‘Knowledge is knowledge’: UCalgary gathering charts a new path in education

Formal education has a complicated and troubling history for Indigenous peoples in Canada. Residential schools were used to erase Indigenous culture and fundamentally altered communities for generations. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada's 94 Calls to Action were released in 2015, with many focused on reconciliation through education. 

As Truth and Reconciliation work continues, education remains a powerful catalyst to affirm Indigenous knowledges and build new pathways for Indigenous student success. The University of Calgary began its own truth and reconciliation journey in earnest nearly a decade ago, with creation of ii’ taa’poh’to’p, the Indigenous Strategy. 

As an important next step, more than 130 Indigenous scholars, students and community members from across Treaty 7 and Métis Districts Calgary Nose Hill and Calgary Elbow, joined UCalgary’s teaching and learning community at a gathering on May 11 at the Grey Eagle Resort to align post-secondary education with natural law. 

A missing element in education has been the acknowledgment and prioritization of Indigenous Ways of Knowing as a form of knowledge, including oral storytelling and histories. Revisioning teaching, learning and assessment is a critical part of reconciliation, and key to the teaching and learning recommendations identified in ii’ taa’poh’to’p. This gathering modelled UCalgary’s commitment to meaningfully engaging with Indigenous communities and postsecondary institutions as key partners in the development of strong educational programs.

In November 2025, UCalgary endorsed a set of principles to better guide student assessment. Core to these principles is a commitment to cultivating a shared ethical space that respects written and oral traditions and honours diverse Indigenous cultural protocols, perspectives and knowledges. 

The idea for the gathering was sparked over coffee with Lakota Dakota Elder Evelyn Good Striker, Standing Buffalo First Nation in Saskatchewan and Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe in South Dakota. The vision was to begin to transform teaching and learning through relationship, with guidance and leadership from Elders on UCalgary’s Circle of Advisors, as well as input from Indigenous scholars, groups and colleagues from across the academic community.

Aligning higher education with natural law

At the gathering, Kainai Elder Leroy Little Bear, an esteemed scholar and researcher, shared Blackfoot perspectives on education as fundamentally relational, rooted in a living system and not an isolated, transactional world. Contrasting Indigenous and Western ‘interpretive templates’, Little Bear brought forward a perspective on education to help nurture ideas and actions for teaching and learning educators in their own areas.

“As humans, we've only been around about 250,000 years. The buffalo has 25 million years of knowledge and memory that they can draw on. We’re the brand-new kids on the block," said Little Bear. "We think we know everything, but we start to realize that, hey, maybe we need to look elsewhere for teaching. That's where our relatives, like the buffalo, come and sit.”  

While Western education prioritizes certainty, speed and measurement, Blackfoot thought understands humans as part of an interconnected web of relationships, including land, animals, story, ceremony and community. Little Bear’s teaching was a call to broaden the window of post-secondary education by incorporating and valuing Indigenous knowledge, relational pedagogy and a deeper attention to the land, to in turn make learning more holistic, ethical and responsive to the living world we inhabit. 

“A relational, transformative approach takes a holistic view of the environment and everything in it, from the sky down to the earth, to the plants, and so on. We embody the land, and it’s captured in our stories and our songs,” said Little Bear.

‘Knowledge is knowledge’

“Stories are our sciences, our laws, our knowledge,” shared Piikani Elder Dr. Reg Crowshoe, who offered reflections and further teachings with his wife, Elder Dr. Rose Crowshoe. Members of UCalgary’s Circle of Advisors and honorary degree recipients from the university, the Crowshoes have been partners in this work since the creation of ii’ taa’poh’to’p. 

For Reg Crowshoe, Indigenous and Western knowledge are not opposites: “knowledge is knowledge.” The challenge, rather, is to build safe spaces where both systems can meet respectfully, for the benefit of future generations, without one imposing on the other.

“If we work together to translate actions through practice, then we can find parallels. Then, we find the best ways to move ahead together to achieve the goals we need to achieve,” he said.  

Parallel paths forward

As tables discussed guiding questions in the afternoon, the gathering brought forward important ideas to take action across the university. The input will be brought together to inform how UCalgary and educational institutions across the region might collectively transform and align post-secondary education with natural law. 

“This work is softening the ground for important change, which will bring us to a new place — one that will nurture student learners in a connected, reciprocal and relational way,” said Dr. Natasha Kenny, PhD, executive director of the Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning.

The learnings will also be shared with educational leaders and post-secondary groups across and beyond UCalgary to affirm Indigenous knowledges and transform how we approach teaching, learning and assessment.

“The journey towards truth and reconciliation is not a fast-track, linear one with a beginning, middle and end — rather, it is a longer, mindful journey of transformation and renewal," shared Dr. Shawna Cunningham, EdD, director of ii’ taa’poh’to’p in UCalgary’s Office of Indigenous Engagement. "Transformative reconciliation takes time. It requires a paradigm shift in the academy to create a culturally safe place for Indigenous peoples, languages, and knowledge systems in teaching, learning, research, and community engagement.”