My name is Stavros Georgios Stavrou. I was born and raised in a western prairie province in Canada, located on the ancestral and traditional land called Treaty 6 territory. I have Greek heritage on my father’s side (he was a Cypriot immigrant), and French and Ukrainian heritage on my mother’s side (she was born in the prairies). I acknowledge my colonial ties to Canada that have benefited me at the expense of Indigenous peoples. I have chosen to work alongside Cree educators to support the education equity of Indigenous students.

I work at the University of Saskatchewan as a mathematics lecturer in the College of Arts and Science, as well as a teacher educator in the College of Education. My research in the prairies relevant to this article included co-teaching Grade 6 school mathematics with Cree elementary school educators. The Saskatchewan Curriculum (2009) included outcome indicators that measured students’ abilities to describe the ways Indigenous peoples (past and present) represent(ed) topics pertaining to numbers, shape and space, patterns and relations, and statistics and probability. However, outcome indicators that involve drawing on Indigenous experiences, languages, and knowledges are seldom included in formal assessments. Speaking from my experiences, these indicators are omitted due to a lack of resources to guide this process, as well as a level of uncertainty to assess these topics in a meaningful and authentic way. In a few instances, I witnessed teachers including questions on tests that asked students to draw examples of shapes and solids from Indigenous cultures. The expected answers were that medicine wheels are circles, tipis are cones, and drums are cylinders.

Shallow examples of material representations of culture (or exclusion altogether) do not foster youth’s educative and healthy life-making across familial, community, institutional, cultural, and linguistic contexts. In this article, I shared experiences in which school mathematics assessments were conducted in relationally-ethical ways by kamskénow (discovering) and miyō-pimōhtēwin (walking in a good way), achieved through Cree kohtawān (spiritual being) principles. This holistic Cree framework was attentive to Indigenous ways of being by drawing on Cree to demonstrate promising practices for philosophically grounding assessment-making through understandings of kotowān principles and processes of discovering using mathematics.

Activating school assessments in the mathematics classroom that involved cultural and linguistic acquisition in the context of family, community, land, and place opened up assessment-making potential that taught to the lives of the students. Indeed, rather than assessments shaping the lives of students, the experiences of the teachers and students shaped the assessments and offered new understandings of Indigenizing school mathematics.

Mathematics is a subject shaped by invalid Eurocentric notions that it is acultural, apolitical, value-free, and universal (Bishop, 1994; Ernest, 1994; Gerdes, 1996). In educational institutions, school and university mathematics are used to regulate access to learning and employment, and provoke fear and anxiety amongst students and teachers (Iseke-Barnes, 2000; Popkewitz, 2004; Stinson, 2004; Macmillan et al., 2005). School and university mathematics assessments also operate as a barrier to Indigenous and minoritized students’ ways of knowing mathematics, their mobility within educational contexts, and are used to racially justify the achievement gap through cultural-deficit discourses (Iseke-Barnes, 2000; Aitken and Head, 2008; Battey, 2013; Stavrou and Miller, 2017; Stavrou, 2020).

Ministries of Education—jurisdictionally located within Canadian provinces—have been Indigenizing curriculum and school spaces in the K-12 and post-secondary levels as part of reconciliation, cultural inclusion, decolonization imperatives, and anti-racism (Gaudry and Lorenz, 2018; Goulet and Goulet, 2014; St. Denis, 2004, 2007; Stavrou, 2020). The multi-faceted and evolving conceptualizing of Indigenization includes: recognizing treaty rights, expanding Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies, working towards reconciliation, decolonizing Euro-Western education and the colonial processes that maintain it, destabilizing racism and oppression in education, land-based education, and meaningful inclusion of Indigenous languages and culture (Aikenhead, 2006; Battiste, 2013; Battiste and Henderson, 2009; Brake, 2019; Gaudry and Lorenz, 2018; Goulet and Goulet, 2014; Korteweg and Russell, 2012; Kovach 2010a, 2010b; Kuokkanen, 2008; Snively, 1990; St. Denis, 2011; Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 2015; Wildcat, 2001).

How these concepts and processes are operationalized in education is fluid across dynamic locational, familial, institutional, experiential, linguistic, and cultural contexts. It is in the individualized experiences of people working in relation that provide meaningful mobilization of Indigenization (Stavrou, 2020). In my research described in this article, I used a narrative inquiry methodology to share my experiences co-teaching Grade 6 school mathematics alongside two Cree elementary educators. In the unique institutional, linguistic, and cultural context of my work and research, Indigenizing school mathematics became meaningful through the teachers’ Cree language and ways of being, It was through our experiences that we shaped the teaching environment and assessment practices of school mathematics, thus creating new stories to live by that were attentive to the needs and aspirations of their Indigenous students.

Narrative inquiry as a research methodology was introduced by Connelly and Clandinin (1990) based on a Deweyan (1997) ontology that education and life are intertwined. As we interpret our storied lives—past, present, and the imagined future—narrative inquiry guides research in contexts such as studies of education, community, healthcare, history, and anthropology. Connelly and Clandinin (2006) explained that narrative inquiry is a way to think of experience as story, where story is “a portal through which a person enters the world and by which their experience of the world is interpreted and made personally meaningful” (p. 477).

Narrative inquirers attend to experiences through considerations of three dimensions—temporality, sociality, and place (Downey and Clandinin, 2010). Temporality means being attentive to people and events evolving through the past, present, and future. Sociality refers to the inquirer and participants’ personal conditions of “feelings, hopes, desires, aesthetic reactions, and moral dispositions” (Connelly and Clandinin, 2006, p. 480), as well as the social conditions of the environment and people who shape contexts. Place means the location(s) where the inquiry and events under inquiry take place. Thinking narratively is the simultaneous exploration of all three dimensions, which is a requirement of any narrative inquiry (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000).

Based on the work of Clandinin and Connelly (2000), Kirkpatrick (2008) provided a visual representation that shows the interplay of the three narrative dimensions.

Image from Kirkpatrick (2008) provided in Figure 1.

Clandinin (2013) explained that an inquiry starts with narrative beginnings, which is a personal justification of the research wonder through an autobiographical introspection. After the researcher frames their inquiry, they negotiate entry into the inquiry site with their research participants. Attentive to the narrative commonplaces of temporality, sociality, and place, the researcher and participants co-compose field texts (data such as written or recorded observations, transcribed conversations, lesson plans, curriculum documents, etc.) Clandinin and Caine (2013) explained that field texts show temporality as they are co-composed over many interactions and include considerations of earlier life experiences. Sociality is shown during these outward events as researchers and participants pay attention to their inward emotions, thoughts, and moral responses. Place is the physical backdrop where the inquiry and reflected experiences occur.

Part of thinking narratively is using the data to co-compose narrative threads with participants. Clandinin and Connelly (2000) explained that narrative threads are plotlines woven over the commonplaces of time, place, and social interactions. Narrative threads are not compartmentalized themes. Rather, they are continuous plotlines that describe the intricacies of human experiences across contexts.

Narrative threads are plotlines that represent experiences through the narrative commonplaces of temporality, sociality, and place (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000). In this article, I shared our stories to live by through two narrative threads that evolved during the inquiry. The first thread, which we named miyō-pimōhtēwin (walking in a good way), highlighted an alternative holistic assessment practice in which Miss Moore and Miss Scribe explained how they evaluated the relational space created by their students. This was achieved by assessing how Cree kohtawān principles guided students towards miyō-pimōhtēwin.

The second thread was named kamskénow (discovering). This involved the teachers assessing how their students shared ideas and solved problems using school mathematics. This alternative assessment foregrounded processes of discovering that supported the cultural and linguistic knowledges and aspirations of the students and teachers, and served to provide more meaningful practices of Indigenization that was personalized to our educational contexts. Kamskénow emphasized that learning school mathematics was an ongoing process of discovering another way of seeing and experiencing the world around us. The experiences shared focus on the teachers’ implementation of these assessments, rather than the responses of the students.

The stories I shared of our classroom experiences showed the power and potential of Cree in providing holistic assessments that foreground languages, knowledges, and ways of being in relationships in the mathematics classroom. This potential is sought in broader contexts. As Goulet and Goulet (2014) explained:

Miss Moore, Miss Scribe, and their students represented an aspect of Indigenization as being uniquely experiential and located in our languages. Combining miyō-pimōhtēwin and kamskénow in the mathematics classroom emphasized that we must begin and end in relationships, while attending to the processes of discovering in ways that support our mental, physical, spiritual, and emotional wellbeing. Attending to the teacher-student relationships—as well as my relationship with the teachers and students—was part of my relational responsibility as a narrative inquirer (Clandinin and Caine, 2013). Attending to curriculum in ways that centered relationships, miyō-pimōhtēwin, and kamskénow was how Miss Moore and Miss Scribe provided alternatives to assessment and teaching that were more meaningful to their students’ learning.

The broader implications and results of these assessments in other classrooms, schools, and subject matter is not something the teachers and I attended to because we cannot speak to how a teacher’s practice might shift. My ethical responsibility is in sharing our work, but I cannot necessarily say what the results will be. The possibilities of how teachers might factor these Indigenized assessments into grades is an area of future research and inquiry. As a narrative inquirer, I can describe some successes of our classroom experiences but I cannot prescribe how miyō-pimōhtēwin and kamskénow could be used in other classrooms, since the conceptualization and actualization of these assessment frameworks depended on the uniquely-determined classroom conditions and behaviors driven by Miss Moore and Miss Scribe. I wonder how our experiences will inspire others.

While our time together was abruptly halted due to the pandemic, I remained in a research relationship with Miss Moore and Miss Scribe through virtual means. We are finding other ways to be in relationships so that we can continue to shape our work and practice. I want to acknowledge these teachers (and all educators) for their tireless efforts during the pandemic to weather the storm. As the teachers transitioned back and forth between virtual and face-to-face teaching, miyō-pimōhtēwin and kamskénow remained integral to their teaching.