ECS 203 Blog Post #6

For me, my understanding of citizenship is gained by meeting the legal requirements for that specific country or state. What I mean by this is for example; within Canada having citizenship means I meet the qualifications I need to be a Canadian citizen and live freely. When I think of citizenship I think of legal qualifications, relationships, legal rights, and duties, and I think of nationality. For me when I think of Treaty Education and citizenship I think about how closely interconnected these two should be, but yet they are not. Personally, I believe that these two go hand-in-hand because, for example, Treaty Education and Indigenous Ways of Knowing are not discussed as much as they should be, yet it has played such a huge role in Canada’s history. For me, I think when someone is writing a test to obtain their citizenship, in-depth research and studying should have to be done on Indigenous Ways of Knowing and Treaty Education. The curriculum has its own treaty education section within the curriculum but is normally skipped over or disregarded by teachers. Why? Normally because we don’t feel educated enough on this topic to teach it, but when it has such relevancy both presently and historically I feel it should be looked at as hand-in-hand and should be reflected that way within the process when obtaining citizenship. The podcast and video opened my eyes to see that we truly don’t know enough about Treaty Education and citizenship, even though I believe we can’t truly call ourselves Canadian citizens if we haven’t educated ourselves on Treaty Education and Indigenous Ways of Knowing.