Indigenous peoples and the federal government of Canada, which have evolved over
centuries, the conceptual framework of the research is a complex and complicated
system. It is based on the moral and ethical system of values of different peoples and
cause-and-effect relations between them.
The purpose of our study is to highlight the specifics of the theoretical and
methodological framework of Indigenous education development in Canada. The
authors identified the following tasks: 1) to analyse the scientific and pedagogical
literature of the problem under research; 2) to specify the conceptual and categorical
framework of indigenous education in Canada; 3) to present methodological
approaches to the research on the development of indigenous education in Canada. A
set of research methods has been used to solve certain tasks: descriptive, statistical and
comparative to study the concept of "Indigenous peoples" in Canada; induction and
deduction to collect and generalize pedagogical material; analytical to process facts
and data; logical method to understand the patterns and basic concepts of indigenous
education in Canada.
Research results.The problem of identifying Indigenous peoples and isolating
them from the titular nation arose at the end of the nineteenth century in the context of
the collapse of colonial systems. By analysing the source of the study, we have found
that in international law there is no officially accepted definition of the term
"Indigenous peoples". In most cases, "Indigenous peoples" are called "... peoples living
in multiethnic societies of independent countries and are descendants of those who
inhabited a country or geographic region of a country, from the time of its conquest
and colonization, or during the period of the establishment of the existing state borders
"(Lopushinskyi, 2011, p. 87). Regarding the local population of a country, the terms
aboriginal, autochthonous and native are widely used in national literature. Aborigines
(Lat. Aborigients - from the beginning) - Indigenous people of a certain territory that
have lived there since ancient times, that is, from the beginning of its existence.
Autochthons (gr.autos - themselves and chthon - earth) are called the primitive
population of a particular land. Indigenous people is the general name of any native
local population, an ethnic group or a nation that inhabited a particular territory before
the dominant populations, ethnic groups or nations, and has a social system different
from similar systems of neighboring or coming-dominant populations, ethnic groups
and nations (Lopushinskyi, 2011). An essential feature that distinguishes Indigenous
people from other peoples living in the territory of a particular state is that, regardless
of their legal status, they retained their inherent social, cultural, economic and political
peculiarities. And these peculiarities clearly diversify them from other national groups.
The indispensable feature of belonging to Indigenous peoples is self-identification as
Indigenous in the territory of a certain state. Thus, the main criterion for the
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