Thea: It is definitely an-other way of being.
Cy: It's not appropriating.
Thea: It's almost like...it's meeting at a common place.
Cy: Yeah, it's like the space in between.
Ida: It's not one or the other, it's both.
Oberg, Blades, Thom-Untying a Dreamcatcher
We begin our final class by sharing the stories of our own academic creations (our papers) and finish with a little theater. It is a nice way to wrap up my first course here in Canada. For me the theme of today was an exploration of culture in the context of human activities. Specifically we use the case for incorporating aboriginal cultural perspectives within the sciences at the University. It quickly morphs into a larger metaphor for increasing cultural awareness and diversity within the curriculum we teach and learn within but for the moment I want to focus on aboriginal education and culture (in the United States we refer to it as Native American studies and culture).
At this point in time I feel I can only superficially address First Nations' issues here in Canada. From your article I can see that many of the experiences and oppression aboriginal peoples felt here in Canada were the same as those in the United States. Prior to conquest, Howard Zinn argues in his famous text The People's History of the United States that Native Americans (or First Nations) had a relationship with nature that was one of the most beautiful ones in the entire history of humanity. He then traces how European colonists systematically destroyed many of these cultural foundations over 500 through more than years of physical and cultural genocide.
In his wonderful history on the education of dominated cultures, Joel Springs writes about how the educational systems of Native Americans were designed to sever cultural ties and prepare them for work within the growing factories of the dominant cultures. He goes on to say that African Americans had the right to vote before many tribes had the right to teach their own children. Both are obviously horrible examples of oppression but though many people know about the struggles of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, fewer still understand the challenges many aboriginal communities face today.
Before continuing on it is important to note that Native American or aboriginal education transcends colonization by thousands of years. Through both formal and informal processes, aboriginal children throughout what would become North, Central, and South America (and the thousands of islands off the continents coasts) learned through direct experience, storytelling, and important ceremonial processes how they related to both the natural world and other members of their Nation.
As these traditional educational processes were supplanted (often violently) by westernized Native American schools, many tribal leaders were disappointed by the educational outcomes for their children as exemplified by this quote:
"For tribal elders who had witnessed the catastrophic developments of the nineteenth century - the bloody warfare, the near extinction of the bison, the scourge of disease and starvation, the shrinking of the tribal base, the indignities of reservation life, the invasion of missionaries and white settlers - there seemed to be no end to the cruelties perpetrated by whites. And after all this, the schools. After all this, the white man had concluded that the only way to save Indians was to destroy them, that the last great Indian war should be waged against children. They were coming for the children." (Adams,1995, p.337)
From my experience in tribal schools in Washington State, the key to educational processes for Native Americans is the re-empowerment of tribes to recreate educational processes and structures that have existed for thousands of years. That does not mean going backwards but using these deeply ancient experiences to craft what the future of what the Native American culture should be based on the unique cultural diversity that each First Nation has to offer. The process is firmly grounded in the nonlinear, cultural, ecological, and cognitive systems we have examined over the past few weeks.
Going back to this case as a metaphor for exploring the complex relationships between culture and the curriculum, the Native American experience is not particularly unique. African Americans were denied an education during slavery and segregated in many parts of the United States prior to the Civil Rights Movements of the sixties. Many Chinese and Japanese students were also segregated during the early history of San Francisco and World War II respectively.
Today there is an effort to deny education to the children of undocumented migrants (predominantly Hispanic and Latino) in parts of the Southwest. Some politicians are also encouraging restrictions on the ability of same sex parents to adopt unwanted or abused children stuck in an overburdened foster care system. Instances of bullying Muslim children also appears to be on the rise suggesting more difficulties for many Islamic communities in the United States as well.
There are many things we as educators can do to insure the cultural and religious diversity of our nation and I would refer readers to the works of James Banks on multicultural eduction. Also, we need to overturn the myth of science education as a predominantly tightly structured white Euro-centric process. Science as a process is as old as religion itself as evidenced by ancient taxonomies of nature by cultures predating Linus, the discovery of fire, the manipulation of metals, and so on and so on. Only through the recognition that science is the fundamental human endeavor of exploration and understanding shared by all cultures, not just ours, will this process truly become empowering.
We must actively resist and overturn the dominant paradigm of one scientific worldview that is currently encapsulated in the individualistic egos of a few smart individuals doing "expert" research, the self centered methods of exclusive scientific patents/trademarks, and narrow focus on efficiency and exploitation of resources discovered/created in our nations largely secret public laboratories.
Wow...okay....time to relax a little. All these thoughts from your play. One final question I have is connected to how the play is constructed. It seems to follow the Socratic method of reasoning. Am I correct in this? The structure of plays like this allows for multiple interpretations which is another benefit of integrating the arts into science.
Citation:
David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction - American Indians and the Boarding School Experience 1875-1928, University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas, 1995.
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