What do you think my Grandpa Doxtdator lost in WW2 besides an eye? I’ve asked my students this both when I taught overseas, and this year when I started teaching on Six Nations of the Grand River reservation. One of my kids this year got the answer.
His Indian Status.
The logic of settler colonialism wants to get rid of Natives. No Natives, no Native Lands, and then extractive programs can proceed apace. That’s the real cash value of the ‘Vanishing Indian’ to the settler colonial state.
We recently had a strike of some 140,000 federal employees in Canada. And what the national news, the government, and the ostensibly progressive union leaders left out was that the strike meant the closure of schools on Six Nations, which are run by the federal government. Again, the ‘Vanishing Indian’.
But people with six Canadian flags and a ‘support the troops’ sticker on their pickup trucks can’t tell these stories about soldiers losing their status, and seemingly liberal folks don’t tell these stories about closures of schools, because both stories are inconvenient to our national narrative. When I made a post in my neighbourhood Facebook group about my school being closed because my union was on strike, it received a handful of shocked face emojis. Stories about abandoned baby rabbits, on the other hand, receive responses from vets who are hopping in their car *right now* to come help.
My Dad and his siblings got my Grandfather’s status back, but his story isn’t unique. In World War 1, Edith Monture was a nurse along with the American army because if she had pursued her nursing degree in Canada, she would have lost her status. No status, no claim to land, no problem.
Before I got my job teaching on the Rez, I had applied for a job in the land claims department of the federal government that I didn’t get. At the time, I told my partner that I had a great idea for a short story about an Indigenous person working away in the government, approving every land claim that came across their desk. Because they met all the metrics of efficiency and office decorum, no supervisor ever looked into what they were actually doing. People would say “He seemed like a really good guy, like he’d be fun to have a drink with. He even brought food to our Thanksgiving office party!”
That’s really a story about being a teacher, especially if you are Indigenous, Black, or a Person of Colour. We know that in some ways we’ve signed up to work for a system like a land claims department, designed to withhold and deny what our kids need, rather than expedite justice. And we show up to work each day to make justice happen, while keeping a low enough profile to keep our jobs. And that’s exhausting and can make for lonely and dangerous work in a profession that is already isolating.
I see so much hope for solidarity, especially in the 31 Days IBPOC writing project. Settler Colonialism and Anti-Black racism need to be abolished together. When Haudenosaunee people come together, we start with the Ohenten Kariwatekwen, which means ‘the words before all else.’ The address repeats our purpose: ‘we bring our minds together as one’. Bringing our minds together is both spiritual and political.
The logic of settler colonialism has been to divide and steal, both land and people. Canada, like the United States, Australia, and Israel, is a settler colonial state. There is no simple binary between Settler and Indigenous to Turtle Island because descendants of enslaved Africans, as one example, are certainly not Settlers. Ashley Marshall prefers the phrase “stolen people on stolen land”. Adele Thomas and Keedra Gibba both used the same phrase around the same time. In the same VICE article, Chelsea Vowel explains that “settler colonials, by definition, occupy lands and impose their legal orders on everyone.”
The violence from the initial settler occupation of land lives on in the connection between violence against the land and violence against Indigenous women. And as a whole planet, we are already feeling the effects of violence against land that could be prevented under Indigenous stewardship models where people talk about responsibility towards the land instead of rights to own land.
In late March, I was gifted tobacco seeds at work and reminded that I need to plant them with Ka’nikonhrí:yo, or a Good Mind. We need to bring those Good Minds together as teachers for the same reasons we want our plants to be born of good thoughts and intentions.
Had I wound up in a land claims department, I bet I’d have fewer tobacco seeds to plant.
The singer at one of our school social dances encouraged us teachers sitting to get up and do the dances that our ancestors were banned from doing in school. I’ve learned some songs, too. Since January, I’ve been the teacher ‘supervisor’ for the singing and drumming group at our school. We have someone come in to teach the songs and tell the stories about where they came from.
When we forget how the songs go or what songs come next, the person who comes to teach us says that we should try and that he will help us out a little bit to remember. He’ll sing those songs softly so the person whose turn it is to lead can take over. Sometimes he’ll go down the hall to see how many classrooms away he can hear our voices and report back to us. There’s only about five of us and so far our record is six classrooms away.
We went to an overnight camp with a school from a nearby city, and our singing group leader came and the kids got up with their rattles. At first, I was going to sit with the other teachers when one of them nudged me and said, “you should be up there.”
It was really something to look up and see our students dancing around us in a circle, to be in the middle of it, to be making it happen with a rattle and voice. It felt like a whole different kind of power to put things right than my imagined Indigenous land claims clerk had to sign papers and run the legal system that was imposed on us.
This blog post is part of the #31DaysIBPOC Blog Series, a month-long movement to feature the voices of indigenous and teachers of color as writers and scholars. Please CLICK HERE to read yesterday’s blog post by Jeannette Lee-Parikh. Please CLICK HERE to to be uplifted by the rest of the blog series.
