2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In line with the LEES division theme, “Engineering Education for Truth and Reconciliation”, this paper reflects on the question, what does it mean to ‘Indigenize’ or ‘decolonize’ engineering education on stolen land? Following calls to address colonialism in Canadian and American higher education, universities have increasingly undertaken Indigenization, reconciliation, and decolonization initiatives. However, without addressing the colonial legacies of the university, these initiatives can further maintain and legitimize white settler and university futurities. By extension, without confronting the colonial legacies of engineering in Canadian and American nation-building, initiatives to ‘Indigenize’ or 'decolonize’ engineering education, consequently, can reproduce the colonial extraction of Indigenous knowledge whilst naturalizing the permeance of the settler colonial state.

In this paper, we reflect on our experiences as white and racialized settler undergraduate and graduate engineering students, engineering education researchers, and faculty, within the Canadian and American university contexts. Our methodology draws on a duoethnographic approach, dialogically engaging with each of our individual stories to contextualize the themes of racial capitalism and settler colonialism as experienced through our engineering education experiences.

We start our dialogue by contending with our experiences with institutional equity, diversity, and inclusion initiatives, and the tensions we felt doing that work within the colonial and racial capitalist foundations of engineering education and practice. We then discuss each of our experiences in our respective engineering programs, how they exemplified neoliberal and militaristic priorities in engineering education, and how they contribute to a dominant ‘collective memory’ in the engineering discipline.

We offer reflections on our dialogue and writing processes, as well as questions that have arisen from this experience–both to ourselves and to the engineering education community engaging in decolonizing and anti-colonial work. Our reflections are part of our process for intentionally ‘pausing’ to make space to discuss the tensions, implications, and contradictions of ‘Indigenizing’ or ‘decolonizing’ engineering education.