Synonymizing Student Development with Healing: Experiential Reflections of Indigenous Higher Education Leaders

Canadian residential schools and United States boarding schools were fundamentally rooted in genocide. An outcome of these colonizing educational experiences is historical trauma. Historical trauma is the cumulative, multigenerational, collective experience of emotional and psychological injury in communities and descendants (Brave Heart, Elkins, Tafoya, Bird & Salvador, 2012). Furthermore, historical trauma engenders discontinuity in accurately understanding oneself, including history, culture, language, and cosmology. In this webinar, moderator J. Māhealani Quirk engages Indigenous higher education leaders on historical trauma’s prevalence on the participation of Indigenous higher education communities, broadly, and Indigenous college student development, specifically. The possibilities and potential tensions of advancing the pedagogical significance of healing within knowledge institutions are explored. 

Learning Outcomes

• Participants will reflect on how higher education is perceived as an extension of organized violence toward Indigenous Peoples.
• Participants will understand the impacts of historical trauma on the holistic development and growth of Indigenous college students.
• Participants will consider the implications for creating interventions, rooted in culture and context, to support and sustain a genuine process of healing.