Email Response

Good morning,

I just want to first off thank you for bringing awareness to a place that needs to be more educated by the sounds of your concerns. Teaching Treaty Education is apart of our jobs being teachers and you are doing a great job bringing awareness to your classroom.

Let us start by problem solving why your class was confused about the topic and why they were making racist remarks or joking about the topic. I believe it is because of how undereducated they have been about Treaty Education. You are bringing awareness to a “foreign” subject that might make some of the students, teachers, and community members feel uncomfortable. Treaty Education has not been taught at the school you are in because it is a predominately-white school; you are going to have to start at the basics. A good place to start looking to help you educate your students is in the Treaty Education Outcomes and Indicators my suggestions is to start at the grade three curriculum. (You might even need to go earlier than this is you are still not able to express your teachings to the students or staff.) The Grade Three curriculum focus is on Exploring Challenges and Opportunities in Treaty Making. Your students do not have an understanding on how the land is important and how the land means something different to Indigenous people compared to settlers of the land. It is a good place to show the view points of each group.

You have also stated that the teachers are “very lax” when it comes to the subject and that, they do not see the purpose of teaching it. In Dwayne Donald’s Video “What Terms do we Speak?” he says “teachers are meant to teach aboriginal perspectives, but really we don’t know anything about it!” This is where you can come into play in your school. If you have ideas and are confident to share them with the staff. Start! We are all Treaty people, is a good place to get your fellow colleagues on board with becoming more educated and wanting to learn about Treaty Education. It is not something we can ignore as teachers; it needs to be showing up in all our classroom subjects and daily. In the video presentation by Claire she says when we are teaching about Treaty Education we are NOT focussing on the Indigenous students in our classrooms (they already know about their histories) we are focusing on the non-indigenous students and building their knowledge and understandings. Claire has a blog ill add the link here it is a great resource to help you further your own education, but also tell your other teachers that it is a great place to discover and learn about Treaty Education. http://clairekreuger.ca/

I hope that these suggestions can help you and will further your learning.