Teaching and Learning Anthropology

This article employs Indigenous urbanism as an analytical approach, as developed by Anishinaabe and settler scholar Heather Dorries (2023), to show how pedagogical interventions employed in the teaching of an undergraduate course at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada) contributed to an enhanced theorization of the city. It discusses the ways in which pedagogical activities shaped the students’ understanding of historiography, Indigenous urban lives, and the construction of shared urban spaces. In focusing on the local histories, territorialities, and specificities of Montreal as a shared and continuously renegotiated Indigenous-settler space, pedagogical interventions used in the course prompted students to reflect on how their own positionality coproduces knowledge about the city. Understanding themselves as knowledge makers, and thus co-producers of urban spaces, students were able to better define the contours of their own relations to the Montreal urban spatialities and socialities. By generously sharing their evolving meaning-making and positionalities, students demonstrated that the Right to the City is a collective reclamation of the urban space that recognizes and affirms Indigenous peoples as rights holders and not simply stakeholders.