Jessie Loyer is Cree-Métis and is part of the Michel First Nation. She works as an academic librarian at Mount Royal University on Blackfoot – Treaty Seven Territory in Calgary. One aspect of her work is researching how edtech and Indigenous perspectives intersect. Jessie talks about the altruistic qualities of openness and how compelling open can be for educators (2019, Loyer). In my teaching practice there have been instances where I have paused around the use of open practices because of the topics my students were sharing and not knowing where the lines were in opening certain information to larger audiences and community interest in the topic. Jessie provided me the language I needed to understand being cautious in certain open practices and how to frame this for my students. Openness is great, but it can also become a harvesting of knowledge from community to present to larger unknown audiences using open practices as the vehicle and student grading as the reward for doing so. Jessie has provided language for me around the pause and begin to consider what it is we share in the open space and how I can inadvertently demand it to be shared as an educator with power over students.

As a librarian, Loyer curates work and she has presented around the topics of decolonizing open education practices, traditional knowledge licensing and the implications of openness for Indigenous communities and students. She draws parallels between land displacement and knowledge displacement in our push for openness. Jessie asks us to consider the intersection of the push towards openness with Indigenous understanding of knowledge and to understand this before we embark on open practices in our rush to be altruistic open educators.

You can see two presentations she gave below, one in 2019 and one in 2020.

Loyer, Jessie (October 24, 2019) Can We Decolonize Open? (1 of 2) Open Access Week 2019 Event. Kwantlen Polytechnic University. https://media.kpu.ca/media/Open+Access+Week+2019+event+-+Can+we+Decolonize+OpenF+%28Part+1+of+2%29/0_l0tzsefz

Loyer, Jessie (November 12, 2020) Keynote OpenEd 2020. Open Education Conference, 2020.
https://youtu.be/YJzrxbQZLF0

Jessie has her publications on her website which is found here:  https://www.jessieloyer.com/publications

Also excuse me she started a TikTok and I love it her username is Indigenouslibrarian .