Michael Marker

Associate Professor,
Educational Studies, 
Director of Ts'kel First Nations Studies, UBC
Musqueam territory

My work is in ethnohistory of education and explores the politics of Indigenous knowledge primarily in the Coastal Salish region. My research has foregrounded the ways that colonizing powers have imposed ideologies and cosmologies on Aboriginal communities and the remarkable resistance strategies of Native people. This work also notes the ways that relationships to land and colliding worldviews continue to be animated by both the mainstream denial of culture and the culture of denial—in contrast to Indigenous holisms. My writing examines the varieties of hegemonies that neutralize a legitimate Indigenous voice and which are continuing to dismiss the Indigenous polemical Other as an exoticized outside case scenario. My assertion is that healing and relationship building can only come of a rigourous decolonizing related to exposing the persistence and pestilence of technocracy and historical amnesia within schools and communities.

Recent works:

Michael Marker, After the Makah Whalehunt: Indigenous Knowledge and Limits to Multicultural Discourse, Urban Education (41) 5, September, 2006, 1-24.

Michael Marker, It Was Two Different Times of the Day, But in the Same Place: Coast Salish High School Experience in the 1970s, BC Studies. 144, 2005, 89-111.

Michael Marker, The Four R’s Revisited: Some Reflections on First Nations and Higher Education. In Student Affairs: Experiencing Higher Education. Lesley Andres and Finola Finlay, Eds. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2004.

Michael Marker, Theories and Disciplines as Sites of Struggle: The Reproduction of Colonial Dominance Through the Controlling of Knowledge in the Academy, Canadian Journal of Native Education. 28, 1-2 (2004), 102-110.

Michael Marker, Indigenous Voice, Community, and Epistemic Violence: The Ethnographer’s “Interests” and What “Interests” the Ethnographner. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education. 16(3), 2003.

(updated 04/07)