Re: Event at U of O highlights Indigenous divides
Have you ever taken a class and been astonished, horrified, or even disgusted, that hundreds of others at your school, and millions in the country, might never know what you do now?
This is how I feel about a few introductory courses that completely challenged so many of my assumptions: human rights, Canadian history, women’s and gender studies, and most of all, Indigenous studies. It’s a pipe dream of mine that someday, a comprehensive understanding of Indigenous issues will be required for everyone who enters a Canadian university. It’s disgusting to me that we have such a limited knowledge collectively of the most basic history, considering we’re all living and working on unceded Algonquin territory.
I’m fully aware this isn’t likely to come to pass in a formal way. Students bitch and complain enough already about course requirements like English and stats. I know there are plenty of sciences students who would be just as horrified by my extremely shaky grasp on how tornadoes happen as I am by the average person’s heavily-abridged idea of Canadian history. That being said, I do think we’re capable of doing much better than we have been at teaching Indigenous knowledge to the general public.
The “Blanket Exercise” workshop is one way this could happen. The University of Ottawa conducted the exercise last week, where audience members stood on blankets representing First Nations territories. The blankets were folded smaller and smaller as the presenters gave an account of the wars, diseases, land and resource encroachments, and assimilationist policies that made up more than 500 years of colonialism.
This is the first time I’ve heard of the exercise and I think it’s brilliant. It’s exactly the kind of illustrative activity that lets someone who doesn’t have the time to take these university courses fill in their educational gaps where Indigenous history wasn’t taught. It certainly isn’t the whole story and it’s not an end by any means, but exercises such as these are great entry points for those who don’t know enough to form an opinion on modern policy issues facing First Nations, Inuit and Metis peoples.
Considering the vastness of Indigenous history on this land, the number of distinct cultures and languages, and the complexities of Canadian interactions with all of them, modern Indigenous politics are seriously complicated. I don’t think these simple exercises will solve anything on their own, but they sound like a simple and approachable place to start for the average person. Once the average person has even a basic understanding of the context behind modern Indigenous issues, maybe then we’ll start seeing those issues being tackled seriously and accountably by our government.
At the very least, maybe the next time I host a party I won’t need to be forcibly escorted from my own apartment by friends because one of my guests said something so ignorant that I needed to calm down.
