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.