“Supporting Indigenous perspectives in STEM and STEAM to promote success for Indigenous youth
through engagement of community and Indigenous mentors.”
In the application to the Alberta government when you form a society, the society needs to describe its work through its objects. IndigeSTEAM described its work via the statement above. Expanding on that, let’s explore the perspectives that we are currently doing.
When we founded IndigeSTEAM, our perspectives centred on delivering education activities for youth and their communities, while involving Indigenous STEM professionals as role models. We also understood that these individuals might need support as they moved between two worlds—Indigenous and STEM—or, for many women, three worlds: Indigenous, STEM, and female.
Two-Eyed Seeing as a guiding principle is not just a perspective for us for our work; it is also our Vision as it provides our goal and our means to accomplish our goals. One aspect that we didn’t fully anticipate is the number of non-Indigenous people who have loved learning about Indigenous people through our workshops; so reconciliation has become a perspective of our work that is enabling us to walk together – which also helps empower Indigenous youth as presenters.
Since we founded IndigeSTEAM in 2018, we have spread our wings even more! We are now considering our perspectives as informal education (workshops, camps), formal education (classroom presentations, teacher PD and a future school idea), charity work (scholarships and bursaries), and most recently research (assessing outcomes of our programs). We have been working with more partners who bring some additional perspectives that we want as part of what we share with Indigenous and non-Indigenous audiences. Our story is growing and we are flying higher than we saw in 2018.
Golden Eagle Feathers “Eagle Feathers” by Peter Kaminski is licensed under CC BY 2.0.1