Treaty Education Advice for a Struggling Intern

Dear Struggling Intern,

First, I would like to say thank you for pushing to continue to teach Treaty Ed, even when your Coop teacher discourages you. As an educator, it is your responsibility to teach Treaty Education, even if there are no Indigenous students in your classroom. All students need to be taught Treaty Education and First Nations, Metis, and Inuit perspectives to fully understand the history, and as Dwayne Donald emphasizes, the relationships that continue today. I would suggest you bring up and show your Coop the curriculum outlining that Treaty Education needs to be taught. In the background of Claire’s lecture, you can see the Treaty Education Curriculum hanging on the wall, and I feel something like this would be an excellent tool for you in your classroom. Mike Cappello expressed a compelling statement in the lecture, saying that Treaty Education isn’t going away. Hence, educators need to embrace and teach it to the best of their ability now.

As for ideas to get students involved, I suggest you look to the lecture video by Claire Kreuger and Mike Cappello that I have posted below. Claire has so many great ways to get students involved. She emphasizes that the goal is not to just teach the content but to have students understand and empathize with the Indigenous perspectives. As you say, the teachers are very lax about teaching Treaty Ed. You may have to do what Claire says and take a step back and start from younger grades outcomes. I also think it would be great to have an Elder come to speak to the class. It might be prudent to remind your cooperating teacher and very important to teach your students because we are all treaty people. The treaties do not only apply to Indigenous peoples, but they are an agreement between Indigenous peoples and settlers, and these agreements continue today and into the future. We share this land, so treaties apply to every single person living on this land.

I wish you luck for the rest of your three-week block!