ECS 203 Blog: Week 10

1. How has your upbringing/schooling shaped how you “read the world?” What biases and lenses do you bring to the classroom? How might we unlearn / work against these biases?
2. Which “single stories” were present in your own schooling? Whose truth mattered?       

Throughout early education, the single story of the Indigenous peoples was told to the younger students. As a white Canadian student who went to a kindergarten to grade eight school with 100 kids, my classmates were all white Canadians whose families also grew up right where we were growing up. Everyone in our small white rural town grew up with the same beliefs, opinions, and values; all were passed down throughout their children. For myself, I grew up in a home environment that pushed the “Cowboys and Indians” narrative. We watched old western movies with my dad, grandpas, and uncles, and for the majority of my childhood, when I thought of indigenous peoples, I thought of the characters in the John Wayne movies. Building off this “single story” that I already had, our school taught us about Indigenous peoples in ways that catered to our existing “single story.”
In many ways, my early education on Indigenous peoples was very stereotypical. We were taught about their ways of life before colonialization through methods of creating diagrams of their communities and teepees and watching films such as Pocahontas. I now realize that these stories about Indigenous peoples are just feeding the “single story” I already had of the peoples. There were aspects of learning about their culture and history that are valuable and significant information to be taught. However, the way the story is told was of the most significant harm. As I grew older and excelled through my education, the narrative was shifted to after colonialization and the residential schools. In University the Treaty Education, that foundation of Indigenous knowledge can still be embedded in people’s brains. I have seen in people who have not taken classes that have opened them up to the whys and hows of racism. Students came to school young, already with a “single story” of the indigenous peoples, and then they were feed information that just grew that “single story.” So then, as they grew up and learned other aspects of Indigenous history, they still have that blueprint belief that will affect how they absorb the new information, such as Treaty Education. To help these issues, teachers must find ways to teach Treaty Education effectively, and most importantly, the issues need to be stopped at the source. Early education of Indigenous peoples needs to be taught in different ways to eliminate indigenous peoples’ “single story.”