I did not realize how little I knew about Indigenous history. It was embarrassing when we had Paul Michelle come in to give a presentation and ask if we knew any of the languages/ peoples, assuming we would know at least 2, and I literally knew none. I was mortified. I looked up the curriculum for grade four social studies in order to speak about government, and to my surprise the whole curriculum was about Indigenous history… I never learned a thing about it in elementary school. This made me realize how skewed our school system is, and the fact I am hoping to be a teacher really makes me passionate about this. I do not want a kid to have to be twenty years old and not know a thing about Indigenous history, because that is our history. Why do we spend so much time learning about European wars when there were wars such as the Chilcotin War happening on our own territory that explains issues that were occurring even better than WWII. We teach kids how great Canada is helping with the wars and do not spend enough time teaching them that we were not always the good guys. We teach a skewed vision of Canadian history by avoiding the truths and focusing on our greatness.
Through this class I learned that Indigenous populations had a pretty rough go. I never realized they struggled so much through the colonization of Canada. Stories from groups such as the Beothuk’s and Dakleh’s made me cringe when we learned that they died off because they felt the desire to suffer and avoid colonists. The fact we pushed so strongly for their assimilation rather than allow them to continue their cultural norms shows that we were not completely accepting; we took their land and expected them to accept what we were creating.
