other Indigenous Guides are designed for. And for readers looking for one or two books to start learning more about Indigenous stories, Stephanie has a couple of recommendations from her lists herself, and they’re both books that you can check out at Centennial College’s libraries right now!
“One of my favorite things to recommend if folks are new to learning about Indigenous issues is the book 21 things you may not know about the Indian Act,” she says. “We have several copies. It's really short, and very eye opening. For people who are really new to the topic, I think that could be a good entry point.”
“I also recommend This Place: 150 Years Retold,” she continues. “It's a graphic novel anthology all written by Indigenous creators on a variety of topics related to Indigenous self-determination and history. Some of them are folklore, some of them are pipeline stories, but they're all centered around Indigenous sovereignty.”
“Not everybody's into comics,” she says about it, “but I think that graphic novels can be a really good introduction point to things, because they’re visually stimulating and accessible to people, especially at our College where lots of folks are learning English as an additional language. Having the visual component can be useful in interpreting the words.” And there’s more than just books available in each guide.
“A lot of the time I'll put in government resources, or organizations that you could get in touch with,” she says. “On the GNED 410, 411, 412 guide, we have links to things like the Chiefs of Ontario, the Assembly of First Nations, and the Anishinabek Nation.”
Making the stories accessible to you
“They're a really important access point for the community that we have,” Stephanie says about the guides. “I think lots of folks don't totally realize the amount of stuff that we have in the library. Some people think of the library, and they just think, ‘I'm going to go in there and get shushed, and it's just full of dusty old books.’ But that's not it. We have so, so much material to offer our students. And the guides can be a really good entry point if you're feeling overwhelmed by the things that are in the library. They provide stable access, they provide guidance, and collaborate with our colleagues to make sure that indigenous issues are well represented.”
“We try to give a head start, so they have this little bit of knowledge, and hopefully that will spark their curiosity enough to learn more,” she says.
By Anthony Geremia