Dynamic Knowledge Sharing

Friday 26 April 2024

“The simple flapping of a butterfly's wings can cause a tsunami on the other side of the world” 

- Chinese Proverb

My understanding of this proverb we usually call “the butterfly effect” in English is that our actions, even small ones, can have an enormous impact. Learning does not happen in a vacuum, there are a myriad of factors that contribute to learning. How mindful, or mindless, we are to the world around us determines how impactful lessons, opportunities, and risks might be. In Anishinaabe culture there's a group of dancers which model their dancing style after memengwaanh (butterfly), so as I write about trauma and chaos I like to think that these dancers work to bring balance and peace into the world.

 

Learning is a combination of external and internal changes, depending on the learner, instructor, and subject. For myself as a learner each class or lesson offers opportunities to hone different skills, use new tools, and connect with or embrace ideas that might challenge my beliefs; to the end of confronting my own biases and supporting a growth mindset. I believe that we learn best when we are intrinsically motivated, supported, encouraged, engaged, and developing our skill or knowledge sets with earnestness.

Trauma-Informed Instruction and Student Wellness

As an indigenous student, education has the added burden of reconciling and healing generational trauma inflicted on my relatives, who survived American Indian Residential Schools. Through a lens of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (CRP), which Ladson-Billings (1995) defines as "specifically committed to collective, not merely individual, empowerment." We know that generational trauma is not fair, and that it’s not our fault as individuals. My perspective is that if we want to thrive we must accept that healing our generational trauma is a personal and individual responsibility but we don’t have to do it alone; and that's where I can fold the tenets of CRP into my theory of learning. 


For some indigenous students, identifying generational trauma as an issue may be a challenge, and they may not even have access to their personal family history. For those who have been severed from that cultural connection, it can be intimidating to want to learn more about their culture without extant familial or communal ties. For some it is impossible to forge direct connections with their inherent culture. 

"Native American educator Cornel Pewewardy (1993) asserts that one of the reasons Indian children experience difficulty in schools is that educators traditionally have attempted to insert culture into the education, instead of inserting education into the culture."  

-(Ladson-Billings, 1995)

The Hegemony of Colonization

Paulo Freire (Pedogogy of the Oppressed or POTO) identified the banking method of education as a model which perpetuates concepts where students are seen as passive receptacles to be filled with knowledge by the teacher, who is positioned as the authority figure in the classroom setting (2009). The banking method of education treats knowledge as something to be deposited into students’ minds, leading to a passive, non-critical stance in learning. I find myself sharing his critiques of this model of education, and it appears that the power dynamic at play in this model was weaponized against indigenous children in Canadian and American Indian Boarding schools. A more mild (to the dominant culture) example that floors me, is how Indigenous children were forced to cut their hair while attending these boarding schools (Hanson, 2009). North American tribes are not a monolith but for many tribes hair is important because it holds our memories, our connections with others, and it’s sacred. Cutting an indigenous child’s hair to make them look “more civilized” is barbaric, and cruel, but it worked to the end of maintaining the power dynamic in favor of the oppressors.

“Schools embody dominant cultural values and norms and constitute critical sites of exerting social control through the ways in which they regenerate and legitimize ‘colonial, and inherently patriarchal, racist and ableist relations and institutions’ (Hutcheon and Lashewicz 2020: 698). This highlights the imperative of developing theories of inclusive education that acknowledge and address the nexus of colonialism/ty, disability, trauma and intersectionality and their impact on educational accessibility, participation and achievement.” 

- Liasidou, 2022

The Injustice of Intersectionality Blindness

In Kimberlé Crenshaw's Ted Talk, The Urgency of Intersectionality, her analogy highlights that the injustices of intersectionality can be criticized by their blind spots because aspects of our experiences, like race and gender, are like roads which will cross. While we are impacted by traffic on both of these roads, certain systems, like the court in her example, may only offer assistance if we are impacted either by one aspect or another but not at the point of intersection. There are many ways in which we become traumatized, and the targets thrust upon us by our intersectionality of race, class, gender, ability, and other attributes make navigating barriers to success palpably, excruciatingly, difficult. 


We are all complex evolving puzzles, and trauma can disrupt the pieces of us that help us make sense of our world. Maybe memengwaanh flaps its wings and we lose parts of us to that trauma; maybe that happened to generations before us and we are now discovering that those pieces are missing from our upbringing. If we do our best to remake those pieces and keep building out our puzzle with the support of those around us, whether they are more knowledgeable others or not, we can heal some of the unaddressed trauma by learning the things that we need to. Doing this will also free up some of our cognitive resources to have space to learn the things we are really passionate about.


Trauma is a hurdle that everyone tackles differently, and the educational systems we have in place have not addressed the inequities from generational trauma well. So when the great grandchildren of boarding school survivors exhibit behaviors which are manifestations of those harrowing boarding school experiences, they might have learned to not question authority figures, and they may have a home environment that rewards docile, incurious demeanor and punishes anything that strays too close to dismantling the system of oppression that is colonialism.

Historical Indigeneity 

Our cultures persist. Our languages persist. Our stories, our regalia, and our traditions persist. We persist despite: broken treaties, ethnic cleansing, genocide, poverty, discrimination, dehumanization, and violence. Indigenous resilience and determination is how our languages and cultures survived. 


Examples - the list above is in reference to these:


Post-colonization indigenous history is not widely taught in American schools, and what is being taught doesn’t typically come from an indigenous perspective, but a colonized one. This history is so rare to come by because few instances of written accounts survived and it’s generally accepted that story-telling and oral histories were how indigenous folks maintained and passed-down knowledge from generation to generation. These stories and traditions survived because our elders safeguarded them and kept them secret. This was done in part to protect that knowledge to be able to pass it down, in part to protect themselves as well as their descendants at times when practicing their spirituality, language, and culture could institutionalize them. (Bach, 2023) 

'From 1904-1960, over 3,500 Alaskans were deemed insane by a jury and sent to the privately-owned Morningside Hospital in Portland, Oregon. The Morningside Hospital History Project (MHHP) aims to find these “Lost Alaskans” ... reconnecting families with information about their lost relatives, and bringing the history of Morningside back into public memory.'

- Bach, 2023

Contemporary Indigeneity

I co-host a Sharing Traditional Knowledge event with my parents to facilitate sharing and learning about our culture and heritage. During our most recent Spring session I learned that major life milestones are often celebrated with new outfits. The new clothes represent a fresh start with that big life change (an event like a birthday, coming of age, accomplishment, graduation, wedding, etc.) but this has practical applications in contemporary settings like getting someone a lab coat for their new job as an assistant lab manager. Historically, I have not been very appreciative of getting clothes in any capacity at any time as a gift, but learning about this context and the importance of clothing items like a ribbon shirt or ribbon skirt (often clothing items used in ceremonies) has helped me to understand that the intention of those gifts and that it’s meaningful. It has shifted my mindset and attitude about receiving those types of gifts and will affect my behavior and gratitude for them going forward. Consequently, it has also influenced my gift-getting mindset, to know what it could mean to friends or family. 


For the Anishinaabek (Ojibwe people) we believe in The Seven Sacred Teachings (2020): aakide'ewin - courage, minaadendimowin - respect, gaazhwenimowin - love, nibwaakaawin - wisdom, debwewin - truth, dibaadendiziwin - humility, and gwe'ekwaadiziwin - honesty (see image carousel below, or click the hyperlink to find audio clips). The culture and language has built into it the mindsets of honoring these teachings. Each of my peers and elders who shared with us at our gathering followed a common theme in one belief we agreed on: it doesn’t matter if you “get it right” as long as you go about it in a good way; as long as you honor these teachings. There’s always room for improvement, and gratitude.


Miigwech, baamaa pii miinwaa kawaabimin! It helps if you know who Yoda is and read this like him, "Thank you, later when again will see you!" (Which my mom did via audio clip when I asked for a translation/meaning check 😂)

References

Bach, S. L. (2023). Finding the Lost Alaskans: Volunteer and Researcher Experiences with the Morningside Hospital History Project. A Master’s Paper for the M.S. in L.S degree. April, 2023. 78 pages. Advisor: Elliott Kuecker. 

Crenshaw, K. (Director). (2016, October). The Urgency of Intersectionality. TED. https://www.ted.com/talks/kimberle_crenshaw_the_urgency_of_intersectionality/transcript

Freire, P. (2009). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Race/Ethnicity: Multidisciplinary Global Contexts, 2(2), 163-174. https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/266914

Hanson, E. The Residential School System. (2009). Retrieved March 16, 2024, from https://indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca/the_residential_school_system/#:~:text=In%201996%2C%20Gordon%20Reserve%20Indian,remaining%20residential%20schools%20in%20operation

Isaacs-Thomas, I. (2019, May 30) The 1970s court case that reaffirmed tribal fishing rights in Michigan. Michigan Public. https://www.michiganpublic.org/law/2019-05-30/the-1970s-court-case-that-reaffirmed-tribal-fishing-rights-in-michigan

Joseph, A. S. (2021). A modern trail of tears: The Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) Crisis in the US. Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine, 79, 102136. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jflm.2021.102136

Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). But that's just good teaching! The case for culturally relevant pedagogy. Theory Into Practice, 34(3), 159-165.

Liasidou, A. (2022). Decolonizing inclusive education through trauma-informed theories. Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research, 24(1), 277–288. https://doi.org/10.16993/sjdr.951

Miller, R. (2021). Nazi Germany’s Race Laws, the United States, and American Indians. St. John’s Law Review, 94(3). http://scholarship.law.stjohns.edu/lawreview/vol94/iss3/5

Pruitt, S. (2023, July 12). Broken Treaties With Native American Tribes: Timeline. HISTORY; A&E Television Networks. https://www.history.com/news/native-american-broken-treaties

Sarche, M., & Spicer, P. (2008). Poverty and Health Disparities for American Indian and Alaska Native Children. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1136(1), 126–136. https://doi.org/10.1196/annals.1425.017

Seven Sacred Teachings | Bay Mills Community College. (2020). Bay Mills Community College. https://www.bmcc.edu/about-bmcc/community-services/seven-sacred-teachings

Valiquette, S. (2019). Sixties Scoop, Historical Trauma, and Changing the Current Landscape about Indigenous People. Major Papers. 106. https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/major-papers/106 

Zalcman, D. (2016). “KILL THE INDIAN, SAVE THE MAN”: ON THE PAINFUL LEGACY OF CANADA’S RESIDENTIAL SCHOOLS. World Policy Journal, 33(3), 72–85. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26781425