Educate Yourself

Those who know me, know that I'm a huge hoop head and one of my new favourite players is Dwayne Wade despite the fact that he retired in 2019. Why? Well, watch ~30 mins in:

“Nothing changes with my love. Nothing changes with my responsibilities. Only thing I have to do now is get smarter and educate myself more. And that’s my job.”

And there we have it. The responsibility lies with us when we do not understand something that we care to understand. It may not always be our child, but if we care about something or someone we should approach it with curiousity and a beginner's mindset.

For example, when my family immigrated to Canada in the early 1990's we landed in Winnipeg. Winnipeg has a large uruban Indigenous population. The folks at the newcomer's centre where my parents were taking ESL courses warned my parents about 'those people'. The truth of the matter was that there likely were individuals panhandling and probably some petty crime that the staff wanted to warn new immigrants about that may not have known any better. However, it is very unfortunate that our first exposure to the first inhabitants of this great country was framed so negatively.

This lens carried through my early years as we moved to Calgary and the little that I was presented with Canada's colonial history (there were no teachings about residential schools in social studies when I was growing up) lined up with much of the European history my family had experienced. Being from Czechoslovakia - smack middle of Europe - every power monger came through us. We were even involved in the beginning of World War II. So why wouldn't Europeans come to another continent and make it their own?

But as I grew up I came to better understand inter-generational trauma. One of my great-grandfathers was stripped of his life's work, another ended up in a concentration camp - he survived, but came out weighing around 100 lbs as an adult man. This clearly then coloured my grandparents' lived experiences - not to mention the Soviet occupation following WWII. My mother came to be deeply affected after the failed Prague Spring in 1968. Seeing how these traumas had affected my family, I grew empathy to the traumas faced by Indigenous peoples of Canada and elsewhere.

I am a proud Canadian, and with all of this Wet'suwet'en protest and the solidarity movement across Canada I knew that the only job I had was thing to get smarter and educate myself more about Truth & Reconciliation. I could have started with the Truth & Reconciliation Commission's 94 Calls to Action (everyone should read these), but I wanted to understand better how we got to where we are today. So I picked up a copy of Bob Joseph's '21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act'. This book has opened up my eyes to just how systemic and intentional Canada was about solving 'the Indian problem'.

In doing the work that I do I think a lot about systemic issues, namely patriarchy, but patriarchy has been around so long that it's difficult to know the seeds of it and untangle it from the fabric of our society and culture. However, Canada is only 153 years old and documents cited in '21 Things' are from this time. Here's what Canada's first Prime Minister had to say about it:

When the school is on the reserve, the child lives with its parents, who are savages, and though he may learn to read and write, his habits and training mode of thought are Indian. He is simply a savage who can read and write. It has been strongly impressed upon myself, as head of the Department, that Indian children should be withdrawn as much as possible from the parental influence, and the only way to do that would be to put them in central training industrial schools where they will acquire the habits and modes of thought of white men.

- John A. Macdonald

There we have it, the seeds of the residential school system that caused generations of trauma, which then contributed to the Sixties Scoop, which then compounded further generations of trauma. One leader's lack of love and responsibility contributed to a cultural genocide that we as a nation are now grappling with as we raise our consciousness around Truth & Reconciliation, Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG), and now the sovereignty of the Wet'suwet'en peoples.

So the loving and responsible thing that the staff of newcomer's centre could have done for my parents, is not only to have taught them about potential risks, but to have helped them to better understand their new home and its history in context.

What's something in your world that you could stand to get smarter and educate yourself more on?