The Education of Debra

Hi Friends
Today I will do a more personal story.
As I've mentioned in past blogs I did not grow up on a reserve. I do hasten to say though that I did most certainly grow up native. I was taught by my enfranchised and shunned( by her own community as well as the dominate society) mother not to believe everything the school system was teaching me. My mother told me the story of Louis Riel, as she understood it. A freedom fighter for the causes of Metis and native people in the west. Totally opposite of what the school was telling me.

The school told me natives were savages. Citizens of a primitive or uncivilized societies. Yet they ( the new comers) modeled their constitution and ways of governance, from the native governments here.
The native people were practicing conservation before the white settlers arrived. There was aquaculture, managing the fish stocks, agriculture rearing crops of corn, beans and squash. Animals were hunted in a managed way so as to preserve the way of life enjoyed by the various nations living here.

Then the school of Hollywood got in on the act and tried to teach me that I should be ashame of who I was.
It worked for lots of our citizens, as I was to find out later in life. But once again my uppity mother had the nerve to disagree with the movie industry, too.

"We," she told me, "come from a long line of courageous leaders. Leaders who were to look seven generations into the future to make sound judgments for the Nations. The only error they made was to believe that the leaders of Nations they were dealing with had the same honour or mandate for their citizens."

My mother had been spared the residential school experience, by virtue of the fact of having been her maiden aunts favorite niece and by being sickly. When her Aunt couldn't bear children of her own she took my mother to live with her in upstate New York, away from the residential school problems (for the native communities) here in Canada. The United States had abandoned the residential schools years earlier than Canada had.

The people in our small town made it clear that we were not wanted or welcomed. My father had been from one of the founding and then middle-class families there and his family thought it an abomination he should bring such shame to their good name by marrying "that Indian girl." Sleep with her kind if you must, just don't marry them. My father was disinherited and his family never called our mother anything but his girlie and of course we were referred to as his little half breeds.

The only relatives we actually had were my Auntie and her two daughters. She, too, had out married and as such was banned from her community as well.

In the course of my life time I have met many like me. Products of out marriages who don't necessarily sound like or even look the part. I have also met many "apples" over my life. All of whom are content to stay on the side lines and get by.

I was talking to my son about these issues one day when he told me what a very wise elder had told him. Deep inside of every apple lays a little brown seed, that may someday get planted. Water that seed.

regards Debra