Native and Non-Native Voices on the Residential School Issue and Historical Revisionism: Writing Between the Times
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Native and Non-Native Voices on the Residential School Issue and Historical Revisionism: Writing Between the Times
Pas disponible in Francais.
Wayne A. Holst
University of Calgary
Calgary (Alberta)
HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE FUTURE
1. Revisiting Cultural Appropriation
Affirmation of aboriginal ways of perceiving reality and expressing themselves has been enhanced through the work of anthropologist Jean-Guy Goulet of St. Paul University, Ottawa. In a recent study entitled Ways of Knowing (Goulet, 1998) he revisits the encounter between the Oblates and the Dene Tha First Nation in Northern Alberta, recreating points of contact and demonstrating convincingly that the people were not passive recipients of Christianity from the missionaries. Through personal engagement and reflection on what he learned, and using the skills of his discipline, Goulet portrays the Dene Tha as actively involved in reshaping and redefining their traditional belief systems. They are doing this in light of the new understandings that were brought to them by the Oblates and a Euro-Canadian education system. Goulet also demonstrates that these new understandings - even when contradictory in nature - become supplements, not replacements for what is already known.
[...]Dene Tha, like many other Dene in the Canadian subarctic, readily identify themselves as Roman Catholic. They baptize their children, pray the rosary, and attend mass, especially on the occasion of a funeral. Nonetheless, the Dene outlook on the world and life persists. Christian labels have been applied to Dene concepts, and Christian symbols have been interwoven into Dene lives and rituals [...] Unbeknown to the missionaries, the Christian teachings and symbols have been incorporated into the Dene Tha world through traditional processes of knowing with the mind (Goulet, 1998, p. 222).
The Dene Tha have succeeded in transforming the Christian faith into something uniquely their own. Far from functioning as inferior, acquiescent receptacles of WestEuropean ways of being and knowing they have survived as a distinct people because they continue to appropriate what they find useful to their traditional culture. They remain ultimately committed to defining themselves on their own terms and in their own ways.
What is true for the Dene Tha is arguably true for many Canadian First Nations. As they begin to accept their traditional knowledge as legitimate, Natives will understand their mutual history with others very differently than seemed previously to be the case.
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Droits d'auteur © 2009 Heritage Community Foundation
et Institut pour le Patrimoine, le Campus Saint-Jean, Université de l'Alberta
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