Bridging Connections: Interdisciplinary Explorations with Higher Music Education and Indigenous Artistic Practices

Indigenous musicians playing traditional drums

Grant Recipient

Dr. Laurel Forshaw
Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Educational Studies (EDST)

Indigenous musicians and scholars have repeatedly demanded a transformative re-imagining of higher music education. This project seeks to create spaces of dialogue and relationship building that will help to guide the next stages of engagement with reconciliation, decolonization, and Indigenization within higher music education using a methodology employed by the Aboriginal Gathering Place (AGP) at Emily Carr University of Art + Design (ECU). Over the course of three days, this innovative project will bring together Indigenous and non-Indigenous stakeholders to engage in Indigenous-led land and community-based learning utilizing Indigenous cultural and material practices—such as cedar basketry and moose hair tufting—as a pathway to understanding Indigenous ways of being, ways of knowing, and ways of doing. Engaging directly in Indigenous cultural and material practices is critical to facilitating conversations (a key component of the AGP’s methodology) that disrupt traditional notions of higher music education and make space for land and community-based ways of conceptualizing higher music education. These spaces of dialogue and relationship building are envisioned as opportunities to bring together individuals (Indigenous and non-Indigenous) whose efforts in addressing issues of systemic exclusion have been largely done in isolation; demonstrated prior commitments and actions on the part of non-Indigenous participants will contribute to creating and maintaining a culturally safe(r) space for Indigenous participants.

Participants’ engagements in cultural practices with contemporary and traditional Indigenous materials will be utilized to prompt discussions and conversations about ways in which higher music education practices can also engage with Indigenous knowledges, materials, and practices. The project will be documented throughout, and video footage of participants engaging in cultural material practices and discussing these practices and their learnings will be central in the creation of the knowledge mobilization digital artifacts that will be useful for Indigenous and non-Indigenous musicians, educators and administrators, students, and communities.

This project addresses several of the Principles of Engagement of the Edith Lando VLC including Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (the project seeks to be a catalyst for transformative change that would result in disrupting the centrality of Western art music to be inclusive of Indigenous musics and musical practices); Collaboration and Cooperation (the partnership with the Aboriginal Gathering Place at Emily Carr University of Art + Design); and Innovation, Research and Professional Practices (the innovative approach of engaging with Indigenous-led cultural and material practices as a methodology in which to build relationships and hold space for difficult discussions).

By bringing Indigenous and non-Indigenous stakeholders in music education into dialogue together, this project addresses ISP Goal 4 by opening pathways of thinking and engagement that will lead to meaningful inclusion of Indigenous ways of knowing, culture, cultural and musical practices into higher music education. This project also addresses ISP Goal 6 (Action 25) by prompting participants to dialogue about higher music education’s goals, learning outcomes, policies, and practices that must be transformed in order to meaningfully respond to this Action. Participants in this project will be engaging in discussions about the very conditions that will lead to higher music education’s ability not only to recruit and but also retain Indigenous faculty by creating conditions for their participation in and contributions to universities that goes beyond the notion of mere inclusion as described by Gaudry & Lorenz. (2018).