In my journey to reconciliation I like to think of it as my personal story, my story has been pieced together by everything that I feel is important to reconciliation. Looking through my personal story of reconciliation up to the present day I have many different memories from my personal experiences, and I have parts of the story that has been taken from parts of the class discussion. One of the most important parts of reconciliation to me is being able to pass down information to students as an instructor but also being able to learn from the students that you’ve taught over time. Using the experiences that I’ve acquired through the field experience over the past couple of weeks I can take the knowledge from these weeks and put all these tools I’ve collected to make myself a better overall teacher.
After explaining this connection that I made through an experience that happened in my own life it began clear to me what I wanted to do as an aesthetic piece. For my piece, I did a ceremonial headdress that was like the one that my friend wore on his graduation day. Some background information about the first nation’s student was that he was adopted into a farming family and grew up in Assiniboia since he was a baby. This boy was always around our house because he and my brother had been friends since before, I could remember he had always been around, and he treated me as if I was one of his best friends. Now having some background information about this boy, I will explain what happened on graduation day that I will never forget. The graduating class for Assiniboia in 2017 was 31 students so when it came time for all the students to get all the students into the gym this boy showed up with a headdress on. You would think that it isn’t a big deal because he is just expressing his culture and showing everybody that he is proud of his heritage, but this was a big problem for some of the teachers and some of the parents. I remember my brother telling me after the ceremony that our principle was trying to tell this boy that he isn’t allowed to wear his headdress because he was only using it to an “attention-seeking stunt”. After hearing my brother tell me this, I felt terrible for that boy and ever since that point I lost a lot of respect for the principle of our school. That is a story from high school that I will never forget and, sadly, a student couldn’t express his heritage on one of the biggest days of a teenager’s life.
