Look to the Moon of the Popping Trees
Written By: Dr. Ellen Bielawski
2007-01-01
; "Dr. Ellen Bielawski")
Welcome to the "Moon of Popping Trees." People often describe winter cold as silent, but I favour the Northern Cheyenne name for the first moon after the winter solstice. If it is cold enough, ice creaks and snaps. Tree sap pops.I'm writing this on a warm December day with exactly one second more daylight than yesterday. No matter what time-measuring calendar my computer displays, I follow the rhythm of the solstices and equinoxes as Earth takes another journey around the sun.
During the short, dark days of December, two of us worked late at the University of Alberta School of Native Studies, then left together. Administrative Assistant Bev Findlay has worked for the school all of its 15 years. I'd been director for less than five months. As Bev closed the locked door behind us one night, she exclaimed "Oh, no!" Graffiti was sprawled across a poster for the school's new course for non-majors, Aboriginal Canada: Looking Forward/Looking Back. Someone had inked over the course title and written: 'This only furthers stereotypes of us! But what could we expect from a school of NS run by non-natives?'
I knew before taking this job that encountering systemic racism and stereotypes would be part of it. But I choose to work on this edge between communities, cultures, societies or just plain people. I choose it because the edge between cultures is a place of turmoil, risk, richness and creativity, like the ice floe edge where Inuit camp for the best hunting.
Just as the anonymous scrawl obscured the type on the poster, stereotypes and systemic racism obscure the relationship between Aboriginal people and others. In North America--the continent many Aboriginal people call Turtle Island--this relationship has grown more complex every single day of the past 500-plus years.
The School of Native Studies, and other such academic programs across Canada and around the world, exist in order to examine and explore this relationship. The school’s distinction rests on research and teaching about the contemporary society that includes all of us who inherit the prehistory and history of Canada. The school teaches, researches, graduates and employs non-Aboriginals side-by-side with Aboriginal people. We work together--not only towards a distant goal of equity between Aboriginal people and others--but creating and living that equity every day.
The school has both composition and responsibility that set it apart from other U of A faculties. The Constitution of Canada recognizes the “special status” of Aboriginal people--First Nations, Métis and Inuit--within Canada. The School of Native Studies recognizes that the relationship between Aboriginal people and others is unique as a discipline of study. Wisely, the founders of the school at the U of A established a unique entity for the discipline.
Does this matter in our contemporary world, in our day-to-day lives? Do you consume electricity in Edmonton? Do you pay taxes? Do you ever walk, bike, rollerblade or paddle in the river valley? Do you own a diamond? All of these actions integrate Aboriginal issues, right here, right now.
Aboriginal Canada is all of Canada. Perhaps we should name our new course "Nation within a Nation: What Everyone Needs to Know About Our Home and Native Land". (Many Aboriginal people sing "our home on Native land" when rendering the national anthem.) I often think the Indigo Girls sing it best: "I used to search for reservations and Native lands, before I realized, everywhere I stand there have been tribal feet…"
We are all here now. That is why the School of Native Studies exists. The questions that history has left for us to answer are not academic. They are active, daily questions. We--all of us inheritors--make choices about them every day.
I start teaching the Aboriginal Canada course on Jan. 5. By design, every one of our multi-disciplinary, multi-racial, multicultural faculty will teach parts of the course, along with Elders, graduates of the School of Native Studies, professors from other faculties, and persons with real-life lessons to offer, as well as academic credentials.
During the Moon of Popping Trees, light returns slowly. Earth can be very cold. The work we do is hard. It seems interminable, and the problems in human relationships appear intractable. But by Maple Sugar Moon (every Canadian, indigenous or immigrant, learns that maple sap runs in March) the light will pour over us daily.
I have a similar hope for the 37 students enrolled in Aboriginal Canada. I hope they will never see the relationship between Aboriginal people and others in a simple 'red' or 'Métis brown' or 'white' stereotypical way again, no matter what paths they follow in their future.
Dr. Ellen Bielawski is director of the University of Alberta's School of Native Studies.
This article originally appeared in ExpressNews.