← Unlearn16: Class is in Session
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Classes in session. Hey, everybody, and welcome to Unlearn 16. Class is in session today. I'm in full orange, as you can see. I have Tecumseh painted across my shirt. And I'm obviously today September 30th. I know this is going to air tomorrow, but speak about the Truth and Reconciliation Day as it has been implemented and created in Canada, what that means, how I implement it, what I think we should be doing next, and to be honest, how the world should be following. So, you know, let me jump right in. First of all, truth and reconciliation about our indigenous population should not be only resigned to September 30th. That's ridiculous. It's absolutely asinine that we just would limit it to that day. What I do like doing within that day, rather than just implementing it into individual curriculum and having individual classes speak about the history of residential schools, speak about what we have done and the way the Canadian government and the Canadian culture has committed a cultural genocide against these people in this country. What we have done, how we've done it, and how we need to reconcile and promote justice going forward. All of that should be happening. And on this day, all of it needs to be happening in what I think as a community, in a school. This is the shift. The shift just isn't about education. The shift is about how do we move forward as a community, how do we talk about it, how do we listen, how do we engage each other, how do we have meaningful conversations? So change happens because you can hand out a bunch of information and they can learn about residential schools in the sixties Scoop. And they can learn about the damage that was done and the. The cultural assimilation that was perpetrated by our government and the culture of our past. But unless we talk about it, unless we engage, unless we sit as a community, nothing's going to change. So today at Metro Prep, I kind of upended things. So I've spent quite a few years doing workshops and educational information sessions talking about what a residential school was, talking about how our government set up these. This structured. Sorry. Structure. Structured system in order to assimilate Indigenous children that were stolen from your home, Their homes, and forced into boarding schools for 10 years. We talk about what was done to them. We talk about the language that was taken, the culture that was taken, the rights, the rituals, the names. We even talk about how they were allocated numbers in order to dehumanize and limit their actual power within that school system. We talk about all of it. And I'd like to think that a lot of my students are incredibly educated when it comes to this. But what I found and what I always find is there needs to be a resurgence of empathy. There needs to be a consistent resurgence of how do I talk about this issue? So I get at their minds and at their hearts. Because if I don't, as an educator, if I don't find out how to get at students and, to be honest, faculty and parents in a different way, then I'm not changing anything for the future, that I'm just paying lip service for the day, and then I'm moving on till tomorrow. Well, I'm not interested in that. So not only do we talk about the history here, but this year I decided to do something a little bit different. And I started Truth and Reconciliation Day actually last week. And I started by these shirts that I'm wearing. And if you're listening to it, I'm wearing a T shirt that is one of my students has very artistically painted Tecumseh over the chest of the shirt. And I had my entire school working on individual shirts all last week. And all of the names that we put on these shirts were then given to students and individual students. Their job was not only to wear the shirt and create the shirt, their job was to research the individual. Because I'm not just interested in researching the past. I'm not just interested in researching the damage and the violence and the assimilation and all of the horrific things that the indigenous population in Canada has had to go through. That is important. Absolutely. But I also want my students to know how powerful, how amazing, the trailblazers of indigenous people in this country, what they've accomplished, what they've done, what they continue to do, the brilliance in their mind, the beauty of their art, the power of their music. Because they're not just a victim of our government and of our culture. They're not. They are survivors. They are warriors of it. The fact that their culture has survived this, the fact that the language has survived battered and bruised, yes, but survived. The fact that families have survived, the fact that now we're starting to see empowerment of indigenous people and culture and nations is the most important thing. So I want my students to understand that as we study their history, it didn't end there. As we study the pain and the suffering that they were forced to endure, it didn't end there. They lived through that. Not all. I understand. And we mourn and grieve for those who didn't, but for those who lived through it, for those who survived, for the warriors that thrived through it. I want to pay honor to those people today. And I want my students to understand that. I want my students, in this day and the days moving forward to understand the power that Indigenous people possess, the strength, the will, the genius. And I want them to understand different communities and different languages and different foundational spiritual senses of all Indigenous nations within Canada so they can start gaining a true appreciation. Because if we do not educate our students, if we do not teach them, they will never truly be able to respect and understand Indigenous people across Canada. They just won't. It has to come through education. It has to come through seeing the truth of the full scope of the many peoples that live in this country and that have endured what they've endured at the hands of our government and the people of the past and of today. So today, when my students walked in, they all had their shirts on. They all went to class. They were supposed to research their person. And the day went on. We filmed some videos. You heard people speaking about it to some degree. Each class, though, which I thought was amazing, each teacher, no matter what the discipline, whether it was math, science, art, biology, chemistry, doesn't matter, politics, history, of course, the teachers were tasked with incorporating Indigenous peoples and ideas into every single different discipline. So my students gain an understanding that there are brilliant Indigenous mathematicians, there are brilliant chemists and biologists, and doing incredible work in studying the trauma response, for example, that has now been coded genetically into people. And the idea that a lot of Indigenous people have always had, which is blood memory, is now actually being proven by science, scientific study. And my students start to become aware that a lot of the ideas that the Indigenous population have had over the years and. And their traditions and their rituals and their thought process is. It's like the rest of the world is catching up. It's like they're becoming aware of all of these important things. Not to mention, of course, environmental causes, animal rights activism. All of these things that we should be doing that make sense, that are rational, that are human, that are beautiful ways of existing, we are now becoming aware of because of the empowerment and the elevated voices of Indigenous communities. And so we went through the whole day, and kids got different lessons from different teachers. And then I sat them all down in the same room. Was it loud? Sure. Were kids pushing and. Sure. But we all sat on the floor because I hate them fighting over chairs. It's just ridiculous. We all sat on the floor. We got as relatively sort of close as possible so we could hear each other speak. And then we did. We voiced what we learned. We voiced what we knew. We ask questions when we didn't. We use the time to empower and to support and to provide empathy for the things that Indigenous communities have gone through. I listen to these young students say the most incredible, beautiful things about justice, about equity, about fairness, about how we move forward and what we need to do. And, guys, I don't know if you know teenagers, but for the most part, they're not going to do or say anything they don't believe. But this is the thing I find that touches most of them, that most of them truly believe in that. When you start talking about it and when you start explaining it, and when each student brings up a piece of history they've been taught or they remember or they thought was important, and we do it as a collective, the amount of empathy and awareness in that room and in that space magnifies to something bigger, to something more powerful. And when I'm listening to them, I know for a fact they're going to do better than we did. I know for a fact they're going to listen better. I know for a fact that if we give them the right tools and we trust them to speak and we allow them to say what they think, that the youth of this nation will lead us down a much better path of justice than previous generations could ever imagine. Because as my students have said today, it's not about money. It's not about apologies. It's about change. If we don't change, it doesn't matter. If the educational system doesn't change, the apology doesn't matter. If the justice system doesn't change, then the money will be wasted. If our health care system and our environmental policies don't change, then the lessons fall empty. And all these kids are saying it. They're saying it loud, and they're saying it proud, with their full chest. Because I know that they understand what will change the world. And the only thing stopping them is us. Us saying it can't be done, us saying it's too hard, us saying it was, you know, what's past is past. You can't fix anything. If you listen to students for more than five seconds, you'll realize that they have a vision of this world that is more about equity, diversity, and empowerment of everybody. Because they understand that's what makes the world a better place. That's what makes their country a better place. And that is actually what justice looks like. Justice requires change. First you have to listen. Really listen. Then you have to question, then you have to have conversation, and then you have to Come up with authentic, incredibly important ways of enacting change in our society so that we move forward differently. And that's what our youth does. And every year I'm amazed and impressed and I feel empowered and uplifted when I listen to those students and I listen to what they have to offer. And I am amazed. You know, they talked very passionately today about one particular topic, and that's language. These kids, I have kids who are bilingual, trilingual, and they talk very. And this is what happens when you have a diverse school, right? When you have a school where kids come from all over the world and they speak different languages, they are able to articulate how important language is to them. And our kids here, the domestic kids who maybe only speak English, start to get an understanding of what that means. And so they talked very eloquently about the importance of language and how we should fund and how should we should back and improve and allow indigenous societies all over the country to bolster, to strengthen, to educate, surrounding their language. Because that is the first step at actually protecting their culture, their ideas, their tradition, and most importantly, their oral history. I looked at all the kids who, let's be honest, they didn't always want it. They didn't all want to wear an orange shirt. They didn't all understand it in the beginning, but by the end of the day, when they were so quietly listening to the horrific nature of residential schools or the sixties scoop where child protective services would unjustly take indigenous children from their homes and put them with white homes, or when they listened to the criminalization of potluck ceremonies and dancing rituals, when they listened to the striking down of political organizations that were indigenous and protests that were indigenous. We talked about the Idle no More fight, and we talked about how there's only reason that justice has happened at all to any degree, is because Indigenous communities have come together and have fought for it. It's not going to be handed, it's not going to be gifted. There is no government in power that's going to turn around and say, oh, what we did was horrible. We have to put that out there. We have to force them into it. That's why our educational curriculum has changed. That's why the mindsets of our youth have changed. That's why. And it's the only reason we are building a better future. So my students know to fight. My students also are very aware of how to hold space. And I realize as I'm sitting here, I am not indigenous in any aspect, but how, if I can I will hold space and I will be loud until somebody needs my microphone, and I will hand it to them in order to speak their truth, speak their identity, speak their history, so we can all change. And on that note, guys, I hope you have a great Truth and Reconciliation day. And I hope this isn't the only day that you speak about it, fight for it, discuss it, and make it a part of your lives. Until next week, I will see you guys. Same bat time, same bat. Channel dismissed.