Month: January 2021

I was taught from a young age that being an Indigenous person in Canada came with many rewards.  The treaties that were signed long before our time would ensure that Indigenous people who lived on reservations would be taken care of by our tax dollars.  “We are all Treaty People” meant that we, the settlers of this country would always owe a debt to the Indigenous people who lived here before us.  The community I grew up in was near two reservations.  It didn’t take a genius to see that the conditions these people were living in were well below what I was accustomed to, and I came from a single income household of 7.  Why then, if these people are being so well taken care of, do they live in such poverty?  

The understanding that many Canadians have about treaties and what it means to be a Treaty Person is a compilation of years of misinformation fed to us by the people who most benefit from keeping the marginalized Indigenous people of this country down.  It is no accident that Canadian history, as taught in schools up until 2007 did not include the accurate depiction of how Canada came to be.  Teaching this history would mean owning up to the injustices done over hundreds of years.

Being a Treaty Person means having the uncomfortable conversations with our families and friends.  It means being a voice for the marginalized people of our country instead of sitting silently.  It means actively working towards reconciliation.  As Lori Campbell puts it in her TedTalk Reconciliation is Dead, “Reconciliation is what you do at your dinner table.  It’s the conversations you have with your families when you’re watching the evening news.”

Works Referenced

I could hear the chatter of all the excited kids as I followed my new teacher into the surprisingly cold gym in August 1997.  My old school was brand new when I was in grade three.  Now, I am in grade five starting in a new school in a new town.  The school was much smaller than my previous, with only four classrooms and four teachers for the entire grade K-8 school.  The gym was dark.  The lines on the floor were peeling and the paint on the walls was chipping away.  My old school had a brightly painted mural of a Raptor on the wall on one end of the gym, and a baby Raptor on the other end, where this school’s mascot, a Cougar was no more than a dull outline faded from years of neglect.

When all of the students had made their way into the gym and settled into four lines the principal came to the front to begin the start of school assembly.  She asked us to rise for the singing of “O Canada”.  I have always loved singing our national anthem.  It played in my old school every morning over the intercom system, followed by the Lord’s Prayer.  When I would hear the beginning notes I would always be overcome with a feeling of pride.  It’s the same feeling I get when I hear “The Last Post” during a Remembrance service.

As I stood waiting for the music to start I looked around at all the new faces.  To say I was nervous is an understatement. I wanted the music to start.  It would be a nice distraction from all the new of the day.  I could fall into a rhythm that I knew for just a few minutes.  But there was no music, only four teachers at the front of the room starting the anthem off.  Slowly students began to join in.  I felt flustered but joined in and sang with pride. 

I quickly became aware of the fact that only the younger students were singing.  The older students were fidgeting, whispering and looking with interest at my sisters and I who were the only new students in town in years.  The teachers continued singing but were also watching the disruptive students with intensity.  For the first time I felt very aware of everything around me, and I was focused in on the whispering trying to determine if I was the target.  For a moment I stopped singing in an attempt to fit in with my peers, or at least not stand out, but it felt wrong.  I was proud of where I came from and could not understand how disrespect could be a gateway to fitting in.  I started to sing again.

Since that day I had never stood silently during the singing of O’ Canada until September of 2020, when the school division I work for added singing onto the list of things that can potentially spread Covid-19.  Singing, even with masks on is not allowed, but because we felt strongly that pride in our country is important to teach our students’ we have started to sign our anthem.  It is amazing how quickly they learned adapted to this new method, and you can see the pride in their faces at their accomplishment.  It is not the same, and I cannot wait until the day we can sing with pride once again, but in the meantime, we make the best of things.