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?
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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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