“Indigenous people were engineers — we weren’t called engineers, but we were. We found solutions to a lot of things like medicine, transportation, hunting, farming and aquaculture, and our designs have held up for thousands of years.”
Kileigh Harrington is here because she wants to make a difference.
Surrounded by cameras in the Oasis Garden across from Alumni Memorial Hall, a film crew readies Harrington, a recent graduate of the Mechanical Engineering and Society program, for her first on-camera interview. It’s late September, and a sharp chill cuts through the air. Students walk by, asking the crew if they’re setting up to film a movie. “Yes,” jokes Harrington. “A major one.”
In the Engineering and Society program, students are taught to “find their Venn diagram” — the place where what you’re good at, what you like to do and what needs to be done collide.
That’s why Harrington, who has Métis and Irish settler ancestors, has spent the last year designing a course that centres Indigenous ways of knowing in engineering design.
Indigenizing engineering education
Under the supervision of Duncan Cree, an associate professor of mechanical engineering who grew up in the Mohawk community of Kanesatake, Québec, John Colenbrander, facilities manager for the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and Beverly Jacobs, Mohawk Nation, Bear Clan of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and Vice-Provost Indigenous, Harrington is incorporating Indigenous perspectives and pedagogies into the curriculum to Indigenize engineering education at McMaster.
“When we talk about Indigenization, there are three distinct parts of a spectrum that we want to talk about,” says Harrington.
On one side of the spectrum, Harrington explains, is inclusion. In this context, inclusion means, “including more Indigenous students and faculty into the university.”
On the opposite end of the spectrum is decolonization. This is where “we reconstruct the university and how it works as a system,” she says.
And in the middle of the spectrum is reconciliation. This is the place within the existing system where “we’re trying to bring in Indigenous perspectives and have non-Indigenous people work to create safer spaces that work towards the recommendations set out by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.”
It’s right in this middle section that Harrington does her work. “When I talk about Indigenizing engineering education, I mean incorporating Indigenous perspectives and pedagogies so we can work towards that reconciliation.”
Harrington’s vision for their Engineering design course adds Indigenous ways of knowing and being into the very fabric of the class in two different ways — pedagogical approaches and discussions about different perspective.
Unlike traditional lecture-based courses, explains Harrington, this course would give students the opportunity to “get out on the land more and really focus on land-based experiential learning.”
But what does this pedagogical approach look like in practice? For Harrington, it means giving students the opportunity to talk directly with Elders and Knowledge Keepers to establish an understanding of history and how various Indigenous communities in our area interact with government and industry.
This out-of-the-classroom, experiential education would be supplemented by an exploration of different teachings attributed to the Haudenosaunee, the Anishinaabe and the Métis communities that are in close proximity to McMaster’s campus, and how these teachings relate to engineering design.
One of the Haudenosaunee teachings that would be referenced in the course, Harrington says, is the Seven Generations Principle.
According to Harrington, the Seven Generations Principle says that “any decision you make, you have to consider seven generations before, and seven generations after you.” This lesson teaches engineers to question “how we are considering the long-term effects of our solutions while also looking to the past to learn from them,” she says.
These teachings would ultimately culminate in a final design project that challenges students to identify an Indigenous community on Turtle Island, now known as North America, that is facing a technical problem, and develop proposal and consultation plans to theoretically work alongside these communities.
For Cree, who notes that Indigenous designs “have been out there for thousands of years and have had thousands of years to make them better,” this design project is where students would be able to express their creativity and understanding of the course content.
“Let’s say I ask the students to design a device that will help me walk in deep snow without sinking, but there’s one constraint: You can’t use the snowshoe design,” says Cree. “I’m really wondering what type of design they would come up with.”
This type of thinking is especially important, says Cree, because there are over 600 Indigenous communities in Canada, each one unique. “There’s no one-size-fits-all solution,” he says. “That’s why you want engineers who are equipped to think about what the repercussions of their designs are on the future, on communities and on the environment.”
Reflecting on Harrington’s vision for the final design project, Colenbrander also highlighted how a course that exposes aspiring engineers to various perspectives and beliefs reflects the type of work they would be doing as real engineers out in the field.
“Think about when we’re designing things,” he says. “Who are we designing for? Who do we interact with? What perspectives do we consider? How do we integrate different ways of knowing and doing and learning?”
And these questions, which students have to consider when different perspectives are incorporated into the curriculum, are key to unlocking students’ potential, says Colenbrander.
“By integrating Indigenous ways of learning and knowing into the curriculum, we actually expand the perspectives that our students are exposed to,” he says. “It’s a great universal design approach that expands the toolkit our students can use when they’re solving real-world problems.”
Finding your own Venn diagram
As an undergraduate student, Harrington noticed that she was the only Engineering student in the Indigenous Studies courses she took as electives and began to wonder why that was the case.
“There’s a lot of really important knowledge and perspectives that are taught in these courses that every Engineering student should have,” says Harrington. “That realization is what started me on this journey.”
That realization is also what led Harrington here, to this garden on this chilly autumn day. And as the cameras rolled around her, Harrington was asked to reflect on her work a year after it all began and discuss her “why.”
After a brief pause to take in the question and a slight chuckle, Harrington returned to the familiar motivation behind it all — the desire to make a difference.
“Sometimes making a difference is easier than you think, and sometimes people are willing to listen to you even though you’re just a little undergrad who hasn’t been out in the world,” she says with a laugh. “But you have to push for what you want and what you believe so you can actually make a difference.”
There’s still more work to do before Harrington’s dream course will become a reality. Alongside her supervisors, Harrington hopes to work with Six Nations of the Grand River, Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation and the Métis Nation of Ontario to help develop the curriculum for the course. This works includes the development of learning goals for engineering students that will guide the Indigenous design course, as well as the development of course content that respectfully includes local teaching.
But for now, Harrington is right where she wants to be.
“I’m right at the centre of my Venn diagram,” she says. “I enjoy this, I think it’s really important and I think I can make an impact at McMaster and on the world if I continue this work.”