Treaty Education

Through watching the videos and reading the articles I have furthered my learning and understanding of the importance of treaty education in the classroom. I didn’t really have treaty education when I was growing up but I am now seeing more and more the importance of treaty education in the classroom.  It’s important to understand that treaty education affects everyone and not just First Nations people.

              In response to the email, it really is unfortunate that so many schools and teachers don’t feel the need to teach treaty education or think that it has a purpose in school. I would suggest to this intern to start by having a conversation with the coop teacher and explain to her your perspective as to why you believe treaty education should be taught. It could be that the coop teacher never learned much about treaty education themselves and don’t even know how to go about the topic. By having this conversation maybe something can be figured out in order to incorporate treaty education in the classroom and the coop teacher may learn something too. Some points I would make during this conversation would be to first start off saying that even though there aren’t any First Nations students in the class or school it is still important to learn about. Everyone living in Canada has come from some sort of settler background which makes treaty education important to everyone and not just First Nations people. Since we are all settlers at one point or another, treaties and treaty education is an important part of our history. If you are learning about the history of Canada there would be a huge chunk missing if you didn’t include the treaties and First Nations people in some way and if we don’t include treaty education in the history or the classroom we are just creating another generation of students who are clueless on the topic. This topic of treaty education isn’t going away and we need our students to be educated and exposed to this learning.

              In Dwayne Donald’s lecture title “On What Terms Can We Speak” he talked about how many people don’t want to teach Treaty education and residential schools because they want that to be done and to put it in the past (11:43). The problem is that this isn’t over and treaty education is still very important and we need to be teaching our students about them.  “There is a disconnect (On What Terms Can We Speak, 12:08)” and when this disconnect occurs the two sides of the table tend to not understand one another and results in one side not being heard or acknowledged. In schools, we strive to have our students feel heard and when we aren’t giving them all of the information or skipping out on pieces of the story, we aren’t allowing them to learn the whole story. If we want future generations to appreciate those who roamed the land before us and work on things such as reconciliation, we need to teach students about treaty education. “This last chance to stop moving, to start listening (Chambers pp. 35)” is very important because if we continue to not teach treaty education in schools we may lose the opportunity to make things right. As Cynthia said, it’s very important to stop ignoring this topic and take action because we need to start listening to one another in order to make things right. Our students have the ability to change the world and we need to help them do that by teaching them all aspects of their history and to teach them about the land they walk on everyday.

              One misconception that might also be present in this situation would be that treaty education is only for First Nations people when really it affects all of us. We are all treaty people and we all should have exposure to treaty education as it affects our past, present, and future. If we skip out on treaty education then many students will have no idea why some people acknowledge the land we are on or why certain ceremonies occur. The land we are living on is important to every generation that steps foot on it so why not teach the students about the history. Our students deserve to know their history and to be given the knowledge to make a positive impact on treaty education in Canada. We need to explain to people and show them the importance of treaty education because it affects us everyday whether we realize it or not.