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Dr. Betty Bastien was part of the for more than two decades as a student, teacher, researcher and co-creator of the faculty’s community learning circle’s curriculum.

Bastien, BSW'80, MSW'86, PhD, was a groundbreaker in the truest sense of the word. Her scholarship, work, determination and passionate advocacy created a new way and, in doing so, opened a path for others to follow.

As former Social Work dean , PhD, wrote in a letter supporting the University of Ģ����ý she received in 2017, “Dr. Bastien is recognized internationally for her leadership in strengthening Indigenous communities. Her vision and passion have helped create community-based healing approaches that restore Indigenous communities and provide a path toward reconciliation.”

In advancing Indigenous Ways of Knowing in academia, she created dialogue where there was little previously, and opened a pathway for generations of Indigenous social workers to come. In that way, her change was seismic, creating parallel pathways of accreditation, and perhaps helping to bring more Indigenous social workers into the profession and thereby helping to decolonize the profession itself.

The path to relational accountability

As a child, when Bastien would leave her beautiful home on the Piikani Nation, where the rippling grasslands roll up against the snow-capped foothills, she would roll through the surrounding towns — Pincher Creek, Lethbridge, Cardston — and she would wonder at the differences.

Why did they have so much stuff? So much of everything? Why did life seem so much easier for the settler children and their families?

“The differences were so stark,” she told me. “I didn't understand them.”

The desire to understand the yawning gulf propelled her forward into a life of action and purpose. A life that changed so much and created a better future for so many.

I had the rare opportunity and privilege to interview Bastien in 2017 while I was still fairly new to the Faculty of Social Work and probably didn’t fully appreciate what a privilege it was to have the gift of an hour with her. It was an amazing time for Bastien, who was being recognized with a prestigious UĢ����ý Arch Award after formally retiring and, at the same time, she was feverishly working to create a paradigm-shifting full Indigenous curriculum at Red Crow College.

She told me that, in some ways, she felt her life had come full circle, from learning Western knowledge and paradigms, to blending that knowledge with Blackfoot ways of knowing, to a new and better perspective.

“It's like all that knowledge I got from the West, in getting a PhD and all the education I received. Then working with Indigenous knowledge and that whole sense of blending that knowledge into the West," Bastien said. "Now I get it all as Indigenous. Now I sit in that paradigm in terms of the Indigenous practice of social work.

“It has been a wonderful journey.”

The road to social work

Bastien's journey initially began in sociology, where she attempted to better understand the gulf between Western and Indigenous Peoples. She said this helped her create a structural understanding of Canada.

“I wanted to work in that area, to be of service for Indigenous people," she said. "That's kind of what we're told as we're in our own upbringing, our own socialization, our communities, to support our nation.”

To that end, Bastien knew she needed more education to do the things she wanted to do, so, after graduating with a sociology degree from the University of Lethbridge, she accepted UĢ����ý’s offer and did her Bachelor of Social Work (BSW) here.

Like many, she says there was one professor and one course during her BSW that really changed her life – a course in social policy from , BA'75, MA'76, PhD.

“That course, gave me a perspective of where and how to make a difference in terms of providing services that are relevant to the needs of the people who we were providing services to," said Bastien. "Also, the whole notion of social justice, how to work in the social service area and to be an advocate for marginalized peoples. That course really gave me a sense of where I needed to go in my life, in my practice and gave depth to what I can do.”

It was during her Master of Social Work at UĢ����ý, focused on social policy and service delivery, that she found the approach, to use Ismael’s term, the relevancy, for those she wanted to help. In studying how institutions work and how services are constructed for the marginalized, Bastien began developing what she described as an Indigenous management paradigm.

“It was using our (Blackfoot) values to provide services that really are based on relational accountability,” she explained. “That really provided an opening of how I could start to practise from an Indigenous perspective.”

How our language creates and defines us

As Bastien began to “really go into depth” on the Blackfoot paradigm, she struggled to find a way to teach this knowledge to her students. At the same time, she was taking on the heroic task of developing and bringing Indigenous knowledge systems into academia.

“It starts with the heart,” she told me. “We called it Indigenous science. It's really that connection. I would say in a sense a spirituality, but people make it sound like it’s faith or something like that. It's really what we call the universal intelligence. 

"There's a word — synchronicity. It's that holistic nature. That holistic, organic, relational nature of an Indigenous paradigm. And it starts with the heart.”

Bastien's life brought her to a place where her heart could write the book that she knew needed to be written: Blackfoot Ways of Knowing: The Worldview of the Siksikaitsitapi.

The book, considered a touchstone for many Indigenous scholars, outlined how, for the Blackfoot, knowledge is experiential, participatory and ultimately sacred. Bastien mapped out her own journey of coming to know, and how important the language we use is to our understanding of the world:

“You come from basic assumptions, which have been proven by quantum mechanics. It's an indivisible universe. Indivisible. We are interconnected, interdependent, reciprocal. It's a circle. Everything is in the moment and now," she said. "Our people knew this. I mean, we've been here 20,000 years. Colonization destroyed that, but this understanding was always there.

“That is our way. That is how we understand the universe to work. When you think this way, there are natural ethical principles and how to conduct ourselves. Our languages hold all that information.”

Language. Bastien explained that the Blackfoot understood that we create our world, we create understanding, for better or worse, with the words we choose and the meanings we give them. They are literally the most powerful tool, and in colonization they are a weapon that inflicts one way of knowing the world while erasing another.

Forging a new way

That’s why fighting for Indigenous language, culture and ceremony were so important to Bastien, along with notions of reciprocal responsibilities and interdependence. It’s also why she eventually left her position teaching in the Western system, even if the subject was Native American Studies.

“It doesn't nurture you as an academic or a person,” she said. “It was very cut and dry. It was always comparing Western and Indigenous paradigms, and it was comparisons made from a Western point of view, what some have called a systemic violence.”

It was about that time that salvation came from an unlikely source, the university itself. Her former dean, , BSW'74, MSW'78, PhD, also a woman of vision, approached her with a unique proposition, to come back to teaching, but explicitly not from a Western lens. 

The faculty was pioneering an innovative distance-learning initiative that set out to embrace Indigenous ways of knowing, and Rogers knew that Bastien was just the woman for the job.

Bastien agreed, on the condition she be allowed to work from home, and then set about putting the principles she had developed into action. Even years later, she spoke with emotion recalling that period in her life.

"I just get blown away now when I look at what they had given me!” she said. “I really want to acknowledge how the University of Ģ����ý created a space for me to practise my Indigenous knowledge and how we connect it to the ceremonies and to the land. Those are all the essential parts. Colonization destroyed all those parts, and those were the essential parts the University of Ģ����ý gave me so that I could work.”

And work she did. The position seemed to engage everything that Bastien carried within her, including her PhD in integral studies where she had begun to develop the bones of what an Indigenized curriculum might look like. She threw herself into helping build the Learning Circles curriculum and said she loved it, “deepening and immersing” herself in knowledge to be able to teach it.

She worked for the better part of two decades, once again breaking a trail that made it possible for other schools to follow, while simultaneously creating a curriculum that resonated with generations of social workers in rural and remote communities across Alberta. But the scope of her work, like her impact, was vast. Besides being an educator, she was also a researcher; she also worked inside social-service and child-welfare systems; and she spoke out frequently, a fierce advocate who brought awareness and change.

The circle begins again

Betty Bastien died in 2023. In describing her legacy, her husband, Henry Big Throat, says simply: “She became an institution. She led the creation of the Indigenous BSW and an Indigenous MSW which was recognized and accredited by the Canadian Association for Social Work Education and accredited by the National Indigenous Accreditation Board.”