She smiled warmly – said, “No.” That was the beginning of a relationship for which I will be eternally grateful. When we first met, I presented Keeta with a copy of the Seven Grandfathers in Academic Integrity resource (Maracle 2020) that had been developed for use at the University of Toronto and asked her if she could do something similar for the University of Calgary. I have said on various occasions that Keeta “breaks your brain in the most beautiful ways”. In the summer of 2020, I had the privilege of meeting and hiring Keeta Gladue, a Cree and Métis graduate student and Indigenous student program advisor at the University of Calgary. The student resource created by Iehnhotonkwas (Bonnie Jane) Maracle at the University of Toronto (Maracle 2020) inspired me to hire a student at the University of Calgary to help us advance our institutional understandings of what it means to decolonize and Indigenize academic integrity. With regards to Indigenization, I knew that I was not the person to lead that work. I knew that there was much more work to be done. I did not realize until later that these negotiations with the publisher were my initiation into allyship.įollowing those negotiations, I committed to deepening my understanding of equity, diversity, inclusion, decolonization and Indigenization of academic integrity. In the end, the publisher agreed to allow me to keep the word “Indigenous” and allowed it to be capitalized and I was grateful. However, negotiating with the production team as the manuscript was being prepared for publication made me realize the importance of social justice in all aspects of our scholarship, including editorial decisions. Let me be clear that in general I had a good experience working with the team at ABC-CLIO and felt particularly supported by Jessica Gribble, the Senior Acquisitions Editor with whom I worked most closely. Of all the negotiations I anticipated having with the book publisher, these were not among them. I gently but firmly rejected this, explaining that as a Canadian, we use the term “Indigenous” and it would be unethical for me to change this wording, even though that’s what might be used by an American publisher or better understood by readers in the United States. I also pushed back on the suggestion that perhaps “Indigenous” could be changed to “Native American”. I was even more of a neophyte then about decolonization 2 years ago, but I knew that capitalizing the word “Indigenous” was a small, but important signal of allyship, so I insisted that it be capitalized throughout. When the book went into production in the fall of that year, I recall that I had challenging conversations with the production editors, who initially changed all instances of “Indigenous” in the manuscript to start with a lower case “i”, so it complied with the style guide used by the publisher. As a result, people the world over began to (re)consider racism, discrimination, and equity in new ways. That event, and others that followed, sparked “a racial reckoning” (Smith 2021). ![]() I submitted the book manuscript to the publisher in the summer of 2020, a few weeks after George Floyd’s murder in the city of Minneapolis, USA. I was beginning to educate myself about foundational concepts related to equity, diversity, and inclusion, as well as decolonization and Indigenization. In the chapter I cite various Indigenous writers including Louie ( 2019, 2020), Louie et al. That chapter, in particular, challenged me to deepen my own understandings of these topics and also reminded me of the importance to remain humble as a scholar and be constantly aware of the limitations of one’s own knowledge. I wrote about bias and racial profiling in academic misconduct reporting, the role of culture, and considerations for decolonizing and Indigenizing academic integrity. I wanted to expand the conversation beyond what had already been discussed in the literature and bring forward new ideas for consideration. ![]() As I developed the book, I shifted my focus and instead, chapter nine became about diversity, equity, and inclusion. In the early stages of the writing, I envisioned a chapter about international students. ![]() When an acquisitions editor at ABC-CLIO reached to me to write a book on academic integrity, I accepted the offer and developed the book proposal for Plagiarism in Higher Education: Tackling Tough Topics in Academic Integrity (Eaton 2021b).
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