The topic of discussion for this weeks classes have been regarding Indigenous people and the trauma's of residential schools, and how we can spread awareness of this horrible history. Indigenous people have had an extremely traumatic history within residential schools that has led to the stripping of their culture, trauma and even deaths, but has also led to impacts in today's day. The last of the residential schools closed in only 1996, showing that these Indigenous people have been silenced for so long and only changed coming into the 2000's, which is not soon enough. Physical, mental, sexual and emotional abuse was implemented into these residential schools that caused harm and mental damage affecting people still today. The Truth and Reconciliation 'Call to Action' documents state this statistic: Stat: the odds of dying for a child in residential schools was 1 in 25. That one child is one too many. Sending your child to school should not be a risk in your child's safety that results in any harm, whether that be physical or mental/emotional. Now with the residential school systems being shut down, we must focus on making a difference in today's school systems that provide these Indigenous students with support and bringing Indigenous education to our curriculum that inform this generation of the past and how we have evolved from it. Starting with our kindergarten classrooms, being a teacher in the 21st century we should be implementing inclusion and acceptance for all cultures and ethnicities. Our classroom completed a jigsaw activity with 6 different Indigenous picture books to read and give a short synopsis and our input on the importance of reading them. The book that my group was assigned was called "I am not a Number" and was extremely hard to read, and was hard to decide if I would read this to a classroom or not. I believed an older grade would be more appropriate, as opposed to Kindergarten students, because of the detailed illustrations and concepts in the story. The story was told by a young girl who experienced being sent to a residential school and was forced to be striped of her culture. Her hair was chopped off, her skin was scrubbed and she was forced to do labour for the nuns running the school. This is an important message to be told in schools to show the experiences they went through. After reading these stories, a lesson can be implemented into the classroom and give
students more resources based on this topic. This website link: https://www.learnalberta.ca/content/aswt/ is extremely helpful in exploring the culture of Indigenous people. The front page and initial image is a circle of different aspects of the website and with the mouse of your computer, you can hover over each rock and it explains more in depth each topic. Using sites like this within a classroom can really spark interest and importance in learning about Indigenous people and their impact on our country.
Comments