An aunt or uncle will approach a new-born with tenderness and love and with language that expresses the child’s point of view as is perceived by that person. Using multiple facial expressions and voice tones, the adult will talk with the child in a normal voice, and the child will embrace the interaction with looks, smiles, cries, or sounds, and various body moves that affirm the child is thinking and responding. These movements and sounds will be interpreted by the adult in interaction and the conversation will continue with the child. The child’s attitudes and values will be confirmed and reinforced, while the community of on-lookers will smile and laugh at the notions expressed in the monologue. As adults express the child’s attitudes and values, they are expressing and reinforcing their own cultural world view in the language context of the Mi’kmaq community and recognizing the child’s expressed feelings in his/her body language.
In the Mi’kmaq community our children establish who they are and what values they embrace through the core of adults and families who share face-to-face encounters. It is important that we make regular rounds of visits to people because this is at the core of our community culture. This reinforces and confirms our relationships. A child will grow up in this adult population with laughing, teasing, sharing, enjoying, gossiping and all the while the child learns of the community and language by listening, hearing and being constantly engaged in conversation. The child will be protected, looked after and given attention, hugged or simply sniffed on the head which is a Mi’kmaw sign of affection. Most children have nicknames or terms of endearment, as that is our way of showing affection for our young, and these names will follow them throughout their life. These names are also unique to them and demonstrate their individuality which is fostered in the community culture. It is in this affectionate, loving, caring family that the child begins the journey in the world.
As children approach the age of toddlerhood, they are given some flexibility beyond this core group of adults as they begin to explore their environment and the outer world. But that exploration is guided carefully by older siblings, by both girls and boys. At that time children are given a great deal of freedom to explore. A wide array of experiences and nurtured independence help one to learn. Sometimes among children it is not enough to say “don’t touch this, don’t touch that, don’t go near that”; rather with guided discovery one learns that there are dangers and how to cope with them. One comes to know dangers by allowing the child to explore his or her environment with older children to come to know these things.
About the time children are five or six years old, they begin to move outside the adult and sibling-centered group to the outside on their own. Always, they are surrounded by a group of peers, older children. Within this new group they move in the neighbourhood in little groups in a clearly delineated space. The children will have been warned and told of most of the dangers, including the dangers of the water or the road. They are warned over and over of the various dangers of cars, ponds, or other areas that are not child-proofed.
Within that core group of children who play together, there is at least one child who will understand that as the oldest in that group, he or she has special responsibilities toward the others, especially the younger children. Oldest or older children have developed a keen sense of being responsible for the younger members of his or her playgroup. If something happens to a young child while in the group, the mother or father, aunt or godparent will ask “Who was in charge here? Who was there when this happened? How was it that that person didn’t correct this before it has to come to me? Somebody else out there should have been correcting this.” And if they say, “Oh there was someone who told them not to do it, but they didn’t listen!” then the parent will remind the children again that they have to listen to the oldest in the group.
We are constantly reminding our children that they have to listen to the oldest in the group, the oldest in your group is the “boss.” So when children begin to explore beyond the bounds of the immediate family home, they begin to realize there is someone always in charge and that those in charge are given the right to chastise the children for their behaviour. So in the large network of the Mi’kmaq community, adults are responsible for other children who are in their view. When they see something happening, they cannot walk away with the thought “they aren’t my children” but rather have the responsibility to intervene.
Our children around the ages of five to fourteen socialize with each other in small groups who move from house to house together. At every household there will be a group of children watching t.v., playing television games, or making sandwiches. They cross ages and sexes, until the girls turn eleven or twelve when they start having their own groups of friends. Boys seem to have fewer age separations in their groups although by the time they are thirteen and fourteen they spend much more time in active age specific activities, like street or ice hockey, baseball, softball, or soccer. But in our community they all learn early the importance or a sense of responsibility and cooperation in a group. Our children are well-socialized in group behaviours, and group-conformed norms. It would not be difficult to call upon that in a school setting, the oldest in the group already being defined as being responsible for the others, for the sense of responsibility and independence is early fostered in the Mi’kmaq community.
When Mi’kmaq children are about ten years old, they begin to socialize more regularly with their own gender-age groups. Girls now want spend more of their time with each other, talking, playing, or watching tv. Boys in this same age group continue to socialize across varying age groups. Among both boys and girls, responsibility for home or child care is evident and expected. While domestic housework seems to fall on girls more often than boys, boys are required to cut and bring in the wood, shovel snow, take out the garbage, and help their father or uncles as is required. Children are taught early that mothers and grandmothers are respected and are to be listened to. One is taught never to talk back to their parents, as well as to do as one is told immediately. To do otherwise would show disrespect. In addition, a child learns early that there are certain customs that must be obeyed. One such custom is that one should never cross the path or over the feet of an elder or a man. At any costs, they must find another route around the elder or stay put until the situation changes. Also girls are taught not to cross over the legs of men or boys.
In our community our people have gone into so many different types of jobs in the need for continuous survival that one thing seems consistent over time and that is women are at work, in the community and in their home. Even working mothers are in charge of the home and the children. Part of the changes that are going on more today is that there are more working women than men because of the economic structures that engender certain kinds of economic development. The times when men were trapping and trading and were off to get the skins and so on are gone. Although men are more likely to be at home, related women are still called in to help with the child and home care while the mother is working.
As our children begin to turn into adolescent age, we begin to assume that they are taking on more adult reasoning, reasoning about what is right and wrong and how one should behave. We would assume that they have these ideas at least by the time they are fourteen years old. This is the age when we understand our children have grown up. When an adolescent does something they shouldn’t, the community people will often say “Well, you can’t change that now. That is the way they grew up and by the time they are thirteen and fourteen, you can’t do anything about that.” So it is a notion that we approach adulthood much earlier in Mi’kmaq society than it would be in a non-Native home, where one attains adult status. Usually this is after high school when one is considered an adult.
Acceptance of a youth’s adult status and reasoning must also go with an understanding that the adult will choose how they will express and accept their sexuality. Mi’kmaq parents provide their youth with good attitudes toward children, parenting, and sexuality in their playful and
humorous dialogues. Imbedded in the language are playful and serious ways to approach youth about their bodies, their socializing, and their responsibilities to themselves and each other. In this nonconfrontational society, youth are allowed to explore and develop their own attitudes toward sexual activity. This is not to say that there is an open door for sex, but that we must accept our youth as understanding their body, their needs, together with the responsibilities that that requires. Since the people hold a stronger value and love for children, the community accepts child-bearing among teenage girls. These are usually major cognitive and emotional turning points for these women. Thereafter, they are more likely to be more responsible and accepting of the consequences of their sexuality.
The Mi’kmaq are deeply spiritual people who throughout their daily life demonstrate their spiritual consciousness. Spirituality is a very strong part of a child’s growth and development and is very evident in all aspects of Mi’kmaq life. The formal and ceremonial rituals of spirituality have been imbedded in Christian traditions, although there have been changes occurring as Mi’kmaq search their identity through pan-Indian spirituality and traditions. But Mi’kmaq history holds a rare relationship with the Catholic church. In 1610 the Mi’kmaq people entered into a compact with the Holy Roman Empire when our Chief Membertou and 140 others were first baptized. While our alliance with the Church was more political than spiritual, it was solidified in daily rituals when a French priest Father Antoine Maillard learned Mi’kmaq in 1735 and began preaching and addressing the spiritual questions of the people (Battiste, 1984).
The relationship between the French and the Mi’kmaq was fostered by an alliance and friendship around trade. Later the Mi’kmaq would maintain Christianity for the French when for over a hundred years in the period following the expulsion of French priests in 1758, Mi’kmaq people held to their strong spiritual rituals in the Catholic Church by conducting their own adopted Catholic rituals. They had prayer leaders who led Sunday prayers, baptized children, accepted promises of marriage, and provided last rites for the dying. Eventually, they succeeded in securing a Catholic priest from the British. These Christian rituals continue today in many communities, and elders play still an important role in them, although a priest in the community offers the primary services. From the time a child is born, he or she is embedded in the spiritual activities of the family. The child will attend mass, wakes, funerals, St. Ann Mission, and many other occasions when Mi’kmaq people in the community gather to pray and celebrate their faith. At every event there will be spiritual offerings, prayers, and blessings.
A major event among Mi’kmaq is the annual St. Ann mission gathering which occurs in the last week of July. During this event, aspects of traditional life are contextualized in this community event. Thousands of people will take a boat across to a sacred island where they will remain from one day to two weeks, living in small camps or tents. Families will be immersed in language, tradition, and meagre simplicity as they share their stories, memories, and laughter with each other. There will be regular prayers and masses offered, and all of the communities will join together in the services. All children like this time especially since they will have a chance to play with all their friends all day and sleep in tents or wooden bunks in the camps, listening to the adults and elders talk through the night. Without electricity and running water, this event places many burdens on the families but is a cherished tradition that many families take on with great enthusiasm.
In the Eskasoni community Mi’kmaq language is still the language of the home and the community, and of at least two other Mi’kmaq reserves in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Whycocomagh and Nyanza. Mi’kmaq language is seldom spoken in reserves where the education of the children has been placed in the hands of the provincial schools. This has occurred in all of the mainland Mi’kmaq reserves and in Membertou and Chapel Island. Our education level is constantly increasing but our average literacy level is still at a dangerously low level. In this century we have had perhaps the worst dramatic experiences because of the education that has been provided for our children in boarding schools.
In 1920 the new regulations of the Indian Act imposed new standards of schooling for children; one was that they would have English taught in all schools and from that time we have had some of the most disastrous outcomes in education. From 1930 until about 1966 Mi’kmaq children were sent away to a boarding school where the Mi’kmaq language was not taught and colonial values were imposed on children. Most children had to spend several years away from their families and communities. Later our reserve had several federal schools where only English was the language of instruction. In the early sixties the federal government began to transfer their responsibilities of the education of Mi’kmaq children to the provinces by entering into contractual agreements that would take Mi’kmaq children from their reserves to be bussed to provincial schools where they would eventually have their language weakened or weaned from them and their future generations.
While exposure to other cultures is valuable, it is critically important for Mi’kmaq children to be exposed to their own culture. Author Adrienne Rich (1989) astutely comments: “When someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing.” (Rosaldo, 1989: ix.)
The importance of culture and cultural understanding in the school curriculum is justified, not only for Aboriginal children, but also for students from other cultures as well, as it seeks to develop an enriched knowledge base from which their knowledge can be gleaned. When different cultures and groups share their knowledge, experiences, and truths, then perhaps schools can get a wider appreciation of the diversity of global knowledge and information and a more comprehensive examination of Knowledge and Truth.
We are still in the 1990s struggling to find ways of putting positive images of Native people in the textbooks. There are so many positive things that can be said about our people and culture, or communities and our history. The Supreme Court of Canada has affirmed the validity of the Treaty of 1752, but it is denied in the curriculum, and so we fight for little bits and pieces of our right to have a little bit of our own cultural integrity preserved. In some reserves, we have been fortunate to have band-operated schools, schools that foster the values of the Mi’kmaq people and try to provide the framework of a Mi’kmaq curriculum. However, the mandated provincial curriculum continues to mirror a centre that is not Mi’kmaq. It is a colonial curriculum with outcomes aimed to serve the needs of colonial governments and their purposes.
We are seeking a more cultural and historical balance in the curriculum, trying to help educators understand the learning style and behaviours of our children. In the next century we hope to look back on our education and say that this was the best time of our education instead of the worst time of our education. We have now come to a place in time where we have our own educators in our communities, we now have our own Mi’kmaq teachers in our schools, teaching our Mi’kmaq people about our Mi’kmaq culture and historical values, and so we see great hope in this. We also hope and believe that as our education evolves that surely our constitutional guarantees of our aboriginal and treaty rights will not be opposed.
A history of cultural genocide, segregation, isolation, and coercive assimilation have greatly eroded, if not destroyed, much of the cultural and linguistic base of Aboriginal peoples in Canada, but rather than seeking to cure the problem, the federal government is turning over educational institutions to First Nations communities or the provinces. They are turning their back on the crises, and creating a context for failure. Vastly underfunded First Nations communities are being left to the immense problem of how to restore and revitalize their communities’ cultures, languages, education, and economy. Probably the most difficult immediate challenge among our communities has been to unleash the people from colonial doubt, inferiority complex, and confusion created by public and federal schoolin
g and Eurocentric assumptions and fallacies.
Canadian colonial education has robbed many of their languages, knowledge bases, and survival in their own homelands because of false hopes for what English language, literacy and Eurocentric education could provide. There is no comfort zone left in Aboriginal Canada.
The General Assembly of the United Nations continues to affirm the priority of the issue of Indigenous rights, by creating the 1993’s International Year of the World’s Indigenous Peoples and the inauguration of the Decade of World’s Indigenous Peoples which began in December, 1994. These votes in the General Assembly demonstrate the world’s determination to liberate the colonized peoples. Coercive methods of cultural and cognitive imperialism in federal, band, or provincial education respecting Aboriginal students must now be replaced with Aboriginal education of cultural transmission and development of culturally adaptive strategies founded upon a choice of systems of language and knowledge. Bilingual, bicultural education may no longer be the sole solution since much of the work in bilingual education is embraced within Eurocentric goals and structures of public schooling. A new model of language education based on inclusion, equity pedagogy, balanced knowledge construction and transformative curriculum is needed. This task must be given the highest priority both by non-Aboriginal and Aboriginal educators and leadership.
Bibliography
Battiste, Marie. (1984). An historical investigation of the social and cultural consequences ofMicmac literacy. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Stanford University, Stanford, CA.
Rand, S. Legends of the Micmacs. New York: Longmans, Green and Co., (1894).
Rich, A. as cited in R. Rosaldo. Culture and Truth. Boston: Beacon Press, (1989).
The Mi'kmaq Anthology Page 14
