Niigan Sinclair – ProD Truth & Reconciliation

Inclusive Standard 9 in education.

On September 18th I had the privilege to attend a professional development day with speaker Niigan Sinclair.

It was a great insightful day with other teacher friends and sharing space with them about community. The best lesson I took from this day was that if you want to understand a community it is as easy as being involved with that community. Openess of mind and heart, as well as investing your time with them in an honest and accepting manner are thing that would genuanly help you diversify and open your circles.

Notes about the event:

The speaker’s father is the person that put forward the “Truth & Reconciliation”.

Teaching Youth to Make a Fire:

• Be in the cold, grab the right type of wood, make sure is dry, struggle to start it, make it bigger, keep it going, etc.
• This is a metaphor to be a father, have a job, etc.
• Fire ceremonies and how they teach young people about their relationships with their bodies, biology, science, etc.
  Indigenous communities have always had education. Usually taught down through stories, experiences in ceremony, and hands on work through their parents and elders that specialized on a specific task.

“The foundation of Indigenous Education was to create healthy and sustainable relationships in every step of life”.

“Learning was a holistic, lifelong process based on primarily localized, experimental learning and formal/intentional education process”.

First Nations Holistic Lifelong Learning Model:

• Source council on learning: “Redefine how success is measured in First Nations, Inuit, and Metis learning” (Ottawa, 2007).
  Teach roots based on ancestry, community, language, etc.

We have been taught that Indigenous People don’t matter as they are not represented anywhere.

• What is our relationship with Indigenous People and how do we allow them to have representation.
• What is success in schooling?
• Where are Indigenous students in this model? Or the current educational model?
• How are Indigenous and Canadian students doing in this model?
  o Furthermore, how is the measure of this success equitable to quality of life, job opportunities, and overall health?
  o We had said in the past that grad equal success. What did this mean? Go out in the world and go make money?
  o Is our job to prepare students for employment only? How do we measure goodness? (Educated Citizen should mean to share and be kind as well).
• Creating individuals that are graded on a curve become competitive and if you do not achieve that top spot, where does that leave you in life and how you succeed? Capitalism has given us an individualistic mentality where it equals employability.
  o This model does not work with kindness and generosity.

Some Challenges to Indigenous education:

• The will to change including political, social, and emotional.
• Finding, commitments, emotional, etc.
• (Mis)Understanding
• Resources
• Fear
• Time
• Anything else?

Reconciliation cannot ever be a lesson plan:

• How do we teach to students that one group matters more than the other?
• What is learnt in the hallways?
• Creating employable Canadians that can work with Indigenous Communities.

The School as a Social System:
“Change the liveability of the culture”.

Factors in successful Indigenous programs:

1. Relationship
2. Relevance
3. Respect
4. Responsibility
   The biggest formula for Indigenous Student success is relationships.

“Indigenous education is education for all!”