A White Paper on Aboriginal Education in Universities.

In this paper, I recount the circumstances which have caused me to question deeply my own complicity in Eurocentric education, which is really all we have to offer our Aboriginal students. Coming from my position as a white, female, middle-aged university professor with a history of school teaching and school counselling, I outline the concerns I have with both schools and faculties of education, fearing personal complicity in cultural genocide. In particular, I am concerned with three things: one, how we frame and name our own racism -- to come to feel comfortable talking about our own biases and prejudicial thoughts, actions, and attitudes-as a necessary first step to action; two, how we disadvantage Aboriginal students in our universities, for whom success may require some form of personal "amputation," and three, how we, as teacher educators, can begin to model, through our own culturally sensitive actions and through our teaching, ways of becoming culturally sensitive classroom teachers. While I do not provide answers to the thorny question of "what to do," I do hold out hope that working in arrangements of mutual respect with those of another culture can lead us to idiosyncratic and powerful models of change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]