Friends, right about this time, as I am making my way back to the North, it is good to know things don’t really change all that much here, ever.
Which is the real direction we need, too, in terms of what we have learned from our ancestors.
One educator who understands this more than most is the Anishinabek, Leanne Simpson, who just happens to be associated with my school, Trent University, in Peterborough, Ontario.
In her lifelong bid to have Indigenous values passed on to future generations she has always held the belief that the future for education is right on the land and with our homeland cultures.
The aim within the last half-century has been learning to do this for ourselves, first with simple acts of decolonization and moving away from imposed outside ways of thinking and doing.
Simpson’s involvement over the past few years with our Dechinta University has intentionally moved along these vital directions.
This one Northern institute of learning has already proven to our Department of Education that land-based programs are the wave of the future.
Our people who work to continue with traditional practices – like moose-hide tanning and other expressions of our culture – are the real experts. This is especially true of our languages. You simply need to relearn your Dene language, for instance, to understand it in Dene.
Education has become more and more of an individual effort and will likely come to the point when people will want to impart their teaching skills directly to the youth, back in country settings.
An earlier sign of this happened back in the early 90s when the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples was first set up.
The leaders were having a very hard time getting to a starting point – to an agreed-upon set of directions – and focused enough for their work.
They invited a Mohawk PhD student, Mark Dockstator, to come in and talk with them about what he was doing on his dissertation – the finished version of his research.
When he got to the commission he told them it was obvious what the problem was, that all of the references available to them were in written format. The real and missing part of their work, was from contact in 1492 on back, to understand these earliest generations.
They needed to go to the Elders and ask about life on the land, to get a better grasp on what we as Indigenous Peoples need for the future.
For this reason alone we will find ourselves going right on back to the land for our future life lessons. Mahsi, thank you.