I had been
contemplating, for some time now, a return to writing and blogging. The itch
was there and needed scratching, my last post on my education blog, Where Are the Sheep, having been in early 2014,
with a short one-off in 2016 addressing the whole Boyden thing. The itch had
been tempered by a number of challenges, not the least of which was the feeling
that I had very little to say and the acknowledgement that there were, and are,
others speaking much more articulately and thoughtfully than I ever was ever
able. Further to it is the ongoing challenge that I have witnessed this past
week in social media and Canadian mainstream media: the ongoing effort to
marginalize and silence Indigenous voices that speak out. A contributing factor
to my hiatus from blogging was the angry, mainstream, usually white, voices
that pushed back rather violently against us when we presented our
epistemologies and views online, in the classroom or anywhere that the dominant
Canadian colonial worldview and understanding has been maintained and
encouraged. I was driven out because I could not emotionally handle that
silencing. I worry that I still can’t, as evidenced by my limited attempts to
engage online beyond a lot of retweeting and article sharing, choosing instead
to let other voices carry the flag. This violence pushed me out of my teaching
career and into my currently fledgling film career. I still want to have a
voice and say what I need to say but I am still looking for the right way to do
it.
As I was
leaning into restarting my blogging, I was trying to decide if I wanted to just
continue with Where Are the Sheep or leave it as an artifact of the time I was
most active as an advocate for Indigenous Education. I am still very interested
in Indigenous Education and still want to speak on that issue but I don’t think
that Sheep is the forum for it anymore as my own thought processes have taken
me beyond that time in my life and I want to explore a larger forum and have
more freedom than what I had imposed on myself with that one. I know it is mine
and governed by my rules but I am leaving it where it is because I need to and
starting fresh here because I need to.
I almost
dropped the idea when all the events of the past week took place, from the
#appropriationprize brouhaha to Barbara Kay’s racist attacks on all things
Indigenous. Some very strong voices, Alicia Elliot and Jesse Wente among them,
spoke against the anger with eloquence and with emotion and power that we are
usually denied. The white supremacist default that backed up Ms. Kay’s assaults
and the #appropriationprize discourse lack real gravitas with which to hang
their arguments and it is hard to argue for “objectivity” when “objectivity”
means so long as it isn’t Native or so long as it agrees with the version of
facts that you grew up with. The attempt to reframe the conversation as one of
free speech and then a lashing out against Native peoples generally is an
attempt to re-centre the dominant discourse as the only one that matters. More
and more often, it is failing, which is what you see here, which is why the
lashing out is getting more violent and more deranged.
Where Are
the Sheep in Mainstream Media’s Reflexive Self Defence?
The following section is from my old blog Where Are the Sheep. I reposted it mostly because I think it might be somewhat relevant
to the #appropriationprize issue:
In the beginning of my Grad program, I was assigned
an article to read, There are no sheep in post-structuralism, by Dr.
AudreyThompson (it is unpublished and unavailable online, I looked,
sorry). Within the article, she argues,
that when we consider race and culture, we tend to start from generalities, and
by starting from generalities, we are not necessarily going to get very far
from where we started. She tells the
story of a class she was teaching that was looking at the culture of the Inuit
by reading the stories of three white teachers working in an Inuit
community. One of her students put up
her hand asked, “Where are the sheep?”
This stopped her cold. Not
because she was wondering about sheep in northern Canada, but because, in her
efforts to decenter whiteness, to remove that aspect of white privilege from
the classroom that reinforces the idea that the western ideal is the proper and
right one, she was reinforcing it. The
teachers in her story were grossed out when they were offered blubber (if I
recall correctly), and considered it a victory, later, when they came around
enough to be able to say no and not feel like they were offending their Inuit
hosts. What her student brought up to
her was the fact that she was, in trying to bring in a less-white perspective,
she was reinforcing it, because the teachers were not immersing and understanding the culture and
the worldview. They were maintaining
their worldview by resisting being grossed out by the other, but not learning
it.
Thompson
argues that in post-structuralism starts with generalizations about race
instead of relationships and the acknowledgement of difference. In attempts to decenter whiteness in
coursework, to incorporate the “other”, Thompson found that it merely reinforced
White privilege, because race and culture was framed by the white understanding
of it. White, Black, Indigenous, Asian,
Gay, Straight, male, female all have general assumptions that can be made about
them to identify them. What do we really
know about the person or the group, even after their status is made known? When we teach about otherness, we teach in a
way that the discoveries will match our expectations of what makes the “other”.
Sheep are
central to the lives of the Navajo, defining relationships, identity, place and
power. They are central to economy and
to education, wherein the children learn to care for the sheep, in order to
learn how to develop their social responsibilities. Thompson, in her article,
quotes Hasbah Charley, 1996: “My sheep are here, and I think of them as my
parents…they are the ones that keep me going day after day.” You can’t recognize sheep in
post-structuralist generalizations of race.
The importance of sheep to the Navajo is that they “represent a
distinctive way of organizing a world."
To look
at my beloved Stó:lō', for example, where do we live? Stó:lō means river. Do you see an important relationship that
might be particular to the Stó:lō people?
The sockeye are our forefathers, they are our food and the food of our
children. They are central to how we
came to be. To you see a particular
relationship there? What happened to the
Cree, Saulteaux and other Plains nations when the Canadians and Americans
decimated the bison herds? Do you see an
important relationship that might be particular to these nations?
What is missing
because we do not know how to value it?
We look at the Cree and Inuit from the perspective of the white women
and their point of view, which doesn’t see any particulars in the culture they
are “helping”, except as it affects them.
Non-Aboriginal people might need to re-examine their own understanding
of themselves (as should we all), accept a little humility and be willing to
examine how a race or culture is shaped by the need to get up and take care of
the sheep, or pay the proper respect to the sockeye.
Audrey Thompson's article is published, in Philosophy of Education 2008 (Ronald Glass, Ed., Urbana, IL: Philosophy of Education Society). It's on p. 193-201.
Audrey Thompson's article is published, in Philosophy of Education 2008 (Ronald Glass, Ed., Urbana, IL: Philosophy of Education Society). It's on p. 193-201.