I'm Back

I’m back. After two days of nearly straight traveling from Iceland to Seattle and back to Kamloops, I’m ready to start working again at this project.

Before I left, I spoke with Jacques Goutier with the Kamloops Ministry of Children and Family Development. In addition to his work at the ministry, he also teaches a social work class at Thompson Rivers University. 

I met with him in his downtown office. He’s a middle-aged man of European descent with salt and pepper hair and an energy that relaxed the more we talked. His job is to work with social workers and managers on complex cases that deal with First Nations children and families. For nearly his entire career, he’s worked with First Nations families and hopes to bring that context and understanding to other ministry workers.

I talked with him about his role as the regional aboriginal practice consultant with the ministry and why he felt it was critical to have a collaborative approach to child welfare practices when dealing with First Nations communities.

It was interesting to hear his perspective on his role because the Ministry of Children and Family Development often gets a bad rap for the work that it does because issues of child safety can make people defensive and combative.

In my experience dealing with social workers, including Goutier, they do the best they can with heavy workloads and many divided interests, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t make mistakes. Historically, child welfare practices led to issues like the Sixties Scoop, which put huge number of First Nations children into foster care and fractured already distressed First Nations communities. This is why Goutier wants to work with First Nations communities rather than dictate to them. 

Of the things that struck me in our conversation was Goutier’s belief that the best course of action when dealing with First Nations communities was that the ministry should continue on the path that is it currently on. He said that the changes in attitude towards collaborative practice had changed dramatically in the 40 years that he has been working with First Nations bands and that change has been for the better. 

“It’s been a slow process over time. It’s complicated in a lot of ways because we have, you know, legislation and there is a lot of different ways the ministry does its work. It’s transitioning to more and more collaboration with the Aboriginal community and there’s really a very, very strong focus on collaborative process and that is the focus of the ministry is moving, and has been for some time, away from an intrusive practice to more collaborative strength-based practice,” he said. “I’m quite excited about the changes that are occurring.”

When I asked him about what he felt social workers needed to do to better deal with First Nations families, his advice was this: “ensure that people are constantly developing positive working relationships with the Aboriginal community so that your relationship as a child welfare worker is not crisis driven necessarily, but that you are actually actively developing a relationship.”

I believe that advice holds true not only for social workers, but also for journalists. It’s important that journalist are not just covering the bad news that happens in First Nations communities and even when we do, it’s best to do so when there are existing relationships in place.

In doing this project, I hope that I’ll have a chance to build those relationship up now so that I can tell new and exciting First Nations stories that come not from conflict, but from my relationships.

Phil Fontaine

Yesterday, I went and saw Phil Fontaine speak at Thompson Rivers University as part of the student union’s Common Voices lecture series. He has three terms as national chief of the Assembly of First Nations and has been an active voice in First Nations politics since he was elected as the chief of his band, Sagkeeng First Nation in Manitoba, at 28. 

About 100 people turned out to hear him speak. Though the room wasn’t full, the audience was engaged and question period went on for nearly two hours. I was pleased to see that the room was a mix of First Nations and non-First Nations people because as Fontaine mentioned, the conversation needs to involve more than just First Nations people if it is to be successful.

Fontaine spoke largely about the history of First Nations people in Canada with a focus on the effects of residential schools and then moving towards the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that he was influential in the creation of.  Most of what he was saying was not new to me, but it is always interesting to hear how issues are framed to a mixed background crowd. I felt that he was diplomatic in his approach, but still honest about the effects that colonization and its actions had had on First Nations people.

I had a chance to ask him about the role that he thought self-government plays in how First Nations people see themselves. He said that self-determination is key if First Nations people are to move forward and he believes it is the right of all people to be able to self-govern.

 I plan to have some quotes from his talk up at a later time, but I am going away for the next week and a half so it may only be in the beginning of March that I am able to post those quotes. 

Another benefit of going to this lecture was that I was able to connect with some interesting and engaged First Nations people in the Kamloops area who agreed to speak with me. I will keep you posted on that progress as it develops.

Moving along

This process feels like one step forward, one step back. I’m not making so much backward progress that I am discouraged, but it feels like there have been a number of setbacks in terms of getting interviews organized and completed.

Today, I was supposed to do an interview with Lisa Cooke, an anthropologist at TRU, but this week has been a busy one for her and we’ve rescheduled to the beginning of March. 

This comes along with some other positive developments. I have arranged to interview Jacques Goutier with the Ministry of Children and Family Development. He’s the regional aboriginal practice consultant and should have some good insights into some of the issues facing First Nations in this area in terms of child welfare.

As well, I got permission to interview Dolan Paul with the Tk’emlup Indian Band. He’s a councillor with the band and oversees the education portfolio. We’ve arranged to meet sometime early next month and this will likely lead to a tour of the Sk’elep School. This is positive because it’s a concrete example of how First Nations bands are taking over control of the responsibilities of their community.

In my conversation with Nathan Matthew, I spoke with him about some of the issues I hope to talk about with Dolan Paul — education and self-governance. It’s been a challenge for many First Nations groups to fit in with current education system because of the history between First Nations people and the federally imposed residential school.

“The lack of connection between parents, students who went to residential schools for 10-12 years, they came away not knowing family life, not having any role models for parenting and I think we’re really feeling those effects in the community,” said Matthew,  “but on the positive side in the ideas of self-governance and self-determination I was, along with a number of other parents, we started our own school in the community and hired our own teacher and the parents ran the school so that was a very positive piece and the activities in getting recognized as having title and rights to territory and rights as First Nations people in this country, I was part of that and part of the community membership that took steps to speak for ourselves and to go out and start asserting our rights on the land and seeing ourselves as First Nations community primarily and not as wards of the state.”

Matthew is see a lot of potential in First Nations people that he’d like to see them embraced. 

“It’s a matter of developing an awareness within the community, within the people, that they have an identity, a history that is worthy and that as first nations people we have a right to live on this world as a distinct people, to be self-governing and that we have a title and a right over traditional territory and we have a right to govern our self as we see fit,” he said. “The first task is to develop that belief in First Nations people because without that you can’t really go any further and that’s is what I’ve dedicated a lot of my time to is developing that belief, that we are Secwepemc, we are Simpcw. We have rights. We are here. We survived and we will move into the future with that notion— re-establishing our rights, re-establishing our community, our families and building from a notion of strength and potential rather than this notion of deficits.”

I think that this attitude is true in many First Nations leaders who are working to establish a new place in for their community in mainstream society. It’s important to not only have this conversation in First Nations communities, but in the wider community. Much of the challenges that First Nations people feel has to do with preconceptions that people outside of their community have about them. In order to get that to change, we need to see people outside First Nations communities educating themselves on First Nations issues and looking to gain more knowledge in and context into the history that has led to the effects today.

This is what I’m hoping to do now through this blog.

The Next Few Weeks

I’m hoping to get this blog moving for March. As mentioned in a previous update, I’m hoping to go the Secwepemc Museum and the Sk'elep School of Excellence.

I’ve now made calls on that and am looking forward to hopefully visiting the museum and school in the next few weeks. I’m still going to be looking at different areas of First Nations life, but will be focusing a bit more on the education system and its relation to self-governance. I want to look at education as one area where First Nations people are taking control back from the Federal government and how that is playing out on the ground.

This week, I’m looking forward to speaking with Lisa Cooke. She’s an anthropology professor at Thompson Rivers University and studies First Nations in B.C. Among her areas of study are the north and how treaties and reserves were done in B.C. I’m looking to get some insights from her into where the current system has come from and what might be coming next. 

Last week, I spoke with Nathan Matthew, the director of aboriginal education at Thompson Rivers University. As promised, here are a few excerpts from our conversation that discuss education, residential schools and what he’d like to see happen next. These are all quotes from Matthew:

“I think we’re still feeling the effects of the residential schools era that ended in the 1970s in this area and that’s where students were really pulled away from their communities and their homes with the specific intent of shredding them of their identity, their language and culture and their connectedness to their culture and that has had an incredible negative impact on how First Nations people are able to feel good about themselves, how they are able to take part in things like education and employment and it’s really been a terrible, I guess, piece of history that First Nations haven’t gotten over yet. It’s incredible the impact.”

“Now days if you’re not proactive in developing positive relationships and meeting the expressed needs of aboriginal people and First Nations that you can easily continue to be a force of colonialism and so there’s still a fight. If First Nations aren’t listened to, if they’re not, I guess, aren’t included in the planning and implementation of services, let’s say at the university level then it’s very difficult to say that you are meeting the needs and you are not a force of colonization, that you’re a force of positive development within First Nations supporting the notion of self- determination and the rights that First Nations people have in this country and aboriginal people.”

“The message that I would want to project is that there is great potential in First Nations and aboriginal people, that we are born with many many talents and many gifts and that the world that we live in serves to diminish those gifts or capacities and that’s the challenge that we have is to ensure that we do grow and that we do develop and we are strong and that we can contribute to our own well-being  and also to the well being of the larger community that we live in so I think that that’s the message. There’s such great potential that’s being covered over or negated and a negative relationship with the Federal government in regards to title and rights”

“it’s rewarding to be part of a development of an environment that’s more suitable for aboriginal success and the development of effective partnerships so personally it’s good because I’ve been able to be part of it, but it’s really part of a large teamwork of quite a number of people at the university and working with the aboriginal community and organizations”

Nathan Matthew

Nathan Matthew outside his TRU office.

Today I interviewed Nathan Matthew, the director of Aboriginal Education at Thompson Rivers University. He’s Simpcw, which is a Secwepemc band by the North Thompson near Barrier. He’s a former chief who led his community from 1976 to 77, 1985 to 87 and again from 1989 to 2006.

He was an administrator of the Kamloops Residential School and served as First Nations representative to the provincial Education Advisory and a political advisor and negotiator for the First Nations Education Steering Committee.

I met with him at his office at the Kamloops TRU campus. It’s tucked under the stairs of the Old Main building. The boardroom was filled with boxes and on the back wall was a huge drum with a with a medicine wheel painted on it.

Largest in the Southern Interior, I’m told by Matthew.

I sat down with him for a half hour interview that ranged from his role at TRU to his own experiences as a community leader. I asked him if I could call him an elder and he looked awkward. That comment was followed by a conversation about how people might see you as an elder, but it’s hard to know when you are old enough and experienced enough to be one.

After the half an hour, I wrapped up my microphone, but we kept talking for another 20 minutes. We talked about how First Nations people need to be proactively involved the policy and programs that affect them.  It was an interesting wide-ranging conversation.

I will go through the interview and post some of his comments on post-secondary education and on residential schools along with some audio clips from our conversation so you can hear it yourself. He’s got some interesting comments on what First Nations people need to do to gain a sense of value so stay tuned!

Update

This is week five of my exploration into First Nations politics in B.C. and I’ll admit I’m getting a bit frustrated. That’s mostly because I haven’t been able to talk with anyone in person. In part, it’s because I’ve been busy these last two weeks, but it’s also because of a series of unfortunate events that’s led to the few interviews that I had set up being cancelled. The cancellations are not anyone’s fault, but they do leave me feeling a lack of momentum.

On the reading scene, I’ve started a few new books and that’s been interesting. I’ve been re-reading Elizabeth Furniss’s book The Burden of History and started Like the Sound of a Drum: Aboriginal Cultural Politics in Denendeh and Nunavut by Peter Kulchyski. Like the Sound of a Drum is about First Nations in the north, but it’s applicable to my learning because of the leading role that the Inuit have taken in education and self-governance. Their actions might act as templates for the First Nations in B.C. as more communities look to take a leading role in self-governance.

I’m enjoying my reading but am looking forward to doing actual interviews with real people. It’s my interactions with people that help me stay excited about a topic so it’s my goal to have done at least one interview by the end of this week for this blog.

Oh no

Yesterday, I was supposed to do my first interview again, but in the morning, I got a call from my guest’s wife saying that he was in the hospital and obviously would not be able to make the interview. 

As a Secwepemc elder, my guest is one of the holders of his community’s stories and language. He’s the last speaker in his community of his language who learned it through growing up with it. His wife said that he’ll likely be fine but that he’s had some scares with his heart in the past. It leaves me feeling like he’ll be OK but it made me realized just how fragile some of this knowledge is.

Because traditions are still carried on orally in many FirstNations communities, it means that those stories and histories live within the people who hold them. This means that when those people pass away, those stories may go too. I’m glad that I’ll have the opportunity to hear some of the history and personal experiences of some First Nations people who experienced some of the historical events and policies that I’m reading about.

It takes time to negotiate and arrange for interviews with First Nations people. It seems to me that I need to approach it with more tact and patience than I would if I was trying to arrange an interview with someone of European descent. There is a different approach to time that is important to recognize. Even though I may want to do my interviews quickly so that the knowledge is not lost, it is better to approach my guests with patience and with cultural sensitivity.

I hope that everything works out with my guest and that he comes home safe. I really do want to hear his stories.