Single Stories

I grew up in small town Saskatchewan – Indian Head – which is primarily dominated by white, middle-class families. We only have two schools, a Pre-K-6 elementary school and a 7-12 high school.  When I attended these schools, the way things were taught were pretty traditional – sit in a desk, in a row, listen to the teacher talk, work when told to work. On top of that, whenever we read articles, stories or novels for any of our classes, they were all very similar in nature (with some exceptions, particularly much later in my schooling) in terms of the stories they presented – they were from the perspective of a white, middle-class person, who went about their white, middle-class life, and perhaps some inconvenience happens at some point which ruins their day. I remember the general message and formation of these types of stories, but not the actual content of these stories – we read so many of them and they were all so similar that they all blend together, and are all fairly unremarkable. Despite me thinking that now, these stories are what has shaped my views on what is normal – or my ‘single stories’.

Outside of school, my family is very supportive of my education and hobbies, and I was privileged with the ability to be able to do a lot of the things I wanted to do growing up – within the realm of financial and realistic probability. With distant relatives however, there are quite a few people who have a less than ideal outlook on those they deem as ‘others’.  Because of these relatives, throughout most of my childhood, I held onto some pretty problematic ‘single stories’ about different races and cultures that are fairly prominent in our society (even in white-dominated Indian Head) that I struggled with, particularly when I would meet somebody who would fall under a category that I had a ‘single story’ about. If they did not meet the criteria of my ‘single story’, I struggled with that. Is my entire world view wrong? Or are they an exception? At the time, I never considered that perhaps it was just those ‘single stories’ that were wrong, and that holding people to a ‘single story’ is unfair to them and doing a disservice to yourself. Holding on to my ‘single stories’ is something that I still struggle with, but it is something I recognize is extremely problematic and I am consistently working to rid myself of judging people on (usually incorrect) preconceived notions and ‘single stories’.

Learning From Place

In the article, “Learning From Place”, there are various examples of reinhabitation and decolonization.  The biggest part of the article that showed this was the connection that the Elders and youth experienced in the project. The youth interviewed the elders to “encourage intergenerational relationships and catalyze knowledge transfer from elder generations to youth” (74). Transferring the knowledge from one generation to another, in a more permanent form than word-by-mouth is a great way to ensure that all people will be able to learn about this culture and history and that it will be etched into history. It also lets the youth, who may not be knowledgeable about the history of their culture, learn about various historical pieces that may have been “lost” over time. Learning about those can bring back these “lost” pieces of culture to be more prominent in their lives.

Another example of reinhabitation and decolonization is how the projects’ goal is to foster development of meaningful space for dialogue and community research. This goal came to be from concerns of when there was a lot of pressure to enter large scale extractive development on the land of the Mushkegowuk people. The project was “[seeking] to identify routes towards decolonization, and shaping adequate responses to problems arising in the face of externally driven development and its implications for life and land in Mushkegowuk territory” (73).

As a secondary math teacher, incorporating these sorts of lessons into my own teaching is something that I struggle with figuring out how to do whenever these sorts of topics come up, especially since even in today’s more progressive education climate, math is still very often taught in the traditional factory setting. A way to approach it would be to use real-life examples from First Nations perspectives, or use First Nations imagery and storytelling to teach math. Incorporating this into my lessons is still something I need to research and work on quite a bit more.