Episode 8: Antidotes to Colonialism—A Disciple of Story Shares His Views, feat. Dwayne Donald

[Music] He said to me, "It's not a matter of fact, you said it, that I don't want to be an Indian anymore." And so, you know, tried to hide, tried not to over-react, tried not to make a feel-back, so I just took a deep breath and sat down. And I said, "Oh, why is that?" He said, "Indian's always loose." [Music] You're listening to Uncedled, Journeys in Truth and Consolation. I'm Jessica Vanneberg, co-host to Church Lee and our guest is Duane Donald. [Music] So, a fascinating conversation lies ahead, like they all should be, right? In this episode, Duane Donald, Jessica Vanneberg and I discuss liberal philosophy, its colonial underpinnings, and its Canadian manifestations, honoring, restoring, repairing, and renewing relationships, how knowing and living your culture can be a fulfilling part of your life journey. Story, positive, negative, and personal, writ large and writ small, indigenous teaching and learning methods, and the need for them in modern education, plus a whole bunch more. But before all that, here's Jessica with a land acknowledgement. It is always a great honor, George, to be asked to acknowledge the land we stand on and the peoples of this land. Currently, I'm situated on the traditional territory of Treaty 6, and we stand upon a land that carries the footsteps of and hearts of many first nations, matying in you and people, that have been here for thousands of years in many generations. And I'd like to acknowledge our and their relationships of Mother Earth. It is an interconnected relationship as we're all relations and have an obligation to respect that this land has nourished and healed, protected and embraced us. And we are grateful to the indigenous peoples that have been stewards of this interconnected relationship. We are all relations and as such we all respect each other in our beliefs, but also our own individual relationships with Mother Earth. And so for my heart and spirit to yours and all those who are listening, I'd like to open up this podcast in a good way. Dwayne Donald, the scholar with the University of Alberta Faculty of Education, is with us today. Welcome Dwayne. Thank you. It's good to be with you. Born and raised in Edmonton, Dwayne is a descendant in the Papus Chase creonation, which is not currently recognized by the government of Canada. His career as an educator began in the Mathar Valley slums of Nairobi, Kenya. One memorable set of experiences in Africa was the privilege he had to work alongside Kenyans with the Mathar Youth Sports Association. After returning to Canada in 1993, Dwayne began teaching social studies in English at Kenyai High School in the Kenyai First Nation in southern Alberta. And that was life-changing for him. In fact, the opportunity to learn from Kenyai elders and community leaders had a tremendous influence on his interests and commitments as a curriculum thinker. In 2003, Dwayne and his family moved to Edmonton so he could begin doctoral studies at the University of Alberta. He accepted an academic position in the Faculty of Education in 2007. He has quite a few degrees, starting with a Bachelor of Arts at the U of A, followed by a Bachelor of Education at the University of Calgary, a Master of Education at the University of Lethbridge, and finally a PhD at U of A. Dwayne's Master's thesis was supervised by Cynthia Chambers, who is a friend of mine, and I like to think of this podcast too. So Dwayne, how does all that sound? Well, thank you, George and Jessica. Maybe I'll just add right now that one of the elders I got to know over the years asked me one day, "How many years I spent in school?" And so I added it up and told him and he said, "Boy, you're a slow learner." He said, "I just went there a few times and that was enough for me." So I always remember that. It's always difficult to try to capture somebody's life story, but that's certainly one stream of it for sure. One thing maybe I will add is that I do have a couple of names besides Dwayne, and what I really try to do, what I've learned, is that those names that are given in a ceremonial way, they're meant to guide you. So they provide guidance, and if you honor them and you follow them, they'll work for you in that way. And so about 25 years ago, I was given a Blackfoot name by this beautiful old man, the late Bernard Tallman. I'm Blackfoot, you would say, "Nisto, Ni, Tsi, Tsi, Tapi, Pak, some, api, o, ma, ga." So my Blackfoot name is Long Runner, somebody who runs a lot. There's a few metaphors attached to that as well. I have a pre-name, Elder Bob Cardinal, who's from Muskehkhasik, Inak pre-nation, somebody that I know quite well, worked with a lot over the years. He gave me the name "Mustahaya Muskoa." So "Mustahaya Muskoa Ni, Tsi, Tapi, Pak, o, ma, ga." And some of your listeners might recognize that. That's a big bear, or a grizzly bear. And some of your own connotations for that name and its connections to healing. I've tried to use both api, o, ma, ga, "Mustahaya Muskoa Ni, Tsi, Tapi, Pak, o, ma, ga." And trying to guide what I do, is in the work that I do at the university. So we are, we're both colleagues, even though this is our first kind of interaction at the University of Alberta. We're both part of different faculties there. I'm a Deneita First Nation, but I'm a 60-scoop survivor. And so I grew up in a very inclusive German family in Northern Alberta. But I found my way to the university. And so I know we both have experienced university in different times. I also have graduated there with a couple of engineering degrees. And so I know we're both alumni and have found our way back into academia in different ways. Maybe you want to chat with us a little bit about what you have seen, change over time, with respect to students and Indigenous learnings and teachings at the university. And where you see things headed. Well, yeah, I mean, it was a long time ago that I showed up there at the U of A. It was a mid 80s. And I really, you know, as a young man, I really didn't have a lot of, I don't know what I would call it, maybe political awareness. I was concerned with other things. And my older brother attended the U of A before me. One of my interests was just to kind of follow in his footsteps. And so I was playing football and sort of went to class once in a while kind of the thing. And so, you know, my mind was on other things back then. I remember I did take a history class with Dr. Oliver Dickerson, who sort of a real ground breaker, a Meti scholar who. I think was the first real historian in Indigenous history at the U of A. And that, that would have been, I think, about 1986 that I took a class with her and stirred up a few things. I guess my, my reflections based on the question, you asked, Jessica, I have to do with more recent, I guess, interactions and. I, you know, I would say that when I, when I began as a faculty member at the U of A in 2007. There were students who were interested in Indigenous themes and issues that I encountered in our faculty, but not a lot. And part of my gig, I guess I'll call it back then as a faculty member was to visit the other curriculum courses that, you know, existed in in our faculty. So these would be the courses where people would be taught or, you know, engage in curriculum and instruction courses on how to teach math or how to teach science or how to teach language art, how to teach social studies. And part of my job was to go around to these different sections and I had like a couple of hours to try to convince people that they should care. I mean, about what I was talking about, and, you know, I kind of mixed reviews and I got, I got kind of tired of it after a few years, of course, because I started to feel like I use car sales. You know, it's not that bad. Give the tires a kick, take it for a spin, maybe, you know, it'll be okay. I just never felt good about being engaged in the work in that way. So I was trying to sell. something. The things changed pretty dramatically in 2013. I was part of a group of Indigenous faculty members that were for us including me who were tasked with conceptualizing a required course in our program Indigenous issues. That course began to be taught in our faculty in the fall of 2013 and it was a remarkable experience to be part of a, that we were all Indigenous people. There was about 16 of us. I think you add up everybody who was involved in facilitating sessions and lectures and all that. I would say in those seven years now there's been a pretty dramatic qualitative change in the students and you know we're dealing with hundreds of students because our faculty is the largest in Canada but in general there was resistance initially and I think misunderstanding and as the sort of culture of the class has grown you can feel that resistance start to show itself less and I just find that people are much more curious and they're realizing that there's a lot that they don't know and so yeah like I said it's been a qualitative shift in our faculty and it's opened up actually a lot of good possibilities for us. The problem I think we have in our faculty now is that we have this required course introductory required course but we don't really have anything formal to follow up with. So students are kind of left hanging unless they choose electives that provide them with more details and what they learned in the introductory course. So being with the faculty of engineering, talking about Indigenous calls to action and how do you incorporate Indigenous ways of knowing and being and relating and doing into maths and sciences is a harder conversation. So I relate a lot to what you said about feeling a little bit like a used car salesperson trying to get that idea out there. In your faculty have you noticed what the uptake has been like with professors? Is there willingness to try to figure out how to incorporate a few more of these Indigenous ways into teaching styles or into different course content? I would say in general that has been a shift in culture and people I think are committed to try to learn more but the distinction you you mentioned Jessica I think is an important one and it's an observation that I've made is that there is quite a bit of interest in taking up Indigenous content. You know what's the information that we can make part of our classes and what are the specific details on that information but less interest in Indigenous approaches to teaching and learning and this is something that I've become increasingly interested in is trying to break down the sort of common sense cultural assumptions that go with how we think about teaching and learning, understanding that most of what teachers do in schools in the past and you know into the present descends from your heritage philosophies and and so really trying to make this point that Indigenous people actually know quite a bit about what it means to live a good life and how to guide people. It's different the paradigm is different and it doesn't always fit into the four walls of school but that's where my interest is rather than just information about Indigenous people that's part of math or science or so on that we can actually have an influence on the processes of education. [Music] You're listening to unsettled journeys and truth and conciliation. I'm George Lee, my co-host is Jessica Vandenberg and our guest is Dwayne Donald. [Music] There's an impatience among settlers and I'm just going to be really kind of blunt in the way I described this. How do we appease Indigenous peoples? Yeah okay if we get a little bit of their content into our curriculum then we can just get back to the work of assimilation which is where we really need to go. What you're doing really is about no let's put the real value not only of the content but of the the ways and the methods that go back to the other nations that make up Canada and let's bring it all together and actually become partners in this enterprise of Canada. Increasingly inspired by the vision for Treaty 6 specifically that I've learned about over the years in terms of the oral tradition but maybe I'll just start George by saying something or pointing out something that I think oftentimes gets missed and that is I think trying to understand the ways in which liberal philosophy in general has come to dominate so much the ways we think about what it means to be a human being and what it means to live a good life. One of the things that I pay attention to is the way in which liberal values which descend from colonialism I would say have this sort of monocultural power and privilege to define a human being and his or her characteristics. My view is that the current context is so replete with this idea that liberal philosophy provides the answer to any important question that you might ask that we actually can't imagine other ways to live right now. A lot of people can't can't even do that and so there's this constant morphing of liberal philosophy and centering it into the conversation. There's an example right in front of us of how what we call truth and reconciliation is actually become an exercise in liberal philosophy. Apologies and the ways in which truth and reconciliation has morphed into diversity inclusiveness, this idea of equity and to me those are what they call empty signifiers which means they have become so overused that they're almost meaningless. They don't actually have an effect on how we think about things. This is why I think it's an urgent public policy issue for us to actually consider other philosophies that promote other ways to live and other ways to be a successful human being. My view kind of following the treaty teachings is not to try to replace or get revenge on what's dominated to the present. It's to try and get that balance. There are lots of good things in liberal philosophy. I wouldn't want anyone to misunderstand that. There have been benefits from economically, politically, socially, otherwise. But it's this monoculture thing that I think is really the problem. And so if we can get these philosophies to sort of work together and form each other in that kind of kinship way that the treaty express, I think we'll be a lot better on. Maybe we could just drill down a little bit more on that public policy issue. I mean the obvious one that comes to mind, obviously not the only one is climate change and sustainability. Income disparity, just generally social services. The domination of the individual at the cost of the overall community. There's a lot of complex issues wrapped up in that. And I guess I can say that one thing I've noticed is that at least with our political leaders is that there's a tendency to try to solve complex issues with simple solutions, like, say, separation from the rest of Canada or something like that. Complex issues require complex responses. I'm aware that I don't understand the whole issue very well, but one thing that gets passed over and kind of misunderstood in public policy issues anyway, and certainly in the faculty of education is the ongoing impact of colonial ideology and how we conduct our business and really the systemic structures that exist. When I was in school and it's probably the same for you too, colonialism was taught as an era and something that happened in Asia and Africa a long time ago. And so I've come to see colonialism as an ideology. It's a way of living and there's a whole series of assumptions that go with it. But in my view since that Columbus did what he did, what's been, I guess, promoted is relationship denial. So I understand colonialism as an extended process of denying relationships. And so what we have is a world beer and ideology that is predicated on relationship denial. And again, that relationship denial that we can see in different fields of study, it's brought benefits, you know, particularly in the fields of science and technology. The ability to kind of separate things out and focus in on certain phenomena, you know, it's brought benefits. But what have been the consequences of that? And so when I talk about relationship denial and kind of a worldview or a system based on that, what I'm talking about is some very fundamental things. There's lots of different manifestations of it. I guess we could talk about, but for me, the most fundamental is the denial of the relationship that exists between your intellect and the rest of you. So the ways in which we're taught in school that, you know, the only purpose of our bodies is to carry our brains around from class to class. And the ways in which this naturalized separation of the mind from the body, from the spirit, from the emotion is taken up in an embodied way and how we learn that as an acceptable way to be a human being. And so this connects to the denial of the relationship that we have to people who don't look like us or don't pray like us. This is a fundamental part of the colonial teaching to be afraid of that. You know, the other one that I'll mention right now is the denial of the relationship that exists between us as human beings and what gives us life. And so this message that I think is predominant in schools that the needs of human beings always supersede the needs of other forms of life. This is a fundamental part of the colonial ideology. I think what we're seeing now in politics and in different ways is, and I think you can understand the last five hundred years of history at least in the Americas is this struggle over relationship denial. I think you can understand slavery in that way. You can understand sort of the class systems that exist and capitalism as part of that. And so what I tell my students is, if we're living suffering under the legacies of relationship denial, the most important thing we can try to do with young people is try to repair those relationships that have been denied and renew them on different terms. Repairing is one thing, but renewing and proceeding differently is another thing. What I try to do, I guess, with my students is to try to follow that kinship teaching, 'cause I think that's a fundamental part at least in what I understand about, you know, pre-philosophy. That's a fundamental part of that worldview is to honoring relationships. So rather than denying them, honoring them. There's a very fundamental concept in the pre-language that I've been learning about, and I still have lots to learn. But it's a walk out the way. And it's my view that, you know, people who live in tree six, they should know that term, along with other, you know, key philosophical concepts that other indigenous people have in their own languages here, because it's a wisdom teaching that has a lot to do with how people have over thousands of years have figured out what's most important about the ecosystem and how to live there. Right, and so, "Wahkutu" is about kinship. It's about, I guess at a very practical way, in practical level, it's about understanding who your human relatives are, and understanding how you're related to them, and how you should speak to them or address them or call them. Okay, so that's one way to think about it. And so it's about extended family relations, but "Wahkutu" and is also about extending your kinship relations past human beings to include all other forms of life that surround us. And so, you know, here I am in Edmonton, and I know that this beautiful river that flows through the city, it's my relative. Because I know that 60 to 70% of my body is comprised of that river. It's not just a nice idea. It's the truth. I use that with my students as a way to connect them to what was actually at stake in those treaty discussions that my ancestors were a part of. So my view is that rather than continue on with the relationship denial, we need to begin to try to live our lives in honor of relationships and in terms of collaboration, working together as adopted relatives, engaging in mutual thinking based on that paradigm. - In the teachings I've had from the others and knowledge keepers and the folks that come across this idea of kinship and belonging is a crucial one. It's one that builds community. It's the one that's the foundation of families. It's the foundation of larger things and larger interactions, not only, again, as you mentioned between people, but with land and animals and plants and air and water and elements and things like that. And so I think a lot on this and what I've heard from people and the words spoken to me, for me, the teachings I've had, they say that it always starts with a family building this kinship, having children at the center surrounded by elders who share their wisdom, nourished by mothers and protected by fathers. This idea and then that model can then be extended again to how you build your community and build your nation and build your country and things like that. But I know for Canada, a lot of what I see that is broken is again the systematic colonial system that has been built and imposed on us with respect to capitalism and economy and dealing with dollars and then you have to move to where there's work. You break apart these family ties, you break apart your communities, you isolate your elders and your seniors and the people who have lived long and fruitful life and instead of learning from them, we put them in homes and in places segregated from us and we send our kids to a school to be taught by somebody else. The values teaching, the seven sacred teachings, the medicine will teachings these things that you live in breathe like respect and love, encourage and wisdom and humility and all these teachings are sometimes lost and in through these cracks. I know a big part of what I try to instill in my kids is living and breathing these values as well and a lot of that is done through storytelling and I think about this as well, especially because I am adopted. Even though my family is not blood, we are still family and I truly believe we're all family and we should treat each other in that fundamental way and honoring the person from our spirits, our own spirits to theirs. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - You're listening to Uncettled, Journeys in Truth and Consoliation, a meeting place for indigenous peoples, settlers and their stories. I'm George Lee, my co-host is Jessica Van den Berg and our guest is Dwayne Donald. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - Can you talk a little bit about storytelling and how that has played a role in your life? - I would say very much so that I'm a disciple of story. I have learned so much from what different people have shared with me in terms of story, their life stories or other stories. And my own view in the work that I do is that healthy people, people who are well are people who have an understanding of the story of themselves. In other words, they understand the stories that they tell about themselves and who they are. And they continue to kind of work on them. That's one way I think about what it means to be well. It's something that we may never figure out totally. But it's kind of this puzzle that we continue to work on. Yeah, I guess at this point, I'm thinking about my parents right now, who've both passed on and within their relationship. There's a lot of the conflicts that we've been talking about or I've been talking about because, my dad. came from a family that was a mix of Cree and Meti, and deep roots in this Edmonton area, as far as we can tell. And my mom is the granddaughter of immigrants to Canada, so she was mostly of Norwegian descent. Their marriage basically brought together these two conflicting stories. One family was coming to a new country, full of opportunity and new freedoms, and chance for growth, and development, and progress, and all that stuff. And my dad's side was basically being chased away. I guess the stories that they had were considered to be relevant. This story, this conflict, I think, it played itself out in different ways in my parents' relationship. I would say, my mom, in the '60s, when they were a young couple, experienced a lot of violence, I'll call it, from white citizens who basically made her believe that they wanted her to understand that she was betraying her own race by being with my dad. And I've thought a lot about what it was like for her, because she didn't drive what it was like for her to have these four boys, I have three brothers on the public bus with her, going around the city to different things, and none of us really looked like her. And so it's very interesting and difficult story I guess that played out with there. And so I've thought a lot about what impact their stories have had on me and how I understand myself, and what the work is that I try to do. And I would say at a maybe a really personal level that part of my work in bringing indigenous and Canadian together is to try and do something from my parents so that their relationship is understood if the beauty it should have been from the beginning. When I went to Kainai, people who are listening, they might know them better as the bloods. That's kind of their English name, Blackfoot folks down there in southern Alberta. When I went to Kainai, I was a kid from the city and a lot of the difficult history stories that my dad and his family had experienced, I didn't really know much about them 'cause no one wanted to talk about it. Understandably, I don't blame anybody for that. That's just the way it was back then. But when I went to Kainai, those people down there were so kind to me. Of course, I took some teasing, being a creed and Blackfoot territory, which was all fun, but they took pity on me and I think really tried to fix me up. And part of that process fixing me up was to tell me stories, stories that could guide me and stories that could teach me something. And so there was a lot of very important stories that I heard stories that were shared with me that I still hold very close to my heart. And it is part of our seasonal pattern. Every summer I make the trip down to Blackfoot country and I usually go to places where I was taken and where stories were told. And I guess make my offerings and give thanks, be grateful for what I've learned. But I wanna share a particular story that's had a profound impact on me and on others that went on when I was down there teaching at Kainai High School. And my sister really, not by birth, but my sister, Ramona Big Head, who is now the principal of Kainai High School. She was the English teacher there at the time that I was there. And I taught social studies mostly. So Ramona and I began developing curriculum together. And we had the support of the Kainai Board of Education to experiment. We followed the Alberta curriculum. So there were a lot of constraints that way. But we were encouraged to work with Blackfoot history, Blackfoot themes, Blackfoot experiences. And so we did as much as we could. And one of the things we did is we created what we called the Elder Mentor Program. And this, you know, involved bringing elders to the school. And we had three men and three women that came and they were so great. We just loved working with them. Through that process, one of the things that we started doing was we started visiting specific sites in Blackfoot territory. What would happen, of course, is each site was approached in a particular way according to Blackfoot protocols. Sites approached as living relatives, places approached as living relatives. This was new to me. I had never experienced this before. But the first place that they took us to was actually in Northern Montana, who was on the Mariahs River. It was about an hours drive from the site of the school. So a few van loads, you know, students, elders, us went, we had a ceremony to begin with. And then while we were there at that site, overlooking the Mariahs River Valley, the elder told us a story of what had happened there. It was a winter of 1870. And there was a large encampment of people in this valley that we were overlooking. And it was cold, January 1870. And most of the young men were away hunting. And so the camp was full of older folks and women and children. And the chief was heavy runner, who was an old man by then highly respected. And that's why he had such a large following of people who wanted to live under his leadership. And so in the morning, when they woke up on this cold morning, they were surrounded by American army soldiers and panic and soup. Of course, heavy runner calmed everyone down as best he could. And he went running towards where he could see the officers were because he said it's a misunderstanding. I'll explain it. They don't know who we are. So as he approached them, they shot him and then they proceeded to shoot up the rest of the camp. And in those days, they had Gatling gun that they traveled with. So the original sort of machine gun. And so they used these Gatling guns to shoot off the tops of the TPP poles. And the TPPs collapsed. And then the soldiers went around and set the TPPs on fire. So in black foot, that place is known as Otsito Totsapu. It means the place where they were burned. What we learned while we were there, here in this very difficult story is that two children somehow survived this attack. They managed to escape and they ran to a neighboring camp of black foot relatives. And so this is the only way this story got out. Because the American army obviously wouldn't have been telling anybody about this. And what we learned at the time is that my sister, Ramona, it was her great, great grandmother was one of the children who survived this attack. Ramona had never heard this before. She'd never been to this place. She'd never heard this story before. And she certainly didn't know that it was her great, great grandma who had survived as a little girl. And so you can imagine what that was like for her to be there at that place to hear that. And so Ramona did her master's thesis on this whole, she actually wrote a script for a play called "Strike Them Heart", which is about this whole experience. It was performed off Broadway in New York City a few years ago. We're a remarkable set of stories, right? But on that day when we were there, I'll never forget after all of that was shared, the students just kind of spontaneously drifted down into the valley where the camp had been and spent the afternoon just sort of sitting on the land. And it was at that time that I had a real paradigm shift. 'Cause I understood finally what this was about, what was happening with story, with place, with ceremony. We were healing ourselves and we were healing these ancestors and we took that place back. After, you know, there are multiple stories I could tell of places where I was taken and things that were shared with me. When I came back home to Edmonton, my first thoughts were, so this is where I'm from, but I don't know any of these stories of this place. Where are our sacred sites? What are our stories? And so I would say for the last, at least 17 years, I've been trying to be recognized as a relative in the place where I come from. And I've tried really hard to learn as many stories as I can about this place. And it's become, this brought a lot of meaning to my life. I would say. - That was incredibly profound. And through you, I feel that just hearing that story has broadened my understanding. So there's an example of story sharing really, understanding it from the perspective of the people there and from the generations involved. how important those sacred sites are because of the stories that they practically use from them, and especially in a situation like that. You're listening to Unceddled, Journeys in Truth and Consolation, a podcast of ideas, solutions, and respectful conversations. I'm Jessica Vanneberg, my co-host to George Lee, and our guest is Duane Gondel. I've said to Jessica before, storytelling in my life is in a bit of a crisis, I feel, and it's because I'm having to modify or face its limitations over the years, and I've built much of my career around what I now kind of recognize as a really impatient form of storytelling, i.e., the news story. I did a lot of journalism or versions of journalism, and it has like a central point, and it just kind of amplifies down from that. And then it may get into sub-points, which are just by the very nature of the story not given as much importance. Then you expand, and you get to go into feature writing and even column writing and some things like that, and then you get to work in some of the more relaxed forms of storytelling, where your only obligation is to keep the story flowing in whatever way you choose to do it as the writer. So as I've looked back on that, and I've realized that I think some of the most important storytelling I did was the really highly personal stuff, where I, when I wrote columns, and sometimes humor, sometimes just personal life stories, and that was kind of an exercise in understanding my own stories. I kind of recreated my life in the story format as it went forward and tried to connect it. Very little of the intergenerational thing, you know, Jessica and I have also brought this up, how I feel coming from that kind of that individual centered liberal viewpoint that you talk about, I have felt so little connection to my European roots. Like I just, it's just like it started in Canada. This is where it started. There is this story that started in Canada. I felt so proud of this inclusiveness that the Canada has, and yet I've had to ignore a whole part of that in that we've done so little as far as our indigenous peoples go within this thing we call Canada. So that was one part of it, and then the other part of it is these days the misuse of storytelling to amplify racist and horrible sorts of thought patterns and really isolate people from other ideas rather than broaden understanding with storytelling. I think one of the things that I think about the pre-language, I'm not a fluent speaker, but I'm trying to learn and there's a prefix in Cree that you may have heard, we say "Mio", so you could say "Mio, Wachkutu", and for example, "Mio, Wachito", because I understand "Mio", simply it refers to something that's good, but the way I tend to think about it is in terms of things that are life giving, things that enhance well-being and give life or support the continuation of life. There's also the prefix that I won't mention that does the opposite. It's against life. So I tend to think about stories in that way, so I'm in favor of stories that give life that support the enhance well-being and provide that for people, but one thing I guess sort of riffing off of what you shared George, one thing that I do in my class that people might be interested to know is that I ask my students to write a fairly short paper at the beginning of the class that is basically a declaration of who they think they are in relation to Indigenous Canadian relations. So they come to my class, they want to be teachers, they're in my class because they want to learn more about Indigenous stuff, I'll say. And so my question is, well, who are you and what does who you are have to do with what you think you're going to be learning in this class? And it sounds fairly easy, fairly straightforward, but over the years I've found that it actually causes a lot of trouble for people, and especially you know, students who are Canadian, so they don't identify as Indigenous and they find the question to be difficult. You know, I guess over the years my observation is that a lot of students have been led to believe that they don't have a culture. Other people have a culture, but where I come from or my family, we don't we don't have any dances or we don't have any kind of special food, we're just Canadian. And there's a kind of a morning, I would say, and it's actually quite emotional for some students I've encountered to come to terms with this, that this is how they think of themselves. You know, I guess the question that I've asked is what kind of story would you have to be told about who you are that would lead you to believe that you don't have a culture? And what kind of consequences has that had on how you think of yourself in terms of identity and how you think of others? It's very difficult in that way, and you know, I follow Tom's King, the truth about stories is that's all we are, and I really encourage my students to sort of do that inventory of what are your stories and how do they influence you? Not in a pathological way, but in a relational way, like make friends with your story and understand that they're going to continue on. To try and elaborate on how I come to understand what I call colonial frontier logics have to delve back again into story as kind of a way to conceptualize things. Here I've become very interested in creation stories of nation and nationality, and I use that idea of creation story purposefully because I think there is a a sacredness to these stories, and especially how they play out in schools, how young people have been told these stories about the origins of their nation. You know, it's interesting to think about these stories in relation to the character of the nation. Certainly we could tell a lot of stories about, you know, our neighbors to the south and their origin stories and how that plays out. And for example, why guns are so important to that culture. But I won't go into that. So of course I'm talking about the creation story of Canada, and how that story has been told or how I learned it in school and how it continues to manifest itself in different ways. And one of my observations is that there are certain mythic symbols that are integral to the story itself, the integrity of the story depends on certain mythic symbols. You know, we could talk particularly, I guess, for where I am here in Western Canada, particular symbols include the Northwest Malapalice, the railroad, but the one that I've focused on are forts. My interest in forts began in different reasons. The main one I guess was, you know, traveling around Canada, there are lots of places with that name Fort in their formal name, all across the country. There's also a lot of forts recreated as museums. You don't have to travel very far to encounter these, especially on the prairies. You know, the observation that children are taken to these places regularly, as part of the field trip experience. And so, you know, the question, what is it that children are actually learning when they go to these places about the relationship between indigenous people and Canadians? And what does that have to do with this creation story? And so part of my interpretation is that there's this idea, it's less common now, I have to admit that, but when I was young, this idea that forts are a four cornered version of civilization that was brought to an empty land, plunked down on this land that people were living on, but they weren't using it very well, right? And so newcomers are brought and they live inside this fort. And so there are the ones over the years who slowly build this place and make it what it is. And so over time, these four walls, literally and metaphorically, are expanded. And the people who live inside the walls of the fort, they claim more and more territory and resources, and the people outside get pushed. And so what we have is we have this social spatial divide that's at the heart of the creation story of Canada. And what it teaches is that Canadians live in a separate reality from indigenous people. This separation that It's exemplified, symbolized by the walls, it's considered natural in kind of an anthropological way and necessary. It's been my view that you can look at most of the institutions in Canada based on this social spatial organizer and education, universities, schools, curriculum documents are predicated on the same insider outside or logic. And even if you look at some textbooks that are used in schools, you will find that there's information about indigenous people that's in the margins of the books and the key part of the text is in the main part of the page. So there's a social spatial plane out that's right there. And so this is colonial frontier logics that's exemplified by the fort and it's predicated on relationship denial. The insiders are, of course, afraid of what's outside the walls of the fort in terms of knowledge and experience and they only focus on what's inside the fort. And this has played out over many generations, of course. And so what we've learned or what's been perpetuated in terms of relationship denial of race and culture and knowledge, it gets telescope to the present and it continues to play out in how these things are engaged with and understood. And I would say like just to take a recent example of the whole pipeline controversy in Wetsu, Wetton is a continuation of this relationship to denial and this fort kind of frontier logic. And it's competing stories too, I would say. About what it means to live here, I guess I would say. And relationship to the land and ownership versus stewardship and land claims, they're presented as something other to the actual land they are like they've intruded. They're doing something wrong against the, perhaps the creation myth of Canada that it's actually wrong for them to even stand up to what they believe in. (upbeat music) - You're listening to Unsettle, journey's in truth and conciliation. I'm Jessica Vanneberg, my co-host to George Lee and our guest is Duane Donald. (upbeat music) It's like there's a box drawn around indigenous peoples, right? When people, I know, like walking along the street, people will look at me and then their glaze just kind of slides over, right? Like you're not even allowed to engage, right? This way, you're in a different box, you're in a different category. And someone else will deal with, right? That there isn't always a gate to a door or an opening into the fort, right? And you see that often in companies and organizations play out that way that there's an indigenous relations person. And anything, you mentioned the word indigenous, that person has to take care of it, right? No one else can talk about it. And no one else can engage in it, right? And so this is an interesting analogy for sure. And definitely it feels that way that it's, I know for my own personal experience, a lot of my life I felt invisible or this exclusion that was hard to explain, especially as a child, right? I can't, you always thought it was something you were doing wrong or something at your core that was not right about you or acceptable or that you weren't deserving of or had the value in there that made you belong, right? And it goes back to that idea of kinship and belonging again. So that's, that is great analogy. So thanks for sharing that. - Thank you, welcome and I guess I wanna share with you Jessica that what you just said really resonated with me, your reflections as a child because that insight on the significance of the fort was actually a gift from our son, he's 22 now. But at the time that that insight arrived, he was probably about two and a half years old and we were living in Fort McLeod, Fort McLeod, which is a kind of an iconic mythic symbol. You know, it's the place where the Northwest Mount of Police were sent to create peace in what we call Southern Alberta. And also that fort was created in 1874. And if you go through Fort McLeod, maybe some listeners have, you know that there is a fort recreated as a museum there. And it's a busy place in the summer. And one of the things that they do is they recreate the musical ride of the Northwest Mount of Police within the fort. They hire local high school students to dress up like the officers and they do the musical ride. It's a very popular item. But when you live in town like we did, it gets kind of annoying because whenever they do the musical ride, they play this music that drones all across town, it gets really tiresome. So this summer that our son was two and a half, he whenever he heard the music, he wanted to go check out the horses. And in those days, horses were really important to him. So I thought that's what was going on there. And so as his dad, I had to kind of follow along as he jumped on his bike and rushed off to see this happen. And that summer, one night, we were getting ready for bed. And he said to me, sort of matter of factly, he said that I don't want to be an Indian anymore. And so, you know, tried to hide, tried not to overreact, tried not to make them feel bad. So I just kind of took a deep breath and sat down. And I said, oh, why is that? My boy and he said Indians always lose. When he was younger, a lot of the elders I knew told us, my wife and I, they said, listen to your son when he starts to speak because he's gonna express some things that will astonish you. And he has a memory of a different time before he was born and he's gonna share some of that. If you listen, you'll forget it as he walks around more. And so this way I view this is that he was speaking some kind of wisdom that came from a different time. You know, it's astonishing that at such a young age, he could articulate something so clearly. And like no one certain terms, you know, he was. And so, you know, I definitely connected to his experiences at the fore. - This is amazing. 'Cause I agree, I know I put a lot of care. I have two children as well, a boy and a girl. And the things that my son comes up with just, they do, they astonish me that they are so, such a different perspective. Yet when you think about it, you're like, well, there's a lot of profound insight in what you just said. And do you realize that? And so I know talking with previous guests, we've talked a little bit about seven generations, teachings, about seven generations passed and caring for seven generations ahead in the present moment, utilizing the seven sacred teachings. And so that makes me think a lot about now children and their connection to the seven generations and the ancestors there. Because we were talking about a little bit about this poll that a lot of people are starting to get towards doing something, towards a call to action. They feel a calling. And I know I feel this calling and speaking with elders and speaking with folks about what this is and where it comes from, it's coming from the ancestors, it's coming from them saying, use your voice, now is your time, you've listened and listened to the wisdom and now figure out what to do with that. And perhaps it's now coming out in the children as well. That is definitely something that I will put some thought into. So thank you for that. One thing I think that we is important to touch upon doing is your popus chase background. I have had the privilege to have several conversations with Chief Calvin about the popus chase and their story and their right to a place here in the Edmonton region in the city and the surrounding counties and municipalities. Maybe you can share a little bit about your popus chase, journey and history and any stories that you think the listeners would enjoy hearing from you. I guess an important way of understanding myself and what has happened to my ancestors and extended family. And I think trying to understand myself in relation into what happened to them. And what I've inherited, whether I want to or not, those are really important things for me. What I think about a lot in the work that I do is I'll use the example of Frank Oliver, which in the Edmonton areas become a big issue and I've been asked a few times by different media folks to comment on the renaming of that neighborhood in Edmonton called Oliver, just because Frank Oliver was one of the main political lobbyists behind the removal of the expropriation of the Popeye's reserve. And people have asked me, you know, what I think about that. And my response in general is that I think it's rather than just vilifying one individual, I think it's really important to think about the fact that Frank Oliver was reelected multiple times. The people who elected him obviously supported what he was doing. And so I'm less concerned with Frank Oliver, honestly, and more concerned with the citizens of the growing town of Edmonton who basically stood by and watched my Papa Chase Cree ancestors suffer and starve. And what that says culturally, I guess, about settler culture and how we haven't, as a society, we haven't really addressed the truth of that. And we continue to avoid it, I guess, the consequences of that. And so, you know, for my family, extended family, all I really know is that lots of my ancestors were members of the Papa Chase band. But for some reason that we haven't really pieced together yet, they decided not to move to a neighboring reserve when the Papa Chase reserve was lost. There are quite a few Papa Chase descendants that live in First Nations communities in the Edmonton area. They relocated when the Papa Chase reserve was expropriated. But my ancestors didn't do that. And I can only really speculate on why. My guess is that, you know, in their conversations, they said, well, it didn't really work out very well for us last time. So maybe we should avoid that. And so what they did is they basically moved east as a city of Edmonton to an area that wasn't really very desirable for home stutters. And that's where my extended family lived for, you know, a few generations. That's where my dad was raised. He was out there east of the city, really, just like as the crow flies about 10 miles east of what was the Papa Chase reserve. And just eaked out in existence there. You know, things change. And that's when, you know, our dad moved back into the city to try to figure out a way to make a living. And, you know, things go from there. But, you know, one thing I guess I'll share is that I grew up, was born and raised on this land that was the Papa Chase reserve. But I didn't really know that until I was in my 30s. That's the way things happen. I think for people who have been oppressed and traumatized by stuff like that, is that there's just a real, that difficulty is of course avoided if it can be. You know, I think in a different context and much different kind of consequences about how, you know, the children of residential school survivors didn't hear about it until they were older because for good reason their parents didn't want to talk about it. And so that's the way it was in my family. There wasn't a lot of acknowledgement of this. And there was a lot of struggle in that ways. And so I guess for me, you know, as I get older, I become aware that, you know, I'm not a first nations person because I can't claim membership in a band recognized through treaty, the Papa Chase aren't recognized in that way. I don't really consider myself me to be out of respect for me to people who have their own distinct history and language and culture. You know, I wasn't raised that way. So I don't want to claim to be Metis in that way out of respect for people who are Metis. And I don't really consider myself Canadian, you know, in the clear and the clear and established way, I guess. And so I guess I'm still trying to figure out how to identify myself. So I do say Papa Chase and that can still confuses a lot of people. They're not really sure what to make of that. A person who would identify as a member of a band that doesn't exist anymore. - And identity is such a big thing for all indigenous people, whether they're mate here in New York or first nations or people like you and I, that don't quite identify, but yet be belonged to multiple places, right? But trying to figure out how to articulate that and that comes to this idea of traditional language again and multiple meaning and two different words and trying to figure out how that works. Just tying it back kind of to your traditional names. I think it's wonderful that you've been gifted from a number of different nations and elders' different names because I think in the end, we're a combination of the places we've been and the experiences we had and the ancestors that we have. And looking on it through different lenses and wearing different hats and things like that, we all have multiple names that have meaning depending where you're coming from. - Well, and what you're talking about is really the gift that Talman gave me when he gave me that black foot name because as he got to know me better and understand my stories, he said to me, your job is to try to help people understand each other better. That's your role. So he said, you got a group of people who live in one area, you got another group of people who live somewhere else and they don't spend time with each other. They don't know each other very well. They don't visit each other. They don't know each other's stories. He said, what you're gonna do is you're gonna spend time with this group and you're gonna run over here and you're gonna spend time with this group and you're gonna try to bring them closer together by running back and forth. So that's what that name is about. The Apio Makhka is really just running to try to bring people together. That's what he said. And so, yeah, that, and that healing part of what I said about Big Bear, the high muskwa. That's a really good job description. That's what I try to do as best I can with the limited knowledge I have and the limited skills I have. I just try to follow what they said. That's spectacular. Thank you. Thank you so much, Duane. I feel like we could talk for hours. I'm confident that this podcast is going to survive. So someday we'll have you back on again, maybe to delve down into some other areas. - And I just wanna say as well from my heart and spirit to yours, Duane, thank you for your time and the sharing that you've given to us. It's given me a lot to think about for sure. And I'll think on that. And so all the best to you and your family. And I hope our paths cross again. - Yeah, me too. Thanks for the invitation. I appreciate it and I wish you well with trying to sort all that out and get the podcast launched. And it's a beautiful day. Durgie, you and Edmonton as well? - I am in Edmonton as well. Yeah. - Yeah. It's a beautiful day. I think I'm gonna go for a walk. - I think that's a brilliant idea. I've got to get out there and feel some of that day as well. So, okay. - Thanks, guys. - Thanks, bye. - Bye, bye. (gentle music) - On settled, journeys in truth and conciliation is a production of Features West Studios in Edmonton, Alberta. Co-hosts Jessica Van Atenberg and me, George Lee. Music written and performed by Kevin John, a member of the Cuyuket Checklist at First Nation on Vancouver Island. Logo conceived and designed by Karine Reedle and Sandy Brown Van Dam. You can find us on Spotify, Apple, Stitcher, Google and other major platforms. Many thanks to our guest, Duane Donald. Remember to like us on Facebook and keep writing that story. (gentle music)