Aborigi-Me in Spirit

How great was Friday’s Aboriginal Education Day? Here were some highlights for me from Dan Smoke, Mary Lou Smoke, and Christy R. Bressette ’s addresses:
• The prohibition of smudging today merely continues the cultural assimilist laws of the past i.e. Potlatch Laws
• First Nations clans ( fish, bear, snake, heron, etc.) function in similar ways to the Scottish clan system
• Historical and current educational policy for First Nations peoples include the: creation of the Indian Act ( 1876), residential school system, reserve federal day schools system, integration policy and community based school
• In case you missed it, Mary Lou led the auditorium in the signing of the “Water Song”. It was awesome!


There were so many workshops I wanted to go to but I obviously couldn’t be in 7 places at once. I did attend Bill Hill’s Double Vision: Single Focus and Faron Whiteye’s Policy/Policing and Teaching workshops if anyone’s interested. I would love to share. Can anyone share some ideas or lessons they learned from their workshops with me? My partner and I are doing a unit plan for Tomson Highway’s The Rez Sisters and are very much interested on hearing ideas. In terms of resources, there are a lot out there but here is a link to curriculum.org’s invaluable Teacher’s Resource Guide to Aboriginal Literatures in Canada.

Aborigi-Me in Mind (Educational Psychology)

Echoing many scholars’ sentiments, Dan Smoke notes that “our education system needs to be indigenized”. Therefore similar to the ways in which multiliteracies bridges the curriculum to our multi literate students, Dan spoke of ‘culture based ‘curriculums that welcome FNMI ( First Nations, Metis & Inuit) students within the multicultural mosaic . Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Distance (ZPD) asks the teacher both to scaffold student learning towards objectives but also to understand where the student is coming from.

Aborigin-Me in Body (Professional Practices)

Under “Relevancy and Voice”, Christy Bressette reiterated the necessity to appeal to students socio-cultural backgrounds through the recounting of her Grade 7 science experience. Through a fishing presentation she was allowed to engage in a form of storytelling, do well on her science project and involve her father in an assignment that valued his knowledge. Having been given autonomy to pick her project, she was engaged in the assessment form, content and purpose for the first time. Not only did Christy prove she had valuable academic knowledge to impart onto the teacher, but she also proved to non-First Nations peers that she had valuable skills and knowledge related to her culture. Christy didn’t remain the only expert in the school, as she noticed a dialogue opening between her First Nation cohorts and other students around fishing and hunting. When listening to Christy’s story, I couldn’t help thinking that I had heard it before… Caleb Johnston from the Socio-Cultural Chapter (7) from Edmunds & Edmunds! Remember the little Cree boy who began to disengage from school in Grade 3, as he’s increasingly asked to demonstrate his knowledge through printed text (233)? Caleb, like Christy, was given an opportunity to combine his academic and cultural knowledge and earned an excellent mark and “more importantly he earned respect and admiration on from his classmates” (251).

Aborigi-Me in Heart (Social Foundations)

Dan Smoke also spoke about educators’ roles in teaching future FNMI students so that they’re both literate in academic and traditional knowledge. Jerry Paquette’s 13B Social Foundations lecture echoes similar sentiments in that education ‘nurture’ “word warriors” who are can “engage mainstream powerbrokers on their own intellectual, philosophical, and political” conventions in order to cast political change (citing Turner 2006). I think most teachers would subscribe to this promise of education, as the “great equalizer”. By repeating the mantra that “education is our buffalo”, it’s clear FNMI peoples share similar educational hopes for their youth as everyone else. It’s a social equity issue.