"Who did I get to be?" Racialized and gendered discourses and the shaping of Indigenous girls' subjectivities in a northern Saskatchewan high school

Abstract

This study explores how school discourses of race and gender have shaped the subjectivities of Indigenous girls in a provincial high school in Northern Saskatchewan. Feminist poststructural theory, race critical theories, and spatial theory have been used as theoretical frames to examine how Indigenous female students have taken up racialized and gendered discourses from their high school experiences. This study also examines the relationship between discourses of race and gender and the formation of identity constellations, theorizing that socially constructed identity categories do not operate separately in the constitution of student subjectivities. Specifically, this study focuses on former students of Churchill Community High School (CCHS), a provincial school in La Ronge, Saskatchewan with a large school population of Indigenous students. Interviews were conducted with fifteen former students who identify as both Indigenous and female and who attended CCHS between 2010 and 2016. Throughout the interviews, the participants discussed experiences with messages of race and gender that circulated in the school during their time at CCHS, reflecting upon how they had responded to those gendered and racialized school discourses. Combining the research methodologies of Foucauldian discourse analysis and feminist poststructural discourse analysis, I analyzed the interviews to further identify and explore discourses of race and gender in the participants’ discussions of their school experiences. I also examined the subject positions made available through those discourses and the ways in which the participants took up, negotiated, or resisted those discourses and subject positions. Lastly, the analysis of the interviews was tied into an examination of various texts that contained wider discourses of gender and race within the historical, social, and educational context of Northern Saskatchewan.