What’s your understanding of citizenship? How can we relate Treaty Education to citizenship?
My understanding of citizenship is how you are connected to your land and in what ways you can carry out this connection. I believe it is important to understand the traditional customs of the land and not alter them for your benefit or because you want to make it more like where you came from to maintain or obtain citizenship. I believe that school has shaped me to be the citizen I am and have the views on my citizenship but schools also left out me learning about others’ citizenships. We can modify this by taking note of the various citizenships that other people hold and how they differ from our own or their new ones. Treaty education is important to acknowledge because it opens individuals’ eyes to the past. Never have I once thought of myself as a treaty citizen but due to my living on treaty land, I am. This results from white colonial settlers thinking of these treaty territories as “our land” rather than as their lands, to which we are the newcomers, and from not understanding the significance of these lands. Treaty education allows individuals to make the past a reality and allows children to build relationships with the land they are living on. The comment “Canada does not have enough money for reconciliation” caught my attention during the podcast. It is terrible that people believe and even think such things since it demonstrates how poorly Canada’s citizens are doing to welcome the Indigenous back onto the land that was originally there’s.