What Does It Cost an Indigenous Educator to Teach Science?

In the fall of 1994, a principal asked me to run a workshop on Aboriginal technology for Grade 5 and 6 students. Wigwams. Longhouses. Snowshoes. I was in my second year of teaching and said yes without hesitation. I was eager and wanted to be useful. What I did not say out loud was that what I was being asked to facilitate, static, historical models of a people, was nothing like the living science I had encountered in Indigenous communities closer to home: knowledge held in relationship to land, passed through practice, inseparable from responsibility.

I taught the workshop. It was received well. And I went home carrying something I could not name at the time.

The Negotiation Nobody Talks About

I am of Pasifika descent, with roots in Hawaii, Guam, and the Philippines. I settled in Ontario in the 1970s, trained as a scientist and then as a teacher, and have worked across every level of the Ontario education system. For most of that time, I was doing two jobs at once: teaching the curriculum I was given and honouring the knowledge I carried.

Every Indigenous educator working in a mainstream school knows this double effort. You walk into the classroom holding two sets of obligations that pull in different directions. On one side are the professional standards, the OCT code of ethics, union agreements, and what administration needs from you. On the other side is everything you know about how your students learn, what the land has taught you, and the scientific traditions of your own people.

That negotiation happens every single day, in lesson planning, in the classroom, in year-end reviews. What makes it so wearing is that almost no one else can see it. Your department head does not see it. Your professional portfolio has no category for it. You carry it alone.

When the Curriculum Replaces What You Know

Going back through the journals I had kept throughout my career, as part of my doctoral research at OISE, University of Toronto, I found a pattern I had not quite been able to see while living it. The tension was not personal. It was structural. The curriculum is built to produce a specific kind of scientific thinker, one who values objective distance over relationships, and measurement over meaning. Every time I tried to teach otherwise, I was working against the grain of the institution that employed me.

I remember teaching a unit on strong and stable structures at a school near an Indigenous community. Several of my students were Land Defenders. The tension in the community over sovereignty and territory was in the room every day.

When I set up the assignment, my students did not build toothpick bridges. They built community greenhouses from sinew and local wood. They connected engineering to stewardship and to the particular history of the land outside our window. The range of what they submitted went well beyond what a standard rubric could hold.

I marked the work and wrote positive comments. But I did it knowing the risk. If a parent or administrator had pushed back, asked why the assessments looked nothing like the prescribed outcomes, I would have had to defend that choice entirely on my own. That is the hidden burden: the accumulation of small daily decisions about how much of yourself to bring into the room, and how much institutional risk you are willing to absorb for your students.

An Ecology of Urgency

In my research, I came to call this pressure an “ecology of urgency.” It is not burnout in the usual sense, too many meetings, too much marking. It is something more specific: the exhaustion of working inside an institution that has not examined its own colonial assumptions, while being among the people most shaped by those assumptions. You are expected to perform competence and compliance. At the same time, you are quietly trying to protect your students from a curriculum that was not designed with them in mind.

There was a stretch in my career when I was a high school science teacher, an acting vice-principal in an Indigenous community, and an adjunct at a faculty of education, all at the same time. I was living in the community where I taught. My colleagues and students became what I think of as critical friends, people who could see things about my practice that I could not. What they reflected back to me was this: the integrity of what I did in the classroom did not rest on my effort alone. It rested on whether the institution around me was willing to make that work visible and valued, rather than quietly expected.

In most places I worked, it was not.

What the Cost Actually Buys

It is worth being specific about what happens in a classroom when an Indigenous educator absorbs this pressure and keeps teaching through it.

In the communities where I worked, on Manitoulin Island, along James Bay, in schools near Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee territories, the students who connected science to their own land and relational obligations did not just perform well on assessments. They asked different kinds of questions. They moved between scales, from the molecular to the ecological to the communal, in ways that surprised me. They were not simply learning science content. They were learning to think scientifically in a way that positioned them as agents, not observers, of their own territory.

That outcome does not show up in a standardized rubric. It does not map cleanly onto Ministry learning expectations. But any teacher who has seen it knows it is real. It is not happening in the classroom down the hall running the same unit from the textbook.

This matters because the question of cost should not be framed only in terms of educator wellbeing, as important as that is. It should also be framed in terms of what students are losing when those educators leave, suppress their practice, or spend their professional energy managing institutional risk rather than teaching. The ecology of urgency is not only a burden on the educator. It is a structural drain on the quality of science education available to Indigenous students.

What School Leaders Actually Need to Do

Most of the administrators I worked with were decent people who cared about their schools. That is not the issue. The issue is that good intentions do not change the structure.

Here is what I have seen make a real difference, not in theory, but in practice, across very different school contexts.

•  Start by acknowledging the emotional labour honestly. When an Indigenous educator coordinates Indigenous programming, leads land acknowledgments, or works with Elders and Knowledge Keepers, that work draws on cultural knowledge and relational obligations that appear nowhere in a job description. It is not a bonus service that comes with the hire. Name it. Ask about it. Build it into how you talk about workload.
• Creating structural space for non-Western pedagogy matters just as much. A teacher who works through storytelling or land-based practice should not have to justify that against a standard rubric every time someone observes their class. If a school says it supports Indigenous ways of knowing, that commitment has to show up in how teaching is evaluated, not just in what gets printed in the school improvement plan.
• There is also a real difference between asking an Elder to come in on short notice so the school can say it is doing reconciliation work, and building a genuine, long-term relationship with a community that sets its own terms of engagement. The first is extraction. The second takes longer and is worth considerably more.
• The same distinction applies to how schools support Indigenous educators themselves. Funding Indigenous education initiatives and actually supporting the person standing in front of your students every day are not the same thing. Treating that person’s knowledge as full professional expertise, not a cultural supplement to the real curriculum, is where meaningful support has to begin.

Decolonization as a Personal Act

There came a point when I left a stable position in a mainstream urban school. I was not pushed out. I chose to go. The school ran on standardized testing and tight rubrics, and my attempts to bring Pasifika and Indigenous ecological knowledge into the science curriculum were met with polite concern about whether I was drifting from the learning goals.

Leaving was, for me, an act of decolonization. I stopped performing neutrality. I went to work in places where the relationships I brought into the room were treated as the curriculum, not as a complication.

Not every Indigenous educator has that choice. Many stay, and they stay for good reasons: commitment to their students, financial stability, the knowledge that leaving can feel like abandonment. It is their right to stay; however, the schools that depend on their presence owe them more than a seat on an equity committee or a mention in a year-end report. They owe them the conditions to teach without having to choose, every day, between their professional standing and their own integrity.

That is what it actually means to create conditions for learning and wellbeing. It begins with being honest about what the current conditions cost.

Reflection Questions

What do you know about the daily negotiation Indigenous educators in your school carry between professional expectations and their own knowledge and heritage? When did you last ask one of them directly?

Does your school’s commitment to Indigenous education show up in how you evaluate and support Indigenous teachers, or only in what gets scheduled for assemblies and P.A. days?

What would it look like in your school to treat an Indigenous educator’s ways of knowing as professional expertise, not a cultural add-on, but the real thing?