Estelle Simard
University of Minnesota, Duluth, Social Work, Faculty Member
- Qualitative Research, Indigenous Knowledge, Indigenous Peoples, Indigenous Studies, Critical Indigenous Studies, American Indian Studies, and 7 moreFirst Nations of Canada, First Nation and Metis Studies, Indigenous education, Indigenous Movements, Pedagogy of Social Work, Critical Pedagogy, and Equity and Social Justice in Higher Educationedit
- Estelle Simard is a Doctoral Candidate in Educational Leadership with a specialization in curriculum and instruction.... moreEstelle Simard is a Doctoral Candidate in Educational Leadership with a specialization in curriculum and instruction. Her works center in Indigenous ways of knowing and being with inherit roots in Anishinaabe worldview, pedagogy, and research. She is an Indigenous faculty at the University of Minnesota Duluth teaching at both the BSW and MSW levels.edit
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Research Interests:
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An innovative approach to providing “care” to Aboriginal child who are making a transition into adulthood embodies the concept of culturally restorative practice. This paper is a literature review on Aboriginal child development for... more
An innovative approach to providing “care” to Aboriginal child who are making a transition into adulthood embodies the concept of culturally restorative practice. This paper is a literature review on Aboriginal child development for children and youth transitioning from a youth to an adult. This paper contains excerpts from “Developing a Culturally Restorative Approach to Aboriginal Child and Youth Development: Transitions to Adulthood” published as a social policy paper for Ontario’s Ministry of Child and Youth Services. The paper was a review of the literature of the following: culturally restorative practices, best practices for successful engagement with Aboriginal populations, thematic of Aboriginal development, as well as implications for child and youth services.
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Weechi-it-te-win Family Services is a community oriented, community based, Native staffed child and family service agency. Weechi-it-te-win serves 10 area First Nations communities located in the Rainy Lake District of Ontario. The agency... more
Weechi-it-te-win Family Services is a community oriented, community based, Native staffed child and family service agency. Weechi-it-te-win serves 10 area First Nations communities located in the Rainy Lake District of Ontario. The agency was created out of the collective wisdom of the 10 Chiefs of the Rainy Lake Tribal Council. Its purpose was to combat the destructive practices of mainstream child welfare agencies within the 10 First Nations communities. Weechi-it-te-win's fundamental purpose is to revitalize the Pimatiziwin of the communities served. Operating under the mandate of the Chiefs, Weechi-it-te-win provides bi-cultural child protection and family support services. Utilizing a decentralized model of governance and management, Weechi-it-te-win Family Services places an emphasis on personal and family healing as well as community capacity building. 4 Introduction Weechi-it-te-win Family Services (WFS) is a community oriented, community based, Native staffed child wel...
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The US social work profession has historically claimed primarily middle-class white women as the "founders" of the profession, including Jane Addams and Mary Richmond. Scholarship of the history of the profession has focused... more
The US social work profession has historically claimed primarily middle-class white women as the "founders" of the profession, including Jane Addams and Mary Richmond. Scholarship of the history of the profession has focused almost entirely on settlement houses, anti-poverty advocacy, and charity in the late 1800s in the northeastern United States as the groundwork of current social work practice. Courses in social work history socialize students into this historical framing of the profession and perpetuate a white supremacist narrative of white women as the primary doers of social justice work that colonizes the bodies and knowledge of Indigenous people and their helping systems. Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) in the US have always had indigenous systems of social care. Yet, the social justice work of BIPOC, and especially Indigenous people in the US, is left out of the dominant narrative of the history of social work practice for several reasons including...
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Research Interests:
A research project was implemented through the use of qualitative secondary data analysis to describe a theory of culturally restorative child welfare practice with the application of cultural attachment theory. The research documented 20... more
A research project was implemented through the use of qualitative secondary data analysis to describe a theory of culturally restorative child welfare practice with the application of cultural attachment theory. The research documented 20 years of service practice that promoted Anisinaabe cultural identity and cultural attachment strategies, by fostering the natural cultural resiliencies that exist within the Anishaabe nation. The research brings a suggested methodology to child welfare services for First Nation children the greater the application of cultural attachment strategies the greater the response to cultural restoration processes within a First Nation community.