A Saskatchewan First Nations Case. This paper examines culturally relevant teacher education for First Nations undergraduate students, offered by the Department of Indian Education at the University of Regina-affiliated Saskatchewan Indian Federated College. As graduates may want to challenge dominant epistemologies of the schools in which they teach, the program responds to students' needs for connection to traditional cultural knowledge in order to overcome personal and cultural dislocation and racism.
All students take classes in Indian languages, studies, and art.
In a class affirming cultural identity, Elders are used as teachers in an outdoor education setting that includes ceremonies, traditional activities, and storytelling. Tools to deconstruct racist ideology and practices are given in a third-year class in human justice that focuses on institutional racism, particularly on an analysis of curriculum. The concepts of race, text, identity, stereotyping, bias, and ethnocentrism are used to analyze the impact of curriculum materials on First Nations children. In addition to curriculum materials analysis, students also analyze images of First Nations people portrayed in the mass media. The classes model pedagogical methods of dealing with racism and critical thinking.