https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_F_jl3BE-k I recently watched this video where Noam Chomsky is interviewing Sherman Alexie, a First Nations author. I have read Alexie's book "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian" and liked the book. Sherman allows Noam to delve into deep parts of his psyche and reveals a very troubled person whose craft of writing does not bring him comfort but reveals parts of himself that he is driven to reveal. He tells us of his alcoholic father, his bi polar disorder, his foot in two worlds perspective on life. At one point he says he is a tribe of one. I like Alexie's book and so I am interested in him as an author (like he says in this interview, transparency is what we like now as readers). Along with reading the history of the Mi'kmaq and listening to stories like the one told to my class about the residential school system, I am starting to see that there is a lot of healing needed for the people stuck in between unfair government policies that continue to this day, and public opinion that brands them as alcoholics and ne'er-do-wells that just want government handouts. It must be awfully difficult to be a First Nations person in this country. I think books like this, interviews like this, and conversations like this need to be had so that people can gain a greater understanding. I know that for me, greater understanding brought greater empathy. I see things very differently than I did before I learned about how this group of people has been treated in Canada. I hope I imparted that to my Grade 9 class this year.
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I have been reading "We Were Not the Savages" by Daniel N. Paul and it's really interesting! I am a history major originally when I took my Bachelor of Arts. I also have an ancestor that is Mi'kmaq (both of my parents are originally from Prince Edward Island). I think the book explores the history of the contact between the Mi'kmaq and the white settlers very well. I am learning things I have never learned before. One of the things that I am starting to wonder though...is that whenever I read a history that is too one-sided, too slanted, I begin to wonder if it is accurate. This book is a great balance to the typical history of FN book (which is often whitewashed to the benefit of the White establishment) but it does make the First Peoples look like saints and the White settlers look entirely like sinners and I wonder, as I read, if that could possibly be accurate. The real story is rarely like that. I am not discounting this historical account. Please understand that I just have been trained to read histories with a critical eye and I have been feeling that it's slanted one way. That being said, I am enjoying the book. I've taught history quite a bit so I knew the stories of the English/French fight over the control of the resources and the loyalty of the First Nations people. I knew the Coeur de Bois went and married into tribes. However, I had not heard from the First Nations perspective how this was seen before. I am getting the sense that they liked the French way better than the English. I can see why, at that time and through that perspective why that was: they had likely seen the ousting of the Acadians and knew how the British operated. The French respected them way more and had shown a willingness to learn and see through other viewpoints. This wasn't a something they were pretending to do, they really did embrace a different philosophy, at least the actual explorers did. I'm not sure the French government saw it that way. I wonder how things would have turned out had the French strategy worked and they had won the seven year war? There are parts of the history that I've never seen before. I hold no illusions about the kindness of the English, they were brutal and heartless and, one could say, psychotic, in their pursuit of wealth and land. I knew they had done terrible things. However, ambushing a longhouse and attacking mostly unarmed women, children and elderly...that was a new low. I also only vaguely knew about what they had done after the first Thanksgiving. I didn't realize how quickly it had happened. They had no conscience whatsoever and it's still as shocking to me today as it was the first time I read it during my learning for my BA degree. The brutal history of Canada makes one wonder at this spin we have spun ourselves to explain who we are as Canadians and as a people. I recently began teaching about the residential school system to the youngest group ever: grade 9 students. This group that I'm teaching is a lively group. Together they are highly curious and very interested in learning about things. (They are also very hard to keep quiet while teaching but that's the price you pay for curiousity as a teacher, I think). They are shocked that they've never heard of this before. I saw their difficulty in fully believing it at first but now that they do, they are having trouble understanding why. I don't know what to tell them. There is no good reason, is there? I can't even justify it myself, or explain it myself, and I am not new to the ideas I'm presenting to them. The last class I taught, they told me that they had never heard any real First Nations history before and they were beginning to think that was wrong (smart young people!). They are also having some trouble truly connecting their ideas about who we are as Canadians with the new knowledge they have just learned. I think that's a good thing. In order for us to truly move forward as a society, we have to learn about who we are, who we were, and who we want to be in the future. As long as we shut our eyes to the truth about who we were (and are) as a people, we will do more damage and will not be able to truly move forward into what I hope is a kinder, more accepting world of the future. We will be doomed to continue repeating the past. This is why books like Daniel Paul's, as slanted as they might be, are important to the discussion of who we were. The students are right: they should have been taught the whole of Canadian history way before now. How do we move forward when we keep hiding from the past? I watched a video recently on the sense of humour, as told through the eyes of First Nations peoples in Canada. https://www.nfb.ca/film/redskins_tricksters_puppy_stew I found that very interesting as I noticed a different, more encompassing sense of humour in all the First peoples I have met in my life. One Inuit man told me I had to feed mosquitoes if I didn't have a permit to kill them (as we were being swarmed in their tent on the tundra). He said it so deadpan that for a split second I wondered if he were serious. I have also seen sharing circle leaders use humour to diffuse intense emotions while talking to a group of young people about serious and difficult subjects. I suppose all people love to laugh but I wonder if the place it comes from for the people who have been collectively and thoroughly hurt need it a little more. The film explores different comedians and shows. I knew about the Dead Dog Cafe because I've read a few books from Thomas King and he mentions it quite a bit. I had never heard it before though, it was very interesting to hear about how people took him seriously when they did a bit on eating dogs. I can well imagine the reaction in southern BC about a subject like that! Another comedy skit is done by two women who are passionate about elders and they do a very funny impersonation of elderly women and their concerns and their everyday conversations. They had the people in gathered in tears from laughing. Talking about real issues in a funny way, bringing issues to light in a light-hearted manner, these things seemed important as I watched the film. I was impressed that a well known comedian (well I knew him...I assume everyone has seen him) would go out of his way to come to Toronto to do a comedy show at his own expense. It sounded like he didn't have any monetary reasons for doing it (after expenses he didn't make any money, he told us). He must be awfully passionate about his craft to do that! Last week we had a visitor come to my 12th grade classroom to talk about the residential school system and his personal experience with it. He emphasized, in his experience, that he was told over and over again that he was a 'heathen' and a 'pagan' and that's why they were doing it to him (subjugating him, essentially.) He told stories about young girls who had pins pushed through their tongues and told to bite down on the pin to stab each side of their mouth, to punish them for speaking Cree. He also told us of secret babies that were born to girls who were imprisoned in this school and sold off to Europeans overseas, never to be seen again. He also told us of his inability to parent his own children, not really knowing how to show love but only knowing what punishment looked like. It was heartbreaking and a very good description of all I've read.
I have heard stories before, have cried over the idea that we (Canada) has done this to generations of people, and yet nothing brings it home quite like a first hand experience. We also heard a presentation from one of the members of the class, whose family has experienced the residential school system. Before our speaker came in, he stood up in class, gave a 20 minute presentation, where he told us why a lot of the First Nations people they see in our community were alcoholics and left absolutely no doubt in their minds of the reason. He told us of his grandfather being raped repeatedly by the priest, and the nuns, who were supposed to care for the children, taking him out of his bed at night for this visit. The man who came as a speaker to our class, his main goal was reconciliation. He said that the only way that could happen is if the knowledge of what happened to those children became common knowledge and there was an understanding between those White Canadians and those First Peoples who had gone through this, about what had happened and what needed to be done from now on. I have taught about the residential school system every year since I started teaching. However, I am always learning. More about this next post! Taking In the past few weeks I've wandered aimlessly around two books I've been reading and various YouTube offerings about aboriginal education. The two books are "Decolonizing Education: Nourishing the Learning Spirit" by Marie Battiste and "We Were Not the Savages" by Daniel N. Paul, both Mi'kmaq authors.( I've also been noticing how many times Marie Battiste has been quoted in our Social Studies textbook at the Alberta high school I work at, but that's a side note).
For the last two months, I've gotten quite interested in the ideas that the unschoolers are putting out there; John Taylor Gatto, John Holt, and Ivan Illich are the authors whose works I've been reading and I as I have been wondering if we are even doing the right things in school for any students, I am confronted with the idea that we have definitely not been doing the right things for our students who are at risk of being oppressed both at school and in the wider society. All of these thoughts and ideas have led to some cognitive dissonance for me. I really believed that even though we needed to work on what we were doing, that there was some hope for our education system. After reading all these ideas, I'm wondering if education as we know it should be scrapped entirely and we should start from scratch. The more we move towards standardization, the further we move away from including people, both in our educational models and in our society at large. I find this quite disturbing. Mostly though, I'm frustrated. I do not swallow the ideas of Gatto whole, he seems quite bitter and angry. However, he makes some extremely good points. Holt, on the other hand, is hard to dismiss. Unlike Gatto, who does not seem like a academic with any qualifications other than his 30 embittered years as a teacher, Holt has a well thought out philosophy and it is quite compelling. His basic philosophy is that the whole system of education and schooling, combined with the wider society's interest in keeping people obedient and compliant, is rotten right to the core. The best thing you can do for your kids is to take them out and teach them at home. And for goodness sake, don't take them out and teach them the curriculum, which is the very thing that is perpetuating these problems, let them learn what they want to learn, what's valuable to them. He believed that if you give a child the tools he or she needs, they will need very little 'compulsion' because humans want to learn. So what does this have to do with the books about aboriginal education? Well if I applied those principles to the idea of aboriginal education, I can honestly not see the benefit of compelling any students, but especially aboriginal students, from attending schools where the white myth of superiority is an undercurrent in everything we do. I've read a lot of other works about how to be more inclusive but I always felt that it didn't quite go far enough. That is combined with my opinion that the standard measure of 'success' is flawed as well. What is success in school anyway? Isn't it that people come out of the education system empowered, able to make good decisions, with skills that they need to move into the world of work and life? Well I'm not sure our standardized tests that are implemented by almost every province, are really measuring those things. Success is different for everyone but there are some things that are simply not valued in our school system. We steer kids away from things that they are passionate about. Art, mechanics, etc., are considered inferior to being, say, a university professor. I think that's wrong, it is creating a situation where certain people, no matter what they achieve, can never be considered successful by our society. Why don't we measure happiness after 10 years of leaving school? What if THAT was the measure? What would we change in schools if that was what we considered accomplishment in life? Or what if we measured how many community connection a person had after they had been gone from school for 20 years, what would change if that was the measure? I recently watched a TED talk where the speaker, Robert Waldinger) was arguing that happiness and fulfillment was about the relationships we had in life. http://www.ted.com/talks/robert_waldinger_what_makes_a_good_life_lessons_from_the_longest_study_on_happiness If that's happiness and fulfillment, why do we measure success with a dollar value? It makes no sense! I wonder if those are our values in education, if we have any business teaching students at all. I think that students we consider 'at risk' like aboriginal students, their values are being under appreciated. The things that are supposed to make us as humans happy and fulfilled are what the First Nations people are DOING. So why is it undervalued? I have thoughts about each separate item I've read and studied but I will wait for another day to write about them. Those are the most burning thoughts in my heart today. As a result of this study about unschooling and the movement around the world to completely shake up/change education, I've have seriously considered pulling out of education myself. I am simply not sure we are doing the right thing anymore. I have a small burning hope that things can be changed and that I could be part of the change, but I'm just not sure what direction to go in professionally to accomplish that. Until next time, Golda |
AuthorMasters in Education student at the University of New Brunswick, I am avidly interested in the future of education, especially for First Nation, Metis and Inuit students in Canada. I believe change is going to come from these sectors who have the most room for growth and the most interest in seeing the status quo changed. Archives
March 2016
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