How did I learn about Indigenous people?

I think the approach I'll take with this blog is to first reflect on what has past (in my life), establish where I am now, and then work forward.  Maybe a good place to start is with a question my colleague and mentor Shauneen Pete often poses to her students: How did you learn about Indigenous people?  She prompts students to dig back in their memories to identify how their opinions, thoughts, and feelings about Indigenous people were formed during childhood.  

I grew up on a farm north-west of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, in Treaty 4 territory (though I definitely wouldn't have called it that as a child).  Interestingly, I can only recall a couple of times that I was explicitly taught anything about Indigenous people, and I think that was largely by accident. 

My dad, who was a farmer, used to come across Indigenous artifacts - arrowheads, stone hammers, and the like.  He would bring these things home and show them to us, and inevitably shared a brief lecture about them as well.  His professional background was in geology, so his interactions with us about the artifacts were usually focused on the kind of rocks they were and why they might have been used for a particular purpose.  Despite the fact that the artifacts were there in front of me, I thought about the people who had used them as historical figures who were long gone.  

I also remember going on a field trip to Cypress Hills, maybe in grade three or four.  While our class was there, a guide led us on a hike around the Fort Walsh site and then taught us how to erect a teepee.  I remember the guide being a white guy (I even remember his name--Allan), but somehow it didn't strike me as odd that a white guy was teaching me about a teepee.  

Other than these two instances of explicit instruction, I think that any conclusions I made about Indigenous people when I was a young child were made implicitly based on socialization.  For the most part, I remember the stories I heard growing up as a farm kid being centered around homesteaders.  These narratives were even embedded in the landscape, on the parts of the farm that we lovingly referred to as the equipment graveyard. As evidenced in the photograph here, the homesteading equipment was never disposed of.  It was left to languish, all the while reminding anyone who happened by about the legacy of toughness and grit it inspired.  The homesteading history of the land where I grew up was the only history on offer.  

I had slightly more explicit contact with Indigenous people when I attended high school in the city. In my school of 800 kids there was one Indigenous family, and one kid in my grade. Though I did observe the difference between that kid and the masses of us white folks (the brown skin was a giveaway), I'm not sure that my brain processed it any further than that.     

What has become obvious to me here is that Indigenous people were so thoroughly erased from our region that they were invisible to me as a child.  Further, I did not possess any curiosity that might have moved my observations beyond observation.  Maybe this was due to the influence of the education system.  More likely, it was due to my implicit position of privilege in a society that refused to even acknowledge the reality of Indigenous people (thus my propensity to do the same). 

I didn't learn in any substantive way about Indigenous people until I was an adult.  I'll explore the dynamics of this learning later.  This initial reflection on my youth has highlighted how deeply we take peoples' histories for granted, particularly when we sit in a position of privilege.