Here, dear readers, is another paper excerpt. This one asked us to reflect on the diversity wheel we completed. It's unusual because it contains a lot of personal information. I've removed some parts to preserve other's privacy so it might be choppy in places.
The most influential elements of my diversity wheel on my education have been and continue to be class, geography, and race. These three elements are interconnected. I am Tsilhqot’in so my roots are rural. Due to government policies which targeted Tsilhqot’in well-being I spent part of my childhood in poverty. Class, geography, and race influenced the educational opportunities that I had and the way that educators perceived me. I don’t want to dwell on the negatives, though, so instead I will focus on how these three factors have influenced my perception of education and how these elements brought me here to UBC Okanagan to pursue my Master of Arts in Education.
I chose a narrative format to tell this story because these three elements are intertwined and unless they are seen in the context of a larger whole they lack resonance.
When I was born my mom took me home to our tent outside of my grandparent’s cabin in Alexis Creek which didn’t have running water or electricity. As a small child my dad drove a cab in the winter and in the summer we went to the Okanagan with other members of my extended family where we lived in tents or picker shacks and worked in the orchards and vineyards. My parents decided that they couldn’t do this forever and that they didn’t like the life they were living so they both went back to school. My mom got her grade twelve and some university and my dad got a certificate in human services. This was enough to boost our family from poverty to middle class. They raised us with the sincere belief that getting an education is the only way to secure independence and security.
My grandparents were illiterate and before my mom went back to school she only had a grade eight education. As a result of this a lot of employers took advantage of them. The stores in the Chilcotin operate on credit, that is, you can buy items on credit and when your pension comes in the store owner cashes your check and takes their share, however, not all store owners are honest and sometimes they’d take more than they deserved. As my mom increased her education she was able to advocate for my grandparents. I was raised with the understanding that education is a hedge against racial discrimination and employer exploitation.
I have a somewhat paradoxical view of education. On one hand it is necessary for my own survival and I inherently enjoy refining skills such as writing, however, at the same time I am resistant to conformity. My resistance comes in part from my mother’s side of the family who went through residential school. For them education was something that tried to take something from you and it was important not to lose yourself in the process of education. It also comes from spending a lot of time with my grandfather, who some refer to as a societal drop-out because he moved to Anaham Lake a few decades ago and has an unusual lifestyle He is an eccentric man who introduced me to a lot of colorful people and taught me that an unconventional life can be rich and rewarding.
I was brought up with a strong non-conformist bent and struggled with both authority and peer dynamics in high school. After dropping out or getting kicked out from three different schools three years in a row I was placed in an alternate program where I kept my own schedule and completed correspondence courses with the support of Mr. Green. This method of education worked really well for me and I completed my grade ten, eleven, and twelve credits in two years and graduated with honours.
I graduated from high school and had my son less than a month later. That fall my dad placed a university application in my hands and told me to fill it out. I asked him what I should take. He asked what I wanted to take. I said I didn’t know. He said just take something. So I took a first year English correspondence course which I failed miserably. In the spring I got a letter informing me about fall registration dates and my father gave me a student loan application. When I went to register (this was back when you had to actually show up and stand in line) I had no idea what to take. I was totally lost. I think I chose my courses based on availability. That’s pretty much how I registered for all of my courses during the first few years of university. I didn’t know how to plan my education or how to get guidance in my planning so I took too many electives and not enough core courses. I learned a lot but it took longer than it should have to finish my first degree.
That’s also part of the reason that I acquired a large amount of student debt during my undergraduate degree. As a single parent of a child on the autism spectrum I took a 60% course load for much of my undergraduate studies and didn’t work because it was nearly impossible to find people equipped with the skills to care for a special needs child and my sisters had children at the same time that I did so our family network was already stretched. We didn’t grow up with a lot so I knew how to live on very little and while it was hard it never seemed impossible. As an undergraduate it was difficult sometimes socially to have less money than my peers but I never really fit in to begin with so I took it in stride. At times I felt very isolated, but this connected me to my studies even more, especially when I started studying critical theory.
During my undergraduate in Sociology I met a lot of Indigenous activists and academics from across Canada through my involvement in the NDP and the students’ union. A recurring message that I heard was the need for more Indigenous teachers and faculty so I decided to become I teacher.
I grew up largely in the Okanagan but spent a lot of time in the rural communities of Alexis Creek, Anaham Lake, and Williams Lake. When I went into teaching I decided to stay in the interior and sought employment in a rural community with a large Aboriginal population. My first teaching job was in Lytton and it was a good fit. My second position, District Aboriginal Resource Teacher, spanned the communities of Lytton, Lillooet, Ashcroft, Cache Creek, and Clinton. My third teaching job was in Lillooet.
Spiritually leaving the Okanagan was amazing. I was welcomed into my teaching communities and formed attachments to the land through ceremony and stories. I discovered a network in the interior of people who are drug and alcohol free and have a life-long commitment to cultural continuity. When my grandparents were alive we had a spiritual connection to our territory, however, when they passed away we spent less time there because the remaining family members do not live on our territory with the exception of one uncle. Some of our traditions are similar to neighboring nations, and the community in Lillooet especially embraced me as one of their own. I began to think more deeply about the spiritual and cultural responsibilities of living in a territory and the obligation to honour the ancestors of the land through ceremony and stories. As I grew in this way I deepened friendships with people here in the Okanagan who had similar values.
I’ve been part of large curriculum development projects and facilitated a lot of professional development workshops, however, over time my faith in the public education system began to wane. Again and again I saw ways in which the ossification of the public school system trumped the needs of Aboriginal learners and communities. I began having terrible flashbacks to my own childhood education where I felt invisible and inferior and my teen years when I lashed out at a system which I perceived to be both callous and unfair. When I entered teaching I thought that I could change public education from the inside, but as an educator I increasingly felt trapped in it so I decided that it was time to leave K-12 education for awhile.
When I was living in Lillooet I was a literacy coach for students who were doing upgrading and university transfer courses through NVIT. I saw how the Lillooet Tribal Council shaped the content and form of these courses, and how education, rather than eroding Indigenous identity, could be a method of enhancing it. In particular, I saw the connection between self-governed post-secondary education and curriculum and pedagogy which served the needs of Aboriginal students and First Nations communities. I became friends with one of the faculty members and she really solidified my commitment to the interior and to community oriented Indigenous education.
I reflected on the structure of NVIT’s community based satellite campuses. I reflected on my visits to the En’owkin Centre for cultural events. I reflected on my own readings on Indigenous education and presentations that I had seen by academics such as Jeanette Armstrong and Lorna Williams. I saw freedom and hope in self-governed post-secondary education and I decided that I want to be part of it. I also realized that change doesn’t happen, it is built by individuals with a deep commitment to a set of ideals and the ability to work with both community and non-Aboriginal bureaucracies in order to create something concrete out of those ideals. To me the decision to return to university is a step towards becoming one of those individuals by building my own capacity to serve the communities in the interior and work towards positive change.
I will always live in the interior of British Columbia. The cultural network that I belong to here is irreplaceable, and even if I were to try to establish similar relationships somewhere else it wouldn’t be the same because I would always be an ancestral outsider. I will spend the rest of my life living in the interior learning how to live in a way that honors the ancestors by participating in and promoting culture. I belong to community which means that my work as a masters student and beyond is geared towards the community’s well being. As Heath Justice states, being an Indigenous academic is not enough, in my scholarship at every step of the way I have to ask myself “and what will you do for the people?” (2003, p.50). I have a commitment to the communities and people here in the interior that have nurtured me socially, culturally, and spiritually and that is why I am doing my masters in the interior.
Research supports my decision to remain in this place. Drywater-Whitekiller report that students who have strong cultural ties are more likely to be successful in their post-secondary studies (Drywater-Whitekiller, 2010, p.3). Kovach, who wrote a book on Indigenous methodologies geared towards Indigenous graduate students, interviewed Indigenous academics about their work and reported that it is important for Indigenous graduate students to stay grounded in Aboriginal community in order to survive the colonial oppression that can be graduate studies and research (Kovach, 2009, p.56).
There is a drawback to that commitment, though. Larger universities have more Indigenous faculty and stronger programming in terms of Indigenous education. However, my cultural education is more important than my formal education. If in the long term I wanted to immerse myself in academia and pursue a mainstream career then I would leave the interior. That is not what I want, though. I want to strengthen the cultural ties that I have here. This means that I will have to take a lot of initiative during my masters studies in order to indigenize the courses and that I will have to familiarize myself with Indigenous theories and methodologies on my own time with the support of my supervisor. It is somewhat isolating because there are very few people in my cohort who are familiar with or interested in Indigenous education, however, through cultural events and social media I regularly interact with other masters students or people with masters degrees who specialize in Indigenous education and are excited to engage in dialogue.
Works cited
Drywater-Whitekiller, V. (2010). Cultural resilience: Voices of Native American students in college retention. The Canadian Journal of Native Studies 30 (1). p1-19.
Heath Justice, D. (2003). Renewing the Fire: Notes Toward the Liberation of English Studies. English Studies in Canada 29 (1-2). p45-54.
Kovach, M. (2009). Indigenous Methodologies: Characteristics, Conversations, and Contexts. Toronto, Ontario: University of Toronto Press.
