Sept. 30, 2021
Seneca News
Seneca Indigenous faculty reflect on National Day for Truth and Reconciliation
Progress being made to decolonize curriculum, ‘wake up to reality’ of past
Growing up in Spanish, Ont., Dustin Lawrence played in an abandoned building as a child and was told it had been a college at one time.
In truth, it was a residential school.
“I had no idea what it was,” said Mr. Lawrence, a Seneca Child & Youth Care graduate and Social Service Worker (SSW) professor. “I didn’t know what the building was for until I was 14.”
As Canada marks its first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, Mr. Lawrence recalls how little he had known about everything as a child, even though his grandmother was a residential school survivor.
“I think my parents just wanted us to be kids and not worry about stuff like that,” he said. “Any knowledge I had early on was based on the western perspective of the noble savages. I grew up detached from my own culture.”
Not knowing what it meant to be Indigenous initially, Mr. Lawrence embarked on a journey to learn about his history. That was when he began to see things differently.
“I started meeting with the elders, and that really opened my understanding of my identity and my background,” he said. “I met people who attended residential school. The gravity of that forces you to wake up to the reality of why you were never taught that or what that abandoned building meant.”
To open up discussions about Indigenous history and encourage intercultural learning in class, Mr. Lawrence makes a point of sharing with his students how he “learned to be me” and asking them to reflect on their own world views.
“It’s about decolonizing the course content and introducing more Indigenous themes to help contextualize that history,” said Mr. Lawrence. “As social work practitioners, we need to be able to use different lenses to understand what happened and how it has affected the current situation.”
Claudine Mugford, an SSW graduate who teaches in the same program, agrees.
“If you are in the social services, you can’t ignore what is happening,” said Ms. Mugford, whose aunts and uncles attended the residential school in Spanish. “We’ve heard of the 215 Indigenous children found in an unmarked mass grave, but there are others. It’s about learning to question things. We are still in the truth stage, and people are struggling with whether or not they want to know the truth.”
As a way to make her students feel connected, Ms. Mugford says she always identifies herself in class.
“I’m an Indigenous woman, and this is who I am,” she said. “A lot of people don’t know any Indigenous people, and I want my students to know they have a connection with an Indigenous person. Now it’s personal, and when it becomes personal, people are better able to have empathy and greater understanding.”
For SSW students interested in working with Indigenous organizations, Valerie Vickery, the first Indigenous field placement co-ordinator in the School of Community Services, has created a practicum focused on specialized care in the Indigenous community.
Ms. Vickery is a Social Service Worker – Gerontology graduate and has also taught in the program.
“The practicum is really a massive history lesson that spans two semesters,” she said. “It’s no longer acceptable in 2021 to say, ‘I don’t know,’ and my intent is to help non-Indigenous students learn and pass on the knowledge. It starts with one, and it blossoms and grows.”
Randy Pitawanakwat is a faculty member at First Peoples@Seneca who works with non-Indigenous professors interested in incorporating Indigenous content into their curriculum.
One of the courses he helps to facilitate is a 12-week professional development program at Seneca called Skoden — Indigenous slang for “Let’s go then.”
“We unpack everything from residential schools to contemporary Indigenous Peoples,” said Mr. Pitawanakwat. “A lot of the time, it’s about including things they may not have known or thought about, rather than altering the content entirely.”
While there was a period in Mr. Pitawanakwat’s life when he was not proud of being Anishinaabe and didn’t know anything about residential schools, colonization or treaties. He eventually learned about his own history and embraced his identity.
“The residential schools were not something easily talked about over dinner,” he said. “For many years, it went unspoken in our house and in the larger community. The healing for some didn’t happen until much later. Many still have never reconciled with that healing.”
On the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, Mr. Pitawanakwat urges people to take the time to sit with their families around the dinner table and share the truth.
“This is an important day,” he said. “There’s nothing fictional about these stories. They were completely ignored until now, and they need to be shared with our children. They are the ones who are going to grow up with the knowledge and lead the work on truth and reconciliation for the next generation.”