A collection of aboriginal stories and wisdoms for counsellor development

Current mainstream counselling education is Euro-American based; a practice presenting other worldviews, including Indigenous, as sidelines categorized under umbrella terms such as multiculturalism, diversity or cultural competency. This relatively singular lens misses the depth in counselling practices and often sees other cultures incorrectly and leads to misunderstandings or unhelpful, even harmful practices like racism. Aboriginal stories and wisdoms have been gathered to develop Indigenous curriculum that will share equal educational space. For this project, I combined Indigenous principles and protocols and standard qualitative methods to gather and analyze the information. I interviewed Aboriginal people I had known previously from various BC Nations as unique individuals holding wisdom and knowledge passed to them through their Indigenous ancestry, and with various connections to counselling as a client, counsellor, educator and/or course developer. Their collective voice suggests Indigenous knowledge be delivered in an Indigenous way using heart learning and spiritual purpose, teachings seen as absent in in western based counselor education.