The following is excerpted from a series of group discussions sponsored by Mi'kmaq Studies at the University College of Cape Breton in 1993. These meetings took the form of conversations among people who came together to talk rather than to solve any problems, and from this sharing it was hoped an understanding of Mi'kmaq dilemmas might evolve. Through a sometimes critical evaluation of Mi'kmaq traditions and culture, these talking circles or kikwtoqiaknutmátimk were an attempt to foster that place within us where dignity is regained and the spirit enlivened.
Participants were from both native and non-native backgrounds. In a somewhat abridged form, this is what took place. If you have comments concerning this material, please e-mail us and we'll add your thoughts to this site, so the Dialogues can continue...
Patrick Johnson: Well, I am going to give up this seat in a few minutes, but I would like to welcome you all, the students, the professors, and friends. I consider all of you friends. John Hewson is a professor at Memorial University. He has worked a lot with Bernie Francis doing the transcription/translation of Father Pacifique's grammar. We can't call it a dictionary, and that's the unique part about the Mi'kmaq language. We don't have a dictionary - a fancy name for it is lexicology. We're trying to figure that out. John Hewson will be discussing that today, and I offer the chair to him.
Dr. John Hewson: First of all, let's just ask ourselves what is a dictionary, and why would anybody want to make a dictionary? Having made several dictionaries myself, I suppose I should explain it and defend it. I'm not sure if I can, but I'll have a try at least.
Languages are composed of different segments, and you notice when the small child starts to learn a language, they start by learning just single words. And the child goes through what we call a one-word stage, and then a stwo-word stage, and then into longer sentences - a three-word stage, and then everything goes. So that very definitely a language is in some ways composed of words, but a language isn't just simply a nomenclature with names for everything, because a language necessarily has, for example, a grammar, and it also has a phonology, that is to say, a set of sounds that are distinctive to that particular language. And you notice that each language has its own different set of sounds so that you have to make certain adjustments when you move from one language to another. And you know how different tha grammars of languages can be. Well, in the same way, the set of words that belongs to a language is very language specific, so that you need a different dictionary for every language.
Now the purpose of having a dictionary is to make a record, especially for those who might know the language but might be interested in learning it, or for children learning the language who want to read on their own and don't know what to do when they come across a word they don't understand and so on. Or, when somebody uses a word and you're not quite sure if that's what the sense of it is. So everybody goes to the dictionary to find out what the normally accepted sense of that word is.
Now you must remember that dictionaries are not made by God - dictionaries are made by human beings. So a dictionary must not be treated as if it were the eternal record of the way things are supposed to be. A dictionary is no more than a record of how a language was at a particular moment in history, so that every hundred years the dictionaries need to be updated. And you'll find if you look in the most usual dictionaries, an English dictionary that you might find, for example, in the university bookstore, you would find that it has been updated; that there are new words in it. Even the great, big Oxford English Dictionary that was made in the last century with thirteen volumes and close on to half a million words in it has been continually updated. So you have new words like FAX and xerox, and things like that, that have arisen in the last 10 - 20 years now in the newest dictionaries. So a dictionary is only a report by somebody, preferably a group, of what are the normal accepted meanings of the words in a language at a given time. And a dictionary of English would normally contain somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 words - that's a fairly hefty dictionary. Now the Oxford English Dictionary contains all the stuff from the past that has been forgotten as well, so that's why the big Oxford contains close on to half a million words - something over 400,000.
So a basic dictionary of a language should be somewhere around 10,000 to 20,000 words. There is your fundamental dictionary which will record all the well-known words and will normally leave out the particular words that belong to some specific trade or whatever, because new words are invented by the trades and technologists all the time, and we don't need all their technical vocabulary in the dictionaries that we use for everyday purposes. So that, for example, NASA and the people who send the rockets out into space and to the moon, they have their own dictionary of their technical terms, and a lot of those technical terms are terms like NASA, which stands for - I have forgotten now - National Aeronautical and Space something or other. The letters stand for things, and that dictionary is crammed with words that are made up of longer, longer stretches, so we don't want in an ordinary dictionary for ordinary, everyday purposes, all the strange and technical vocabularies for left handed screwdrivers and all the other things that we don't need for everyday usage.
Now, is there a Mi'kmaq dictionary? Well, yes, there is, actually. There was a rather interesting one made by the Reverand Silas Rand and published in 1888. It's Rand's Dictionary of the Micmac Language, and it has been reprinted and republished within the last 25 years, and in fact, the copy that I have is the republished version. But it is, of course, over 100 years old, so some of it is no longer relevant. And of course it does not contain the new words that are added, and certainly things have changed. There is also the problem that it is only English - Mi'kmaq, so that, for example, if you want to read some of Rand's translations just to have a look at how Mi'kmaq was written in the 19th century, if you come across a word in Rand's translation of the Scriptures that you don't know what it means - and having tried this, I certainly found lots of words that I didn't know what they meant - where do you go to find what the word means? Rand has a dictionary. Surely you should be able to find it. Well, you can't, because Rand's dictionary is a dictionary by English gloss, as we say. That is to say, the alphabetized words are the English words, and then the English gives you what the Mi'kmaq is, but what we need is a Mi'kmaq - English dictionary - a dictionary by Mi'kmaq gloss where the Mi'kmaq word will by first and alphabetized, so that you can then find the Mi'kmaq word.
Now you can't find the Mi'kmaq words in Rand's English - Micmac Dictionary because you would have to know what it meant first. You would have to know the English word that that means if you wanted to find it. And the whole purpose of the dictionary is to find what the Mi'kmaq word means, so, problems.
There are other problems with Rand's Dictionary as well - at times he simply took a whole area of vocabulary like building a canoe, for example, and there's about three pages under "canoe" giving all the vocabulary for the terms of the canoe, and building the canoe, and so forth, for the operation of the canoe. And another curious thing about Rand's Dictionary is that there are some very strange English words that even I as a university professor - I am not quite sure what these English words mean. What are they doing in there? And I think that the answer to that is that Rand, in making his dictionary, took one of the 19th century dictionaries of English, and asked his Mi'kmaq informant, "How do you say this in Mi'kmaq?", and he would give him a word from the English dictionary including all kinds of strange words that we no longer use in English, but were still in the dictionary in the 19th century.
So, strange English words are in there with the Mi'kmaq meanings, and some of the Mi'kmaq terms are also very amusing maybe because Rand didn't know what the English word meant, but his native informant certainly didn't understand what the English word meant, no more than I do. So then Rand had to explain to him in English what the English word meant, and then the Mi'kmaq informant told him in Mi'kmaq what he had just said in English. Instead of having English - Mi'kmaq word, you often have English word and a long phrase in Mi'kmaq explaining what the English word means.
So, one of the ways of creating a dictionary for a bilingual dictionary in the computer age, is to take an old dictionary and rework it. So there is a possibility rather than starting from zero, of starting from something like Rand's Dictionary of 1888, which would contain a lot of interesting historical data on the Mi'kmaq language.
Now the ususal way of making a dictionary is to do it from the written word. So traditionally the dictionaries that have been made of native American languages like Ojibway, Cree, Menominee, and so forth, is for a whole pile of texts, oral texts, to be recorded and written down. And then the dictionary would be made from that written record, so that we have, for example, Bloomfield's Menominee Dictionary. Menominee is a central Algonquin language which was published after Bloomfield's death in the 1970's. Bloomfield died long before in 1949. In the 1970's, this manuscript that had been lying around that he had originally started and was finished up by others, was published. So we now have a Menominee Dictionary which was made up from Bloomfield's Menominee texts, and it contains something around 12,000 words of Menominee.
Now that is the typical way of making a dictionary. In other words, get all the texts, and then from the texts you make your dictionary. That means you lose the words that may be in current usage but are not in those texts. For example, most of Bloomfield's Menominee texts were folklore - were stories - so there is a more or less specialized vocabulary. But when you go looking for the vocabulary of ordinary, everyday life, like cooking and things in the kitchen and that kind of thing, the dictionary is lacking in that area. So whenever a dictionary is made, you have to be careful to make sure that all the different areas of everyday life get looked at.
Now in the computer age, dictionary-making, like everything else, has been revolutionaized. For example, in the old days, when you made up everything and put it all in alphabetical order, you had everything on slips of paper, and somebody would be responsible for getting those slips of paper into the correct alphabetical order, and this was mostly done on filing cards, and the typical recipient for those filing cards would be a shoebox. I have seen lots of shoeboxes full of filing cards, which is the old way of making a dictionary. And you would have markers for where everything with the letter "c" begins, and the letter "d" begins, and so on, all laid out in shoeboxes. Now you can imagine the incredible amount of time and work that goes into that - even just the shifting around of bits of paper and getting them in alphabetical order, and of course, it's quite possible to make mistakes.
A new fact: at the turn of the century, in 1902, there was a dictionary of Mi'kmaq produced that was supposed to be Rand's Dictionary turned around to be Mi'kmaq English - in other words, Mi'kmaq by Mi'kmaq gloss. Hurray, we should be able to find Mi'kmaq words! But the poor guy who put that thing together did such a botched up job that the dictionary is almost completely unusable - one of the reasons being that it is not in the correct alphabetical order, and he changed a lot of Rand's original work in spite of the fact that he didn't know the language. He refused help from anybody else. He wanted it to be his baby, and the consequence of all that is that dictionary is fundamentally unusable; it is garbage - so we still don't have a real version of Rand's Mi'kmaq English. All we've got is English Mi'kmaq.
Now a good bilingual dictionary should have both. You probably are familiar, for example, with French-English dictionaries where you start with French to English at the beginning, and then English to French at the back. Now, all we've really then, of Rand's so far, is English to Mi'kmaq. Somebody had a go at the Mi'kmaq English, but it's no good. So there's still room for a version of Rand's Mi'kmaq English, and it's easy enough to do, and this is what we have got done so far. We take every heading from Rand's original dictionary of 1888, starting with the English word, and we put it into the computer and try to keep it in a single line. And instead of starting with the English, we start with the Mi'kmaq word. We put the Mi'kmaq word out front. Now that means that the Mi'kmaq words all come out of alphabetical order because the whole thing is done in English alphabetical order, but with the modern computer that doesn't matter, because even with simple programs like ordinary everyday software...you have sorts where the computer will sort everything alphabetically on each line. So you can take the day's work and the computer will automatically, in the matter of a few seconds, sort everything alphabetically in terms of Mi'kmaq gloss. And eventually we got the whole of Rand's Dictionary put in machine readable form on Mi'kmaq gloss and got it all sorted so we get all the "a"s together and all the "p"s together and so forth.
So now we have some kind of a record of what Rand's original Mi'kmaq English Dictionay should have been, and out of this I think we can hope to make a dictionary of Cape Breton Mi'kmaq, or of any regional variant of Mi'kmaq, reasonably easily because we can take all of those original listings and divide them up in various ways, and this is what I want to propose: that when you look down those listings you can see certain things that are absolutely right for modern Mi'kmaq as spoken in Cape Breton in the 1990's. They fit. It's perfect. That's right. Other items - you know that's not the right English word for that. Other items _ I don't know that at all, maybe the Elders might - don't recognize it. So what we can do then, given that everything is on computer, we can make one listing, one file, of everything that is obviously acceptable. A second computer file of everything where the Mi'kmaq word needs some adjustment. A third computer file where the Mi'kmaq word is okay, but the English gloss - something has to be done with it. And a fourth computer file of things that modern speakers don't know, but there may be somebody around who still knows that word and can verify it in its usage. In other words, that final file would be for future research to make the dictionary complete.
Now what we need, of course, is the input from native speakers themselves, and this is where I am hoping that we can get something going at University College of Cape Breton, in a small way, with sorting the data from Rand into these fundamental catagories, and I am sure that as we go along we will find that there are other files that we will want to make because other problems will arise and be seen. And in this way we can get agreement from various quarters on what should go into a community dictionary of Mi'kmaq. And my role in all of this will simply be to keep all the files and do the editing and find the funding to keep the whole project going. So I want to close there, leave it at that, and ask you for comments and commentaries and questions and clarifications.
Bill [Surname Not Given]: What did you do with the largest files? You gave the example of "canoe", where you had three pages - well, did you apply English words to all the different parts and activities surrounding "canoe"?
John Hewson: No, it's all in Rand. There would be a word for "McDonald's" and this kind of thing, so he would give us the English word and then he would give the Mi'kmaq word. Now what we did was simply to turn them around, so the Mi'kmaq word is in there with the technical word in English for that particular kind of canoe. And if there was any doubt about it, we would add "canoe" in brackets, so that it then becomes a regular dictionary word rather than a subheading.
Scott Stewart: There are a couple of questions. One thing that strikes me is that we're always creating bilingual dictionaries. Is there any work in progress for a Mi'kmaq-Mi'kmaq dictionary the same way that the Webster is an English-English dictionary, where you define Mi'kmaq in terms of other Mi'kmaq terms?
John Hewson: That, I think, would be a later stage. I think the most pressing need at the moment is for the bilingual dictionary. The later work, incidentally, would have to be done entirely by Mi'kmaq linguists.
Scott Stewart: The other question is - I don't know that much about this - but from what I have heard, Mi'kmaq and English are radically different sorts of language. One way I have heard it expressed is that English tends to be a noun type structure and the Mi'kmaq tends to be verb structured. Does that create any particular problems in creating a dictionary of the sort that you're trying to create?
John Hewson: It's not too much of a problem because any user of the dictionary should be aware of things like that. So consequently if you list something like "meskilk" and you give it a gloss English "big", anybody knowing the language would know that "meskilk" is in fact a verb with an animate subject. Now that kind of information would not be in the dictionary, that would have to be in the mind of the user of the dictionary.
Male Speaker: I have a technical question on software. You mentioned that you were using word processing software. Is there a databased software package that one could use when compiling a dictionary that you know of, that would allow you to use the terms also providing lots of words for text and for annotations and the like?
John Hewson: Yes, there is. Thank you for asking that question because what is amusing is that the best software that we have seen to date is called, would you believe, "shoebox", and it's designed to do just what the old shoebox would do - to keep things in alphabetical order, and it keeps everything numbered, and it will also store text, and it will relate text to lexicon, to dictionary - and the best thing about "shoebox" is that it comes free because it was done by the S.I.L., the so-called Summer Institute of Linguists, who are mostly missionaries and so consequently not interested in making money out of their software, and you can have "shoebox" for free.
Female Speaker: Dr. Hewson, one thing I don't understand is when you create a dictionary, Mi'kmaq-English, why would you give an [unclear] of form in English for what is a verb in Mi'kmaq? I would like to explain to you that last week in class I was telling my students - "Don't tell me that this word means 'a man's coat', because it doesn't mean 'a man's coat' in Mi'kmaq. It means 'a man's coat' in English. " What I want to know is what is the meaning of this word from a Mi'kmaq point of view? So what I don't understand is why would you create a dictionary that pushes to an English meaning?
John Hewson: Because it's a bilingual dictionary fundamentally. But let me try to answer you; see if I can take a shot at answering if I understand what your problem is. Not all languages have the same parts of speech. There are, I think, only three parts of speech that are universal - the noun, the verb, and some kind of adverbial particle. Now, that means that adjectives as we have them in Indo-European are very rare in the rest of the world's languages, and consequently, in the rest of the world what we use as adjectives usually show up as verbs. So that instead of saying 'that red book', you say 'that, it is red book'. So you have a verb in there with that kind of agreement and that is precisely what goes on in Mi'kmaq. Now anybody who knows Mi'kmaq would know immediately that to get a meaning of an adjective, of an English adjective in Mi'kmaq, you need a verb of some kind. So there would be no sense in adding that kind of grammatical information to a dictionary which is fundamentally about the lexicon. It would need to be understood that Mi'kmaq represents things not only differently in terms of lexicon but also grammatically - fundamental grammatical differences.
Female Speaker: Well, it just occurs to me that what you are doing is that you are creating a dictionary for the facility of [an] English speaker as opposed to a dictionary which is somewhat close to the comment that Scott Stewart made. Why would you try to attach a meaning of Mi'kmaq for English speakers as opposed to transpose English meanings on Mi'kmaq words?
John Hewson: Yes, and indeed the dictionary will do that, but what it will give you is information on the lexical elements and it won't give you information on the grammar, and in order to understand, you have to have both grammar and lexicon together. But obviously you can't add all of the grammatical information to the lexicon, so your dictionary has to be usable by somebody who is already knowledgeable about the grammar.
Female Speaker: Okay, but what I still think that what you're doing is that your situation presents a western European...as opposed to situating it with...Mi'kmaq...
John Hewson: Yes, fine, alright, but as I said to you, it is the first stage. It is an interface between the two cultures to start with. But it is badly needed and some of those things will come later. For the monolingual dictionary, as I have said, you are going to need Mi'kmaq linguists to do that, and part of their training could be in the making of a bilingual dictionary to start with. A bilingual dictionary, I think, has to come first, and the bilingual dictionary is one that we can manage. And we certainly - at this point - are not in a position to manage a monolingual dictionary.
Stephanie Inglis: Some of the students here are involved with some discussion in one of our senior Mi'kmaq courses - just looking at the whole area of rural views and translation and moving from one language to another and what type of concepts you set up by the way you translate it. So I'm going to put them on the spot since I have them as a group here, and add that we have been discussing many of these things in class, and if they have anything that they want to share as a group or ask you.
Male Speaker: I think that Mr. Hewson said we are losing our Mi'kmaq so fast that English, I think, is almost an official [language?] for us to help us develop our Mi'kmaq dictionary, because the common people are slow to Mi'kmaq but it's dropping every day...if you can use English it helps with the Mi'kmaq. And I believe that is the way to go, but other people have other ideas.
Female Speaker: ...about the comment you made about...Mi'kmaq and the lexicon or whatever you call it. For me, I'm very curious about that remark. Obviously some of the stronger reserves, they have stronger Mi'kmaq speakers. Obviously, when you look at a name you know the area the people are [from?]. Big Cove and Eskasoni are the two strong points for the language spoken. Again, I am interested in the regional aspect - like Cape Breton, for example - has five reserves...it is my understanding that in each reserve they sort of have a different dialect...
John Hewson: I think you would find variation on a small scale in Cape Breton itself, and I think that that is the kind of thing that we would try to get into a dictionary of Cape Breton Mi'kmaq. We would try to get as much of the variation, capture as much of the variation as we can. But I don't think there is going to be - there obviously won't be - as much as there would be if you took the amount of variation that you would get between Eskasoni and Big Cove and Restigouche, because if you look at the DeBlois Dictionary, which I forgot to mention, by the way - published about 20 years ago with about 6,000 words - that would be the most up-to-date dictionary we have at the moment. DeBlois lists variation right the way across the whole scale. But most of his stuff is from Restigouche, and I know some of it looks quite strange because of the difference in dialect ... you know, fundamentally different pronunciations, but in a small area there shouldn't be too much variation.
Female Speaker: What about the writing system?
John Hewson: For a writing system, we are using what I've always used, mainly the Smith-Francis. The early work that I did was done for the Conne River Band Council and they instructed me that they wanted the Smith-Francis Orthography so I used it. And then of course, I worked with Bernie Francis and used it with him, so I think it is a really excellent form of transcription. The more I've worked with it, the more I like it as a linguist. I think it is a really excellent piece of work, and it fits the language nicely. Everything is meaningful. You put the apostrophe in for vowel length, and you put the apostrophe in for consonant length as well. You know, there are all kinds of small things about it that really work well.
My old informant from Newfoundland taught me the old style using the "g" and the rest of it. Now the problem, the fundamental problem with that today, is that when a language is in danger, you cannot afford an orthography that doesn't give you as much information as possible. Now the old spelling form was fine when everybody knew the language - everybody could read it and interpret it, but when you get people no longer knowing the language...but I think that it's something that if we don't make that reform then the language goes that much quicker, unfortunately.
Female Speaker: Maybe I can comment. I remember when I was writing papers, trying to push Mi'kmaq language and reading. I remember when I was trying to say vice versa, there are thirteen words in Mi'kmaq, there was no English translation for it. The closest I ever got in the translation was maybe the concept of what I was trying to talk about.
John Hewson: Yes, there are always problems of that kind in bilingual dictionaries. I mean even between English and French which are related Indo-European languages you have problems of translation. The English word "hint", for example, has no obvious equivalent in French, so you end up in French by saying "suggestion", or something along those lines. So every language has its own distinct centred meaning. So you've always got that problem of trying to explain in a second language what the first language really means. That's always a big problem in a bilingual dictionary, and especially when the languages come from different language families - English from Germanic and Indo-European and Mi'kmaq from Algonquin, North American, and different cultures. In fact, probably the cultural problem is an even bigger one because it may appear that a word means such and such, but when you put it in its cultural focus, it is actually something quite different. There's always that problem. And your dictionary makers have to be aware of that for certain, have to be aware of the cultural differences and so forth. It is not an easy task.
Female Speaker: I was just thinking of when I was doing a paper on [unclear]. There is an ...and Elders were helping me. We were both speaking Mi'kmaq and I was giving English terms. And we never found out anything...comparable to what we were trying to describe. And then finally I took the liberty of writing the concept...We couldn't find the exact words at all. Because no one could be exactly right. It's almost like a degree of the trainer or something like that.
John Hewson: Yeah, somethimes when a word like that occurs, it may be used in its original form so that you would use that Mi'kmaq word in English, and then people would know that that was a very special concept and you had to understand and learn that concept - there was nothing equivalent in English. It is odd in a way that we do that somethimes in linguistics, that the French terms "langue" and "langage" both translate into English as a language so that we sometimes use French "langue" to indicate tongue, mother tongue, that kind of sense of a language as a complete, finite hold, because language in English is ambiguous.
Female Speaker: But then you're telling me that you must have prior knowledge of French to know this, then.
John Hewson: That's right.
Female Speaker: Then all my readers in English would have to have some prior knowledge of Mi'kmaq before they would understand the concept of it.
John Hewson: Well, if you're writing a text like that you would really want them to know what that word means, so it might be preferable to leave it as a Mi'kmaq word, as a challenge to the reader and put a glossary at the end to try to give the reader some idea of what the particular concept belonging to that word is.
Murdena Marshall: I foresee some sort of difficulty in, maybe, that the ...because of our ambiguity.
John Hewson: Because of?
Murdena Marshall: Because of our language ambiguity. In the course which I teach, which is 230, we would investigate the ambiguity of the language - how many different concepts make up this word...
John Hewson: Yeah. But this is quite normal. You will get - sometimes where you have just one word in one language, you will have ten or a dozen in another language. In fact, I teach a course on semantics in the linguistics program at Memorial, and one of the exercises that those students have to do is they have to take a bilingual French-English dictionary, and I give them certain words in English to look up and to report on the French words that they find there. Because some of the words that I give them, I give them an English word such as 'top', like the top of the table. Now you will find that there are at least a dozen different words in French to translate 'top' - 'top' of the table, 'top' of the mountain, 'top' of the tree - they are three quite different words in French. And in French if you take a word like 'coup', which basically means a 'blow', well, you can have a 'coup devant' which is a gust of wind, and 'coup de pointe', which is a punch, and a 'coup de pied', which is a cake. And there are about forty different English words to translate 'coup'. So you get this in all bilingual dictionaries, that there are words which have a vast range of meanings. These are sort of generic words which cover a multitide of things, and maybe the other language doesn't have that same category of generic word in that particular area. So that is a matter of fields of vocabulary - that different languages take a particular field and they will carve it up in different ways. Some languages for example, in quite a small field, carve it up into three areas, and another language will take that same field and carve it into two, and then you have overlap. So that words don't necessarily mean the same thing as a word in another language. You will look it up sometimes in the dictionary, and you will see that what the other word - what a given word in language A is supposed to mean in language B. But it doesn't mean that all the time because of the different amount of variation that you get between the two.
Male Speaker: Inflection would be part of that, wouldn't it?
John Hewson: No, inflection really should go in the grammar, if you're talking inflection like the endings of nouns and verbs and things like that....The emphasis helps the listener to figure out which of the various meanings you want, yeah, but you can't get that into a dictionary.
Murdena Marshall: I thought you could.
John Hewson: Well, you can get the difference between English 'permit' and the verb 'to permit', but that is about the limit of what you can do in a dictionary. You can show where the stress falls on a given word.
Murdena Marshall: But you have to make that dictionary accurate. You have to include those parentheses, those little things that are stress words and where the emphasis is, which syllable the emphasis falls on.
John Hewson The Mi'kmaq words don't have the same kind of fixed stress as English words do, no.
Murdena Marshall: We're very compact.
John Hewson: Yeah.
Murdena Marshall: We're nomadic, remember?
John Hewson: Yeah, that's right.
Murdena Marshall: We compact everything.
John Hewson: It's like word ordering as well. In word ordering...English is fixed, but in Mi'kmaq it's a movable feast.
Male Speaker: Can I ask one more question? This is just out of curiosity. How close is Mi'kmaq to the other foreign languages? Any relation at all?
John Hewson: Not that we know of. Apparently what happened probably 500 or 600 years back is that the Iroquois drove a wedge up the St. Lawrence River Valley and separated eastern Algonquian from central Algonquian, so that's why they lie in between.
Male Speaker: What do you do with new words? Like, there is no word for 'refrigerator', or 'tee off' or 'golf tee'.
John Hewson: This presents quite a problem, because just how far do you recognize borrowing as being a part of your language? This raises all kinds of political and cultural questions. Let me just say a few words about borrowing. If you look at English, you will find that English is borrowed from all over the globe, including borrowing from Mi'kmaq - like toboggan, wigwam, caribou... So, if you take, for example, a paragraph of a newspaper editorial and you look at where all the English words came from,you will find that about 50 percent ot it is not from Old English, but it's borrowed. And the biggest borrowings in English have been from French. And that dates from the period of English-French bilingualism after the Invasion of 1066 of William the Conqueror who invaded the British Isles and became King of England in 1066. From 1066 until 1317-1318, the Kings of England all spoke French. And during that time you get an enormous amount of borrowing into English from French. Ordinary, simple words like 'park', and then we make it into a real English verb, and you can have a verb 'to park' and you can have 'parking', and then the French go and borrow it back as le parking.
So you've got this borrowing back and forth, but it's not quite that simple, because if you want to defend your language and keep it significant, its cultural significance, then you don't want masses of borrowing, especially in the case of a minority language. It's alright for English because there are millions of speakers, but when you have a minority language, there are only a few thousand speakers - you really don't want an enormous mass of borrowing. So you'e got to be selective about your borrowings, except those ones that seem to you to be natural and that everybody uses, and then some of the others you just leave them out. Does that start to answer the question? Because there is no easy answer to it.
Male Speaker: What do you do with the ones that are already borrowed? Do you set them aside or mention the fact - like, there are many French words in our language now that are in use today? Do you give them credit - they are French or they are Mi'kmaq or whatever?
John Hewson: No, I wouldn't, in the same way they did the dictionary of English today. We don't indicate, unless you want to do an etymological dictionary, unless you want to add to the dictionary, but I think that's a different kind of dictionary. We're talking now about a bilingual dictionary which fundamentally gives meanings in two different languages. Now, when you get down to a monolingual dictionary, then you can give information on the etymology. That is to say, where the word originally came from, and when you look at dictionaries like these in the great, big Oxford English Dictionaries that I was talking about, in that you will find an enormous amount of information. You will find, basically, if it's an old word, you will find a thousand years of its history given in the Oxford English Dictionary - all the forms from 1200 and 1300 and so forth, and its original meanings and how it changed and where it came from, is it a borrowing or is it original and so forth. But that is a very different kind of dictionary.
[End of Dialogue, November 1993.]
Sake'j Henderson: Thanks for everyone coming. I am not the moderator, I am just one of the first voices, but I wanted to set the context since people need context. We don't have a purpose for this dialogue as a topic; we've got a lot of people asking what was the purpose of this Mi'kmaq dialogue, and all week long we have heard this question in different contexts - as to its purpose - as if we had some magical meaning, and like people needed external orders to get together otherwise they wouldn't get together. I think my friend Patrick [Johnson] explained it best. After working on it all week, he came up with the answer to what we considered our purpose at this meeting. What did you say exactly?
Patrick Johnson: What I said was, well, we're looking to be kind of facetious but high-tech. Everybody has been asking me what purpose is this, what are we going to discuss? And I told them think of a feather. You hold it up, and it will go with the wind and to me, and that will be our topic.
Sake'j Henderson: Traditionally, we always go around the circle from right to left. Some other cultures go from left to right. Since we started off to the right with our Sweet Grass Prayer, I will continue that tradition. My name is Sake'j Henderson and I am a member of Mi'kmaq Studies at the University College of Cape Breton. I will let everyone introduce themselves before we have Russell [Barsh] say a few opening words.
Marie Battiste: I'm Marie Battiste and I have many roles. I'm working right now as a Mi'kmaq Cultural Curriculum Coordinator with the Eskasoni School board, developing Mi'kmaq curriculum material for the schools. I'm also a member of the Board of Governors at the University College of Cape Breton and neighbour to Alex Denny and Patrick Johnson.
(Background laughter.)
Alex Denny: I'm Grand Captain of Mi'kmaq Grand Council. I have a special dream. I don't want to and I haven't gone to the mountain top, but I'm getting there. My dream is for all people to some day run their own education system, to be able to educate themselves in the way that our forefathers did. A lot of people, when I started speaking about educating our own people in our Mi'kmaq language, they looked at me as if I was to have been admitted to Cape Breton Hospital, but now, as we are losing our language, people are now beginning to comprehend what it is that my old man and other older people has told us. But rather than to bore you with that, I still believe that one day we will have our own college. Hopefully if you present yourselves accordingly, you may teach there.
(Background laughter).
Patrick Johnson: My name is Patrick Johnson. I'm the Mi'kmaq Student Advisor for Mi'kmaq Studies at UCCB. To my right is Murdena Marshall.
Murdena Marshall: Here I am, Murdena. I also work here as an Assistant Professor, assisting my own self. I work in the Mi'kmaq Studies Program. I teach the 100 course in Mi'kmaq History and I teach the language and the literacy of it. I also have been educated in folk...medicine, in my own tribal work, and in the education system, so for, to put forth...education in all those people. My work of, and my richness, is not in the formal education system but in my tribal work, as my tribal work has set me straight, I think, in many things - not only in teaching but in many, many, many ways. Never was I...forever grateful that I had the opportunity to talk under elders.
Sam Migliore: I'm Sam Migliore. I teach here at the College as well. I'm an anthropologist. My work is a little different from the work of most anthropologists in that what I do is study my own people, and in studying my own people, a lot of my research and writing has been to critically examine what people have said about my people. And in a sense it is a re-examination of the field that I am working in.
Margaret Migliore: My name is Margaret Migliore, and I am a librarian. I have also been teaching here at the College - Anthropology and some Sociology - for the last couple of years. I basically think of myself as a librarian, and hope to do that full-time soon.
Andrea [Last Name Unavailable]: Hi, my name is Andrea, and I'm visiting Eskasoni with Russell Barsh, and I guess by training I'm a lawyer, and I'm a graduate student at present in Political Science at Buffalo, New York.
Russell Barsh: I'm Russell Barsh. I sometimes describe myself now as a political refugee in Mi'kmaq country. My own family comes from Lithuania, and I grew up around stories about what they ran away from, and then spent some of my teenage years down in the States on one of the reservations beginning to re-think all of my values and all of the things that were important to me and to my grandparents, who I really grew up with. Now I suppose I describe myself as something of a teacher-writer-troublemaker, and a sometimes servant of Alex Denny in the United Nations in our efforts to understand what Mi'kmaq is about, in the process of trying to get others to respect the dignity of Mi'kmaq people.
Aaron Schneider: I'm Aaron Schneider. I live over on the other side of Kelly's Mountain in St. Ann's Bay. I am a sometimes teacher and a librarian, and I work with environmental development groups, local and national groups.
Carol Corbin: I'm Carol Corbin, and I'm an Assistant Professor in the Communications Sub-Department here at UCCB.
Stacey Sulewski: I'm Stacey Sulewski and I teach in the Bachelor of Arts Community Studies Program here at UCCB.
Ruth Schneider: I'm Ruth Schneider and I'm the Program Coordinator for the Centre of International Studies. I used to be a teacher until that started taking up full time. I live on the other side of the island as well in a snow bound farm, and I'm hoping to become wiser as I grow old.
Graham Reynolds: I'm Graham Reynolds. I teach at UCCB. I teach History and a few other things. I guess I'm still trying to figure out what I'm doing, sort of a wanderlust.
Richard Mac Kinnon: I'm Richard Mac Kinnon and I'm from New Waterford, which is not too far from here, a fifteen minute drive down the highway. And I spent a lot of time in Newfoundland, and did a lot of research in Newfoundland, and in fact, all my research is in an area known as Vernacular Architecture - which a lot of people don't really understand that - but we study looking at structures like barns and out buildings and the kind of houses that most common people lived in, rather than the elite houses that the merchants and the upper classes which most architectural historians try to look at. A lot of my research has been in Newfoundland, but I'm also doing a lot of work in industrial culture here in Cape Breton coal mining communities.
Scott Stewart: I'm Scott Stewart. I study and teach Philosophy here at UCCB. To my right is a good friend, Stephanie Inglis.
Stephanie Inglis: I'm Stephanie Inglis. I teach Mi'kmaq students in Mi'kmaq Studies, but I'm probably more of a student than a teacher. And to my right is my husband, Peyton Chisholm.
Peyton Chisholm: My name is Peyton Chisholm, and I don't know what to saaay. To my right is Sake'j Henderson.
Sake'j Henderson: Okay, to shift this frame a little bit, to a little more structured framework: indigenous people have one pressing problem in the entire indigenous world that has thus far not been really focused on, and has eluded almost everyone. Still, we have to somehow solve that problem in order to keep continuity, and that basic problem is the topic of tonight. We don't expect any solutions, but we can talk around it or through it, and we have asked Russell to set the stage for it, and it's a problem that faces seventy-five percent of the peoples of the world.
The problem is, if you've been oppressed for a certain amount of time, if your language has been oppressed and if your world view has been oppressed, how do you restart these cognitive realms as a collective process again? How do you relight or rekindle the flame that other people have tried to blow out? Anyone who has studied psychology realizes how hard it is to deal with one disturbed individual to just get them back to normalcy. Our goal is to push them higher than normal, and push them to understand the total depth of their oppression, and understand the knowledge within their language and within their Mi'kmaq world view.
It's becoming a Mi'kmaq problem, but for most of Canada it is already a crisis, most of the language has already vanished, and people are trying to re-establish it. With that, I will turn the discussion to Russell Barsh, and people can just join in when they feel comfortable about it - and there is, I guess, one caveat, one caution - that you don't have to feel compelled to fill in the silence. Generally, people rush in where there is a silence or a pause. You don't have to do that, but if you want to do it, go ahead if you have something to say. But it does get uncomfortable because in the tribal world, there are long pauses between the next speaker.
There are two ways to do it. One's the Talking Stick and the other is the Talking Feather. I can pass them around. If you want to, and if you have something to say, hold onto him. Once you start talking, you have to pass it. So at each pause we will know potentially who desires can talk. To begin, I will pass the Talking Stick to the right. Russell will pass the feather to his right.
Russell Barsh: We need a celestial framework for measuring our ideas. I guess I would like to start off by talking about tea. Tea is very important in my experiences in the Mi'kmaq world in that it's the stuff that symbolizes people being together and talking, and being happy together, and the warmth and the togetherness as families, and everyone in the community would come to a house and there is tea for everyone. Go and visit and talk, and there is tea. The teapot of today is like the old symbol of the bowl with one spoon in the times of the great council fire - all the tribes sharing hunting grounds and sharing the resources of the land in a way that wasn't legal or formal but with the respect and the hospitality and love of neighbours and kinsmen. The Mi'kmaq tea ceremony, you know, people come together at areas, walk in the door, the teapot is put on. Pretty soon tea comes, and everybody sits around and drinks it. It is very different from the Japanese tea ceremony, because in the Japanese tea ceremony, people sit around and they admire the ceremony, or you admire the formality of the ritual that is repeated every time the tea ceremony is done. But the Mi'kmaq tea ceremony is about the sharing, the togetherness. You enjoy the people that are drinking the tea together. Very much like something that I spent a lot of time around in my early days - travels around the world - when I was in the South Pacific and Fiji, where you had a ceremony - and there was a formal ceremony - but also every time somebody came over and visited from far away, out would come...this stuff, and pass the bowl around for everyone to share it. Sharing is something that made everybody remember their neighborliness, their kinship...
But there is something else about this tea. It doesn't come from Mi'kmaq country. It comes from India, originally China. The British brought it here. The Mi'kmaq picked it up from invaders, and yet this stuff which was brought by an invader and comes from halfway around the world - still the tea is about as clear and real and meaningful - it is a symbol of togetherness in Mi'kmaq society. As a symbol it is as meaningful as anything that was here before Europeans arrived. I think that what that says to me is that the point of understanding cultural change and cultural stress and the psychology and sociology of oppression, the destructiveness of depression, is not about symbols or rituals. Tea can be a sign of a healthy Mi'kmaq society just as much as sweet grass can be, or a sweat lodge, or the old ceremonies that have almost completely vanished from people's memories. That's not the point. That's not what shows whether a society is healthy or not - whether the symbols and rituals that bind it together grow back into remote antiquity.
I think anywhere we look in the world we find that some of the most powerful things that hold people together are things which they have adopted, getting joy, and shared from relatively recent times. Even without sometimes really thinking about whether they come from here or there or somewhere else. What would make them powerful is the way they are shared. The passing on of the love of the sharing from generation to generation makes it healthy, whatever it is that's shared. The love that goes with pouring that tea is giving it to everyone that comes, rather than whether it is tea or some herb that comes from Cape Breton or from Mi'kmakik, and that's where our problem lies. It is not in the inventory of culture - it doesn't matter if there's a satellite dish behind the house. That's not the point; it's not the issue. It's the love going from generation to generation, that is the issue, and something that isn't very visible, and which doesn't show up in inventories, and which isn't something that makes an easy way of categorizing what is Mi'kmaq culture and society and what isn't.
But once we talk about culture as the passing on of love from parents to children and from generation to generation, rather than the passing on of an inventory of objects and ritual, then and only then do we fully appreciate what terrible things have been done to Mi'kmaq and other peoples in the recent history of the world - because the chain of love has been broken, it seems to me. People have experienced a tearing away from their families, from the love of their parents. They have been subjected to violence, physical and psychological. They have been abused, not only individually, but as entire societies. And just as abuse leads to a cycle of violence on an individual level from parents to children, it can lead to a cycle of self-destructiveness and doubt and hopelessness in the life of a civilization or a society from generation to generation. Once it starts it is very, very difficult to stop it. This to me ishat discussions like this are about. How do you stop the oppressive cycle? Not in the level as individuals, but at the level of an entire society which has been badly enough abused as every generation grows up with the pain and the bitterness, the self doubt, the self rejection, the self destructiveness, passed on, mixed with love, from the generation before it.
I thought once that one way we could tackle this was through our reaching out to indigenous peoples elsewhere, first around the continent, and then around the world. Reaching out to people who are whole. In the psychology of individual abuse, by the individual's experience with abuse, there is the idea of stages through which people go if they struggle with what happened to them. The initial stage is denial - it didn't happen. First Nations have gone through that - prolonged periods when everybody wanted to be white. That was denial. Generations when everybody wanted to be Euro-Canadians, to be like everybody else, be accepted in packs. Also, denial exists at the political level: we don't have problems - there is no drinking, there is no child abuse, the culture is intact. This denial is of what has happened and its effects.
But I think we have passed that. We are now into the stage, that next stage that people reach - bitterness and hopelessness. Getting angry about what happened, which is healthy at that stage. But with the anger, a sense of frustration of what do you do about what has happened to you. Who will you blame? Who is going to set it right? And I see that combination of bitterness, anger, bitterness, and also who's to blame, who's going to set it right - the government's going to set it right, are we going to set it right? No. The search for how to find the oppressor, in effect, the parent, and shake them up and say, 'You did this to me, now you fix it', that doesn't help. That doesn't work. It doesn't work individually and it certainly isn't working in a relationship between First Nations and Canada. The abusive parent is just saying 'Tough luck, kid. There's nothing we can do'.
So you reach out. You go to other cultures, and say well maybe out there, there are some Indians somewhere who aren't self destructive, that haven't had this happen, and they're still together, and we'll get together and they'll help us here. Like an abused child as an adult reaching out to people who maybe weren't abused so badly they try to pull themselves through it, saying I got to talk to you, I need to work this out. And to some extent I think that will help. But it is also very depressing, because I've travelled around now working with indigenous peoples from thirty-five countries, and they all got the same story. They all say the same things. They are all searching for the same answer. They're coming up here to find out if we're a little bit healthier up here, and go and help them get through their crisis. And that's a really scary thing. So we get together and we talk, and what do we find out? Everyone is carrying that load of bitterness and hopelessness and looking for somebody to share it with - for a witness, for a guide - to share it with. And then, of course, I suppose the ultimate thing is going and looking to the experts in western society, European society, and what do we do? The experts, the scholars, the scientists - and as Sake'j suggested, they don't have the answer because they have hardly gotten to the point of being able to deal with the consequence of breaking the cycle of abuse at the individual level. We're talking about it at the society level.
So the challenge, it seems to me from what I've seen, is to find a way of producing the support of reintroducing the love, of creating the sense of security, confidence and security, that every indigenous people needs to shield itself. And it's not just a matter of bringing back things. It's not a matter of what people wear or what ceremonies they carry out or what objects they have in their house or what they eat. It's bringing back the love and the sense of security that generations of people have been deprived of.
There's an old saying I heard once that long ago before Europeans came it was said that it took four generations to get over a war among Aboriginal North America. Four generations to get over a war, to wipe away all the tears, for the children to be born whose parents were not filled with the bitterness of what happened to their parents and their grandparents. We are dealing with something far worse, far more intrusive, that reached every single member of society - not just the warriors, but everyone. And that's the challenge. And if we treat it, it seems to me, as a problem of government policy, or a matter of law, or a matter of individual psychology, or individual problems, I think that we have missed the whole point. It's on a different scale, and in a way, I would say that the Euro-Canadian society, and Euro-American U.S. society, and European countries like Britain and France, are in themselves in a state of denial. They would like to think, and they would like their people to think that all they have to do is pay some welfare, send some cheques, maybe give a little land back, make a deal, give people the ability to administer their own affairs at the local levels, self government, and it will go away. And that's like taking a child who is a product of four or five generations of the worst psychological and physical abuse and saying, 'Okay, kid, we're going to give you some compensation and send you to college, be happy'. It's missing the point. Breaking the cycle of love and bitterness, and not just a question of property or law at this point.
This is the thought that has been going through my head, and at this stage of the discussion, all I can say is this to me is the most perplexing question I ever faced. And after many years of working with law and policy, I have come to the conclusion that this is merely the issue, and with the tools that I was trained to use in defense of Aboriginal rights, are completely powerless against the real problems.
(The Talking Stick and the Feather were being passed around. Finally at the end of Russell's comments, they were both passed to the same person.)
Sake'j Henderson: There is one on either side of me. (Much more laughter.)
Patrick Johnson: It's an old Indian trick! (More laughter and background conversation.)
Murdena Marshall: I couldn't possibly disagree with you at all. I have students at different levels of understanding their own culture or their own oppression, and very varying styles as a teacher as far as different - both learning styles are different - and that's going through a stage of learning. And their understanding of oppression - they don't understand the word oppression, although they have lived it; they are living proof of oppression. It is very difficult to teach students, especially about different eras where oppression was significant. The school - the students totally deny it, although it happened right here in Mi'kma'ki, but that denial is so, is so real is that's all I do - is do research on residential schools, document it, so if the student sees it, because I can't get too many guest speakers to come in and talk about pain. First of all, they can't talk about it because they have not come to the full realization themselves, so therefore they cannot talk about it. There's only one or two students who will talk about it, and I can't use those two people every year and hope they can come up with the same... We don't have the same groups of students each year. But the oppression is real, and that oppression inside is the result of your behaviour, and you feel it. I feel it too; I feel impotent, although I cannot feel oppressed - I'm beyond. I'm okay. Stephanie, go ahead.
Stephanie Inglis: Funny that Russell should start off with the need to say about the notion that what's happened is that you have a breakdown of passing on of love, because I find myself continuously in situations; you've got this one...who is in Mi'kmaq Studies. You go for six years - as when I introduced myself, I said I was more of a student than a teacher - and I find every day you have to deal with the question, because every day I've got my feet stuck. You've got two windows to look through, and so when you look at the question that we're talking about tonight, it [is] one of soul. It's not one of policy; it's not one of history or political, it's one of soul. And if you look, when you look at students and in your class, and here I am trying to teach a very structural approach - I'm trained as a linguist, a very linear, structural linguist - so I go in with my presentation and when it is most successeful is when you can ask a student to question, when you know that they know the answer, but simply by asking the question, it forces them to think about what they already know, and basically, for them to examine their soul. And if you can do that, then you start to see blossoming and learning.
But what has to happen is the student has to reach a point where they value the information that you're presenting to them to rediscover in themselves. They know about Mi'kmaq way better than I do, yet I'm the teacher, so I'm simply there to ask them questions for them to look inside themselves. But it's not until the student makes the recognition that, 'Oh, you mean it's important? It's important for me to know this? Oh, this Mi'kmaq language really is complicated; it's more complicated than English'. Or when they make all the jumps of realizing this is important - 'This is me, and I do know about it'. Or you'll bring words out and they'll say, 'I've heard that word, but I don't remember how to use it', and then they'll go and find out the word. So slowly you'll start to see doors open. But the doors are only open by asking the questions which force them to reach the recognition of sayinggg, 'Yeah, this is something that maybe I should look at'.
And what is so frightening to me as a teacher is that someone could go through all their life and perhaps be thirty years old and never have had the opportunity in their learning experience to start to question those things in a formal way and to rediscover them. And that's what has to change. Students have to be able to do that when they're 6 or 7 or 8, and when it becomes very real. Today we didn't have a lot of students come because of the weather. And we're always changing the assignments because when they don't work then you have to do it. So we said, okay, bring in the writing of your children, and let's look at Mi'kmaq and English and what's happening. Well then the whole picture changed, because then it was their children.
So it has to be a matter of soul, and it has to be a way of presenting the idea that it's humanity, because non-Mi'kmaq people need the rediscovery of Mi'kmaq soul more, or as much as Mi'kmaq people, because as human beings, every time we lose an aspect of diversity, humanity suffers. In every language we lose and every ability to be a whole community is lost through... but how that's going to be perpetuated to a whole group of people, community and nation...
Richard Mac Kinnon: I was just thinking that you were both - you know, as Russell and Stephanie were speaking - that I teach a folklore course at the university, and I have both Mi'kmaq and non-Mi'kmaq students in the class. And I'm trying to get to the answer of the question that Russell raised, and how do you reacquaint the kind of comfort and love in family situations and how people view it? In my course I have students do projects. It is a project-based course where opennnly they have to meet face-to-face with someone and discuss aspects of their tradition, however they define that. In the class we discuss ways in which tradition is defined by western scholars, and we look at European scholars, American scholars, and the folklore departments in the U.S., and the few folklore departments in Canada. We know the literature, but students...
The fundamental point is that we can go to the libraries and we quickly discover that there is very little on most of the projects - not just the Mi'kmaq students, but non-Mi'kmaq students, too - will discover that there is very little in the library on the kinds of things that are meaningful. So I guess the point is that having people, having students understand aspects of their own traditions by - and this is something that Murdena mentioned - going back to people in their communities, elders in their communities, family members, and interviewing, discussing, having dialogues with them, that is one route. It is one route. I don't know if it gives you all the answers, but I think when you get to that level of face-to-face communication with people, then you can begin to understand in much bigger depth the problems as well as strengths, and the sharing that once went on, the kind of values that were once crucial and essential to small communities, not only Mi'kmaq communities, but non-Mi'kmaq communities too - the values that were essential for the survival of the community, the notion of community. Once people start to see some of those, I think that helps to produce that kind of reacquaintance with the core values.
Marie Battiste: I guess a lot of the discussion that has started sparking me is about the total notion of what it is we want to learn, how people learn, what styles they learn best in, what objectives we want to achieve. In my work with curriculum, we have established a community dialogue with elders, with teachers, to try to define or to try to shape what we want to put into the curriculum. It's sort of like taking everything you know and trying to decide for children what are the most important things we want them to know. And not just that, but how can we give them something that they might be able to transform themselves, as well as be able to be part of a collective dialogue that transforms a whole community, a whole nation, to help them with their doubt, with their self-concept, with the anger that's still in the community from boarding school days, of healing from child abuse, from family poverty? I don't know yet where that is.
I would like to hear some thoughts about some of the things that people might have as to what they think needs to be part of one collective knowledge base in order to be able to transform that oppression that we heard and we know so much about - that we've been part of. We have part of a cognitive imperialistic regime, and yet we are trying to use that regime to do something that takes us beyond it. It's a quandary. I think that some of the things that we have done is to try to seek from our elders, the body of information that they have. We ask them to help us with what is appropriate to give to kids, and oftentimes they'll say, 'You shouldn't do this or that. It isn't appropriate'. I often see that our elders also still have notions that are embedded within that cognitive imperialistic education, or a system of self-doubt that they have. I am not sure that we are doing it yet in the right way.
Graham Reynolds: It seems to me that one of the things that we're all facing (and it seems to be one of the dimensions of the problem) is the sense of fragmentation that we all experience. I think that western culture in particular really puts things in boxes and divides us against ourselves. Historically we take history away from indigenous people and we deny them a sense of identity. I think that it all comes down to a tradition thinking of humanity which separates and breaks things into compartments and wants to deal with things in manageable sort of components. And I think we do that in the way we see things in terms of western thinking, in terms of dichotomy, everything is in terms of dualistic kinds of models and so on. Such thoughts, I think, do a real disservice to the nature of the problem or the nature of reality. I think that we have to really try to reintegrate and put things back together again. I see actually that the next several decades as being a pd of tremendous re-joining, tremendous coming together. I think that in the last several decades we have experienced the growth in the sense of identity that has occurred around the world, that in the most recent terms perhaps is generated by the civil rights movement in the United States, and that linked up, I think, with international movements for Third World, and then stimulated the Women's Movement, and with that we have the identity of native peoples in North America and around the world.
I think all that has been really exciting, and it is, you know, really, it's sort of the first and second stages of [name unclear] analysis of the growth of consciousness. I think that we are now on the verge of coming together again, because individuals and groups have now rediscovered part of their past and the need to continue the process. And I think the next phase is to try to put it all together again and to see things in terms [of] the inter-relationships and break down some of this fragmented kind of thinking. So maybe, you know, the future is not so bleak. Maybe, you know, there is sort of a sense of common humanity that is waiting for us if we just simply break through some of those barriers and obstacles that have been traditional to western thinking, certainly, and because of the dominence of western thinking, it has tended [to] pervade the rest of civilization
Ruth Schneider: I like your optimism. I was thinking of the problem of the immigrants because there are those cultures that are still where they seem to have originated and are looking for ways to re-state their appropriateness here, and then there are the cultures that are lost because people have been wanderers for generations, and I suspect that the problems faced by both groups are somewhat similar, connected with fragmentation. It was just something that bothered me years ago when my children were young, the fact that I was supposed to send them away for eight hours a day, and some government would take care of them. They called it a school, and would teach them for that time, and then they would come home, and they had been separate from all the things that we thought were important. They probably learned something there, and I think the fact that you are building your school out of your community is a wonderful luxury in some ways. We couldn't see any way that we could do that in our community, although there were certainly people that solved that with alternative schools, but to have first of all a culture that you are clearly aware of even though it may be disappearing and you're trying to re-state and re-teach the language and customs of it, is luxurious in some ways. And to be able to teach and to build a school out of your community to teach those things I think is a wonderful possibility, and I would like to at least put on the table the concerns of those who don't - who can't look back and see what it is they want to save, and who are grasping in other ways to see what it is we teach our children and our grandchildren.
I grew up thinking I was Norwegian, and only after I was well over my 20's did I realize that no, I had one Norwegian grandfather. It's just that the stories were best that came from that half of that side of the family, but in actual fact there were all these other things I knew nothing about, and I suspect I am rather typical of the North American immigrant.
Alex Denny: I think it's interesting when you hear an immigrant speaking in that light. The problem we have as native people is that we have these schools. I say the education system is just bringing all nationalities through one door and they all come out the same at the other door. In Mi'kmaq thought, what little there is left of it, we try desperately to teach our children. In my own family, for example, my own children, I try to teach them the values, other than the almighty dollar. You know, the values that Russell spoke of - that you are a family. That there is such a thing as love. There is such a thing in our language as not only the love of your neighbour, but love of every oxygen breathing animals, plants, and whatever else. I feel the most important thing we all face is now that we have celebrated the quincentenary of Columbus, are our children going to be able to celebrate another 500 years, without dramatic changes in the global system of how we industrialize, how we modernize, how we use so-called technology? Now these are some of the scary aspects.
In speaking with some of the older people when centralization started in Eskasoni, the biggest thing that I understood from my old man was when there was a person coming to the reservation thinking that all the Indians are now getting together and he was trying to get his Masters or his Doctorate degree. And as a child, I was told to lie my ass off, to tell every conceivable lie you can think of, and would you believe that guy has his Docotrate on what we told him! (Much laughter).
And this is what you people and I now look up to - this is the educator, this is the elite in our society. One of the basic reasons I have always felt why we survived was that we didn't tell the strangers what our secrets are. We kept it within our society through the Mi'kmaq language. But now you look at our children. In Eskasoni, for example, which is more Mi'kmaq speaking than any other community, I would venture to say about kindergarten and pre-kindergarten and Grade 1 and 2 students that start there, about forty percent of them speak English. They talk English. It's the easiest to speak, you know. It's much easier, and the thing is, we as parents, you know we love our child when they are speaking English and our own language. We answer back to them. We use English. So who do you point the blame to? You know, these are some of the thoughts that I believe my old man, the old man who brought me up - I guess I'm thankful that he wasn't able to speak English, but he got around.
Or, to think here because we are now educated, we have taken in the so-called education system of Euro-Canadians or whomever, we are saying this is it. This is how the society is, and this is how we the Mi'kmaq people must go through. It's just like the teaching of Indian day schools and residential schools. If you want to be smart and rich you must speak English. The smart part I went along with - but rich - I haven't gotten that far yet. But the thing is the Catholic, Catholicism that we were taught, you know, told us on one hand that you had to be rich, but you also had to give, you know, what little you had, to everybody but your own neighbour.
I feel that the majority of those have been oppressed. There is not one home in Eskasoni, for example, whereby a child, or even people in my own age group, have not suffered oppression. But we have learned to live with this. The only unfortunate thing about it is that the majority of us would much rather keep our mouths shut than to talk to anybody involved in it. But that's not only in Eskasoni, that's in all of your societies. One of the things that I like best about your society is you tell your kids, 'Don't drink, that's bad for you'. You come home from work and the first thing you do, you go to the fridge and open it and get a can of beer. Now that's how crazy society is, you know. But we accept that, we live in it, and we accept it. The government tells us that alcohol is no good, that cigarettes are no good, but where the hell do they make most of their money again when you're smoking? Now these are some of the thoughts that I believe we must re-think in dealing with the so-called Mi'kmaq of the 21st - if there is such a thing - century. I just feel so hurt when I hear people say that this is what happened. We know what happened,, and we know what happened in your society. We've lived next to non-Indian communities. We learned to live well.
Prior to centralization, Indian communities were self-sufficient. But now even in today's society when you look at it, the government is always saying - like every band across Nova Scotia, anyway - y think they're rich. Everybody is now talking this is the new thing - self-government. Eskasoni is 8.5 million dollars in the red. Chapel Island is 1.3 million dollars in the red. Membertou is 1.2 million dollars. I can go on. And this is what you call 'self-government'. The arguments governments give us is 'Sydney is in the red; the province is in the red, and the federal government is in the red'. I tell people that just because people go out into the lake and jump, I don't go. Would you?
Now this is why I'm saying we must all re-think what the hell is it that we are doing. Why is it that we must have two car garages and three cars, and just to keep up because we are at a certain level in our society? You know, these are some of the things. Once those things are re-thought of by everyone, including me. We have learned politics, and we've learned to use your money. Some of the Mi'kmaq people are rich - not that many within the reservations. But those people are so rich that they have forgotten where the hell they came from, who they are, and what it is they want their children to be. You know, the very first thing that they know when that new ruling came out whereby now Indians will be paying taxes who work off the reserve. That's not new - I worked off the reserve all my life, and I paid taxes. It's no big deal. Our forefathers went to war. You know we've paid our dues. We had land here. Where the hell is it now? You know, this is the kind of thing that I feel that we must try to re-think, and we as Mi'kmaq people are depending on you - the so-called elite, the educated. With that, I will let you continue.
Patrick Johnson: Unfortunately, all that stuff we told the anthropologists had to become the bible of how to treat Mi'kmaq or indigenous people today...looking for reference material, they go back to these people. Wallis and Wallis had a great picture of a Plains Indian, and was going around asking all the Mi'kmaq people in New Brunswick...Big Cove, and in Shubenacadie, "'Is this what a Mi'kmaq person looks like?'"
Then we got Hollywood - ones that painted feathers. Collectively, when they speak about Aboriginal people, they say 'Indians'. They don't say 'Mi'kmaq'...they don't say 'Cree'. It's 'Indian'. Collectively, we're all in one same boat. It's like saying that in Europe there's only Europeans. There's no Czechoslovakia; there's no French, there's no Belgium, there's no Dutch people. They're just Europeans. You know, the Europeans were a nation, but they were also tribes that became nations, and we were also tribes, and we were nations. In our collectivity, everybody is talking about collectivity. I cannot and will not be lumped with all other tribes in Canada. You know - just as I wouldn't want to be lumped with some of the liars that were in our Mi'kmaq nation in the early 1900's. We still lie to anthropologists, and I hate to admit it. (Laughter). Sometimes to linguists. (Much laughter). And sociologists. Anybody that wants to fool around with our minds. I'm not saying, you know, what real untruth is there, but you don't bare your soul to anybody. Somebody talked about souls, and that part that you step on when yyyou walk, and that's the way most Indian people feel - they've been walked on.
Part of it has been fun. I came here in 1983. It was fun coming here, and I'm still having fun. Sometimes it gives me a headache though; listening to all the petty squabbles, and everybody has petty squabbles. Our collectivity was in our family, our family. I talked to Marie, and the first thing you talk about, if you don't know her - who is your father? who is your mother? You know, it was family oriented. Then centralization came - the hell with the families. Divide the families. Everybody seemed to think that they are going to do something good for the Indian, and unfortunately the Indians - in our case are the Mi'kmaq - and we just haven't met them halfway, and with that I pass the feather or the stick. You're stuck in the middle now, Sam...
Sam Migliore: I find a lot of the things that are said interesting because I keep thinking about my own background and my own people, and it's not the same history, but there is a lot of oppression as well. I come from Sicily, and Sicily has been run by every other European country, and now peoples from further East, from the West, from all over North Africa. And the Sicilian people have continued, and one of the ways that, whether we are in Sicily or whether we are in Germany, or whether we are in Canada or Australia - we are everywhere now - is that the family has become the centre of focus.
As long as the family is together - and they don't have to be in the same place - then the people are strong. The last hundred and thirty years we have seen our written language disappear. We have seen the dialect - it's a language but it's called a dialect - placed into a position where any educated person would laugh at someone who spoke the language, and it's only today that the University of Palermo - they've reintroduced the Sicilian language as something that you should study, and I heard today that there is again a movement for independence starting up in Sicily. So I hear many of the things you're saying, and I feel some of those things. It's a very different history, but I guess some of the things that happen to oppressed people bring out the sense of family and the importance of certain things.
Sake'j Henderson: I'm sort of struck by no matter what the actual - I don't like to call it culture anymore, since I've lost a sense of contact with what is called culture, I guess I prefer consciousness a lot better since I'm talking about the cognitive part - is that Sam Migliore wrote and gave me an article of his on Sicilian time, and how people characterized Sicilians in the same way they characterized all the indigenous people about their lack of respect for time, 'bout how we're never on time, always late for meetings - but I was struck when I was reading it that this is a Mediterranean culture, the other side of the world, yet someone has developed a discourse of how to shame us into being like them through this global criticism of indigenous peoples. And we do it to ourselves.
The elders were always telling me when I was young, when we started wearing watches, first it was a luxury, but whenever there was a tough spot, we started looking at our clock as if somehow that would give us some help. And our elders would say, 'You're really abusing that thing you're wearing on your wrist', and you'd say, 'Well, why are we abusing it?' And they'd say, 'Well, [you] don't look at it to see what time it is, you look at it to see where you ought to be'. That's a real bad abuse of time to always look at your watch and say, ' I've got to run because I'm supposed to be here and there'. But we've done that over time. We get criticized for not being the model of education, kindliness, tidy, soldierish, not thinking for ourselves, not expressing our concern with the daily structures, and it's the daily things that are so impressive. It's not the big policies that come out of Ottawa or Washington D.C., or Rome, that says you have to change what you can sort of effectively ignore. It's all these structures of telling my son, 'Well, it's 8:30 and you should go to school because the bus comes at this time'. And he said, 'No, I would rather walk', so we go through this argument whether he should walk to school or catch the bus. But he wants to be himself, and he's really struggling against this unknown enemy that he will struggle with his whole life - of these external school authorities telling him that it's real important just to be there on time even if you don't want to be, because it's good practice for when you've got to be a worker.
And I see it's the daily things we do, shuffling from class to class every hour, seeing how long they'll obey, seeing how long it takes for them to rebel; and Eskasoni has a crazy, crazy system of disciplining because every method they've used to discipline Mi'kmaq children, and mchildren, really fails because they are still forcing them to be somewhere where they would not choose to be except for the fears of their own parents about their future and the fear of your own inadequacy as a parent, that you seem to get some kind of relief by shuffling them along to strangers. And you seem not to have to share this burden, but that burden that you're shuffling on, a lot of things can go wrong in the context because I've never really seen too many children who really enjoyed the educational experience - the regimentation of any culture - and education should be a fun thing. They are filled with mystery and they're filled with many things they want to learn by letting strangers select their curriculum, and keep talking about this mysterious future and how all this regimentation is going to help them, and instead of letting them do what they want.
It bothers me a lot. I think it's the intersection of love and oppression and shame and doubt and fears. I always hated the knowing and the knowing critics in our society, but once we introduce the classroom doors, we introduce them to a world that even those of us who have gone through it and walked in the paths for many, many moons and many winters and summers, really inherently disrespect it. And it really doesn't add up to a sense of dignity of my son or daughters, and I see them each year growing progressively more wearied of the regimentation, and I really don't know what to do with it. But I don't have any solutions for it; I've only thought about it. The years where the shame of not being strong enough to have been able to, I want them with me and giving them some material benefits of working here or there.
Russell Barsh: I think I agree with Sake'j that there is a kind of global discourse of civilization and savagery that we're still struggling with that has never gone away. It's at least as old as the Roman Empire, and probably older, and I think it's still argues in basically the same terms between, ah between power and wealth on the one side and family and love, and between the organization of time and the enjoyment of time, and I love telling the story from the Roman invasion of Britain when the Romans, as they landed on the shores, were met by a whole bunch of Britons, dined, and were wooed, very much like the people in New Guinea meeting the anthropologists 50 or 75 years ago. And the Romans proudly showed the Britons a water clock...to show them how civilized they were - how the Romans were civilized because they controlled time. And the Britons asked them what it was for, and they didn't understand what the point of it was. And the Roman historians noted that this was an indication that the Britons would never go anywhere because they didn't have this sense of the organization and the manipulation of time.
And it has been 2000 years of the same discourse of civilization and savagery, the same attributes assigned as a value system to civilization and savagery, civilization and backwardness, and what maintains it. I remember being at an international seminar on development where some Eastern European economists were talking about how difficult it was for them to build a post-communist, decent, just, economy that was not oppressive. But also not oppressive in the capitalistic sense of generating far greater inequalities between the rich and poor, and growing from a politically oppressive system, and they were saying what can we do.
You know, every Eastern European, every Hungarian, every Czech, every Pole, looks at you bloody Western Europeans with your big cars and your Hollywood and everything else, and this demonstration of that, seeing this, convinces people that this is the unevil - that you people have gotten away with this. And the way the wasters, the wasters and the spoilers always seem to get away with it and create that demonstration effect that creates the discourse of civilization and savagery. Those who can waste, who can accumulate wealth and power always seem to be better off in the short run, and insist upon being viewed as superior by those who don't. It really scares me because it's this tremendous powerful drug on the t.v., in books, in school, in the way children are taught, what you aspire to - the culture of the wasters is the superior culture, and look at the evidence of what it can produce, what it can do.
So I think that one answer, maybe, well, a partial answer to this question of what we can do about what's happening to indigenous peoples' consciousness is we do have to address the consciousness of the wasters. Because indigenous people from the midst of a world of wasters are always going to suffer from that demonstraiton effect. They'll always be struggling to hand on to the children, and they look and they say, 'Why can't I have a big car like everyone else?', even though we really know everyone doesn't have a big car and never will.
The other thing that struck me as I was listening to all of you who have spoken in the last some minutes is the question of recovering history, recovering history- and I see it at two levels. One, a kind of a level of all Aboriginal people, a history of what had happened to Aboriginal societies, and the other is a very individual level of people looking back at their own history and their parents and their grandparents. I think we've had both those kinds of histories stolen from people.
At that bigger level, what Patrick was saying, I mean, Aboriginal people, indigenous peoples have had their histories stolen. It 's like not only does history begin when Europeans arrive in North America, without differences, and without a sense of historical process that, as Patrick was saying, that our North American continent has experienced over the millenium, the struggles of nation building and nation destroying, and the great struggles of whole historical processes, of people coming together and falling apart and building and rebuilding and rebuilding again, through all of their differences as different nations and different peoples, and it was that process in every part of the world that kept bringing out and renewing the ideals that are the best and most important ideals. The ideals of love and freedom and of respect, of dignity - that had to be brought out and fought for over and over again in every part of the world. We're denying the history to Aboriginal people.
It's like everything with Eden - one uniform, homogeneous Eden - until Europeans arrived, and then it became one homogeneous mess. And it's like indigenous peoples are not in control of their own destiny and never were. They just sort of lived in the Garden of Eden and then the serpent came from Europe. But the serpent was always here. The Mi'kmaq [unclear] was for a long time; it was the serpent, and the struggles that were fought for the freedom of different Aboriginal nations to retain their integrity and dignity is what they really were - were struggles that went long before Europeans arrived. The Europeans were just the nastiest and biggest for many thousands of years, but denying that history is in a sense telling people that they are victims of processes that they never have controlled, that they never had - never, ever, had control of their destiny in all the millenia; that they were like animals wandering over the continent. And then Europeans came and created history, but before that people never made choices about their identity, the near future, or had struggles over what was right and what was wrong, until Europeans came and created problems. That's a denial of people's humanity, it seems to me, and at the individual level it seems to me that if we look at what we know about, about oppression and abuse at the strictly individual level - not as part of the assault on the consciousness of the culture - but simply within a family, between parents and children, we live what we know about that kind of oppression and abuse.
One of the few things that does seem to be very important is for children and their parents to be able to talk about the chain of abuse. When the parent can say, 'I understand now that I did this to you because of what my parents did to me. I know now how I have behaved because of my experience' - and now that you know it, you don't have to do it to your children because you can recognize the evil that you're passing from generation to generation. But in order to do that, you confront that kind of history, the evils that are being passed from generation to generation, you have to admit that they are there. Not just that you were oppressed, but that you are communicating the oppression yourself from generation to generation. And you are passing along the symbols of oppression from generation to generaiton, and then we get into these funny things.
You know, it frankly is not as bad here in Cape Breton as in most of the places I have gone in North America. I mean, many places where the people who are called Indian elders are three generations or four generations away from the last person who had a traditional education of any kind, or who spoke one word of their own language - three or four generations away from that. I've been in Indian meetings - excuse me for using that part of the rhetoric to be general, not accuse anyone in particluar - where people have turned to someone who was my age and said, 'You're our elder, what's our traditional way of dealing with this?' And they take it, or they take it out of anthropology books that we're told, by people who lied to them about what was going on, or didn't know, or didn't care what they told them. So what is being passed on, much of what is being passed on - and in this respect Mi'kmaq people here in Cape Breton Island are very lucky because they're not anywhere as bad off as a lot of other folks - what's being passed on is not the old culture, but an accumulation of lies and stories and wounds, but not being addressed like that.
I just want to shut up in a moment, but with one point on this that I find most particularly fascinating and is most interesting for this Mi'kmaq civilization here, and that's with regard to relationships between men and women - that I hear such stories all over the place about traditional gender relationships, such amazing stories! And it's like you can't even adress the fact that a great deal of the rhetoric of gender relationships that is now being treated as traditional knowledge comes from Europeans, and it's not traditional at all. It's part of the wounds. These are wounds that are being carried along, and are part of the passing on from generation to generation of bitterness and anger between men and women, but now being treated as part of traditional culture. And children are now turning to their parents and saying, 'Why do we talk like this?', and parents saying, 'Because of what my parents did to me'. Saying this is tradition, this is Indian, this is coming from our past and not from oppression. Until we can talk about what comes from the oppression, what is being passed along now from generation to generation as part of the oppression, it's impossible for people to stop it; to say, this part of what my parents have given to me is wrong. I reject it. And I have to talk to my parents and say you know that this is part of your pain that you have given to me, and we stop it, because we know this is the pain - this is not our culture. This is not something we want to give our children as an inheritance, but you have to face it, otherwise the pain gets transmitted as if it's culture.
Marie Battiste: I would like to just follow up with some thoughts that that has given me, too, a concern that I have that children need to have something other than what they are getting right now. That they're taken away from their families for a very long time during the day, and they get only a real brief period of time with parents - some will go to bingo, some who watch t.v., some play cards and whatever - but [unclear] in that brief period of time that they are part of and connected to their families, and their culture is going to help them to survive their oppression or to be able to overcome their oppression, or to cement them in skills and values and beliefs that will help them through the period of their life.
And I see that in school, when they are with lots of age group students, there is a lot of abuse among students - how they treat each other. You know how they tear each other down. I mean, they're going to get it anyway, you know, in other places, but they do some terrible things to each other in terms of affecting their minds. And I don't know, I think that for me a lot of the transformation of, through my own oppression and my own pain and my own problems that I have, came at a later time when I was older. Maybe, you know [unclear] - if you have students here at college - are your brightest and sparkiest, and the most creative, and who can work through all the problems because, you know, they have to come to an age of reasoning. I don't know what it is about it, but that there are great things happening, and I see in John Jerome's [Paul] program, for example, in training and education, where they bring back these older students back into the school system and try to give them some skill development, that we see excitement for learning. We see a quest for learning. We see behaviour problems gone.
This program enables the students to foster and develop a continuity with who they are and with their people and with their identity and with their place among them. And that we've got it all wrong to take these little ones and put them into schools and to strip them of all that opportunity that they could have had. But yet we might then give the older ones, or those ones at a place in time that are sparked to creativity and who are interested in all bits of learning and give them the opportunity to help resolve some of the problems that are laying on the shoulders of the kids, or to lay it on the elders who have suffered the pain and agony of their life.
Stepahnie Inglis: The only thing that I wanted to say was that listening to everybody goes back to what our friend was saying, and it always enters my mind because I am a teacher, and that's who is going to be the teacher? And I think, and that strikes me almost every day when I come to work and do what I do. The people that - because I'm often in the student's role - you're just around them and you think these are the sparky ones. These are the bright ones, these are the ones that they're thinking about it, and they're wondering and they're questioning, and they're thinking. And they're really thinking about it - about their life and what's going on, but they're never the ones when you look back into the community that have any teaching in an official role.
And when I look at it, I think someone I would identify as 'that's the teacher', and, 'why isn't that person the teacher'? And I think the other thing I find that I wonder about is, to get that spark - and I think that's what we're talking about - to light that spark, and you see it as I teach as an individual, when a student gets the spark and they come alive and you know they have the type of learning, and that's what we're talking about, how do you spark somebody? How do you spark a nation, or a people, or a community?
So you have two things going on. When I look and see, okay, a student has been, they've got that spark, then you wonder, you wonder and you say that takes time, and it takes a certain type of learning environment, and all of the learning environments, or ninety percent of them that are fed up are so structured. Okay, you're going to take this course, and you're going to become a C.H.R., and you're going to get this, and you know it's going to be in 14 weeks, and you're going to do that. That's not the spark. The spark has to be with the teacher. I have people in class that are saying 'What about this?', and 'What about that?', and I never thought about that, and that's right - and it's not coming from me. It's coming from theminside them. So how do those people become the teachers, with such a thing as [unclear]? All I see is very, very busy women who are asking all the right questions, who are running, running, running, running, running, running - because they're trying to keep it all together. And how can they have time to be teachers?
Richard Mac Kinnon: I guess the fundamental notion of how do you define learning, and in terms of the kinds of forms of learning that we have are not the ones that are condoned within the universities, within school systems, are not the kind of traditional forms of learning which are learning by observing, learning by watching, learning by doing. Those are the kinds of things that I think we have to get back into the school systems that will enable some of the more traditional patterns to survive, and certainly within the university, we are in a system. Why is it that you have to have a class in three 15 minute periods, three times a week? Why? Why not part of it on a six hour session on a weekend, or why do we define these kinds of structures?
It's because of the way in which things have gone in the past, and somebody decided this was a good form of learning. But there are lots of other kinds of forms that we don't stop and think about, and I think certainly in terms of being creative, we could think of a lot of ways to kind of match up with more traditional forms of learning and solve our institutions. I don't think that certainly this university is being very creative despite the fact that we have Mi'kmaq Studies, and we have some other courses which are related. We haven't been very innovative in how we approach the concept of learning.
Stacey Sulewski: Could I have the feather please? Thanks.
Graham Reynolds: As I pass it to you, I just wanted to make a short comment about the system and the fact that I think all of us here have survived in spite of it in terms of education. And I think that for me is the nub of the problem in terms of what we do in the classroom - what we do as an educational system. And I think that's where the oppression is, that's where the separation begins as to where we become fragmented from ourselves and our culture. And I think also that the native American traditions and consciousness really has a whole lot to say and to offer as a way around that. Because I think what Marie is saying about the need to try to retain that sense of family and that sense of wholeness that a child has in the beginning, if we could only just try to maintain that, and create a system where that is the centre, and not the idea of taking a child out of the family, and really just doing a whole sort of number on the brain, separating it out, and making that child fit into a modern conception of the individual that fits into the cogs of industrialized capitalistic society and all that.
Stacey Sulewski: I just want to share an experience that I had last year which again connects us to a lot of things that different people have been saying. Last year I was a graduate student at York University in Toronto, and about a year before I finished, actually a year and a half, myself and two other students, a friend of my Dad's, who is Ojibwa and another friend of mine in Maria who is Mexican, we got ourselves into a project that ended up - well, we thought it would take us six months, but it took us a year and a half.
We were hired by Ryerson University to research a one hour radio segment for a long distance radio course in an upper level gerontology course. The one hour segment was on native people and aging, and it took us a year and a half to complete the project. But I have to say that it was our work on that project that got us through our final year of graduate school. We were all very unhappy because we were going to graduate school, because we were going to this regimented kind of education that just takes away your soul. And what we thought would be something that we would have to deal with turned out to be something that helped us through the year.
In the beginning we were taking the radio technician from Ryerson from open college to the interviews we were conducting and that changed over time. We left the technician home, and we just went to the reserve where we talked with elders, and we turned the tape recorder off and we stopped taking the tape recorder. But it was on the reserve that we lost track of time. And it was on the reserve where we were fed by elders and given tea by elders, and oftentimes we would spend an hour until it got dark and we would have to drive hours back to Toronto. But that was the healing process for us that we looked forward to. And even when we were really sick we would go, and as soon as we would walk in, the elders knew that there was something wrong with us. And I think that our sessions with them - sessions - they were in a way sessions, they saw that we were needing and they helped us through it, through our times of difficulty and discomfort.
I think the whole process of renewal starts with people like me in making myself ready for a different way of thinking, sometimes which can be uncomfortable, and that it's experiences with elders that helps me and makes me ready for a different way of speaking and for a change in consciousness. I notice that people, most people here tonight, have made some reference to elders.
Sake'j Henderson: I would like to go back to a few points. First, part of the pain in the last three centuries or four generations that Aboriginal people have felt have led to a maximization of the value of being tough. No matter which indigenous people you go to, we raise our kids to be tough. We know that they're going to have to face racism, they're going to have to face pain, they're going to have to face the anguish of the things that they were born into. In the process of teaching them to be tough, we teach them to curse, we teach them to resist authority at every level, and we teach them to try to think for themselves by opposing others. I think for the last generation maybe we have gone too far. I don't know how to correct it. I didn't start it. I just know that part of the pain that was passed down through my grandfather to my father, and he passed it down to me, and in different ways I pass it down to my son unconsciously in behaviour without really thinking about it, and I pass it down to my daughters too.
Every day I end up telling my daughter that she's got to be a little less sensitive, so in a way I kind of buffer her from the pain that she'll endure. But we haven't stressed... and the reason we stressed elders is that they were tough enough to endure the pain and the oppression and the poverty. Things that they struggled for, struggled against and through, which have made our lives better. But we don't, in our children and our youth, even in the teenagers, if you can classify them as such, teach them that there is a certain toughness that merges into love and caring and affection - that you have to be really tough to be vulnerable. To not deny the pain - let's try and get closer to it and find out what it is. You can blame it on the external things, but there's something in your soul or your mini- souls in the Mi'kmaq situation that is protecting you, and there's other things that are being violated, and you have to sort of, instead of looking at the textbooks, you have to go into your own soul.
And I think every people have to do this. I think having a library is a form of denial, of teaching people to go search in external books to resolve their pain instead of turning to people they can share a private moment with and explain a little bit of their pain and a little bit of their want and their needs and not their disciplinary or doctrinal masks, but in the mask of human pain. This characteristic of being tough, you know, has its real kind of, if you will, analogy to...; it's helped us survive. That it hasn't helped us actually survive as people or as humans in the same condition, and we can't seem to visualize recreating new elders. We're going to become elders, and it seems like such a long process for everyone until we actually get old and realize that we wasted most of our life one way or another, by being tough.
Aaron Schneider: I think it all comes back down to this incompleteness that is left over that Sake'j was conjuring. Getting back to what Russell was saying at the very beginning, how does someone learn to love themselves again? How do you return the love of people to themselves? - and it is a really tragic thing. You see it in a lot of people, not just North American Aboriginal people, even people in circumstances where they are oppressed by a dominant culture, dominant because it is powerful, more powerful than they are, and it can dictate to them and they become dependent on it. And I don't think that that love of either self or community or on an individual basis or of a people for itself can come from the university, with apologies - ha ha - to the mess that they're in.
When you are looking at an institution that is the epitome of western civilization, the civilization that beggars all other civilizations,, this civilization that dishes out the accolades, and there are a lot of accolades dished out in universities, but there aren't too many victories. And I think that for a person to love himself, you have to have a sense of victory. There has to be something that you can do, something you have overcome, something you have triumphed over - however small - but it has to mean something to you. And I think the same for a people. They need to have some victory over those things that they have to overcome to survive or to empower themselves. And for a people to love himself, they have to somehow find out how to empower themselves again, and you see this throughout history. You see this all over the world, and see examples of attempts to do this.
And sometimes to even fight or struggle is enough, if it is a good fight, or a triumph in itself. Even if in the end it is not equated to a win; the struggle sometimes is the victory. And, there's a funny situation developing here on the island [Cape Breton], and it's one that's very difficult to deal with for a lot of people for various reasons - the business of white people have been accused for a long time of manipulating. Aboriginal people, as allies in a common cause, trying to sort of fight their causes in different ways, using them to form their own agenda, and sometimes this is true and sometimes it isn't true. This situation developing around a very prominent landmark here, and some people have, various people have designs on it. The stretch of land that separates the St. Ann's Bay from the inlet to the Great Bras d'Or. This is really an incredible place. It's a place I spent a lot of time toting a kayak around, and until fairly recently really was quite a desolate, wild stretch, and a place that I always felt somehow was very magical, alarming looking, alarmingly fierce looking place. A place that stood and defied intrusion. I would paddle past this really great, rugged, red granite cliff, and places that really only birds can visit, and as I paddle up further, if it's a good day, you can go out to the islands, Bird Islands, and places that, just their, somehow their invulnerability gives you some sense of the sacred.
Now the Mi'kmaq people - I'm not sure how many of them believe this anymore. There's a lot of them are Catholics now, but I think that basically behind that there is still Mi'kmaq, and that tradition is still there. The anthropological survey crew that came up to look over what was there, that would prove it was sacred, they looked around for petroglyphs, looked for arrow heads, looked for burial sites...They didn't find anything. We stood and watched them back along the road that had already been bulldozed before they got a chance to look in case there was something there that might have had significance for them. But there was a cave. The caves, you know, the caves I guess, they were sacred ...[unclear].
It seems that there's an interesting sort of struggle shaping up here, but you know, and time will tell whether it really takes the form of some sort of identifiable struggle that people can latch onto and make something out of it. But it seems that that should be. If this is the mountain that Glooscap supposedly [is] to return to, that it's a very important place. This should be something that should be an opportunity to some sort of triumph or victory, where they actually stopped them from requiring gravel there or not, but somehow a really good struggle, and could be galvanizing, could be something that people would remember if it was really, if it was sincere - people would really try to win. It seems that the claim on it has all been trivialized as being aesthetic. A lot of people, I mean we can go to these meetings and make lists of 50 odd stipulations and objections and environmental impact and problems that might occur in the environment, but deep down in everybody's hearts that I know of, that's really fighting this thing - figures the mountain is so damn beautiful, it's such a really beautiful place. It's a pristine, unspoiled day, it's - you know, everyone that feels anything about beautiful, natural places knows there's something there that has nothing to do with environmental impact or judgements or documents or scientific studies or anything like that. It's perfect as it is, and it needs something much larger than profits and a few jobs - someone to make working 24 hours a day on a Saturday with seven rock crushers or this kind of stuff. I am getting kind of far afield here, but when I see something like that happening, I know I'm very invested, and it's stupid, because I live not far from there, and it's one of my favorite playgrounds. You know, a place where I can go to just feel like everything is really okay. But it seems that something like that, whether it's the staff or something else, there needs to be some sort of, some sort of triumph. Some sort of a victory that people make for themselves. And it seems that the opportunity comes from something they already have in common, something that's already there, and the ingredients seem to be there.
The favorite parts, you know where the people love themselves because they can do things and feel little victories, of whether they create victory because they love themselves, but somewhere along the line people get off the track. They have been pushed off the track or some disaster happens, and we have to get back there again. And I think that maybe there's a path there towards self-respect and self-esteem, and it's kind of being able to love yourself again for yourself. You stop abusing yourself, abusing each other, abusing your children, and you know, wallowing in all this helplessness. And you can do things again which you know you are able to try, and help with something.
Carol Corbin: I wanted to get back to the "tea" because it started a revolution back up here, and I think that there is some significance to it. I used to think that the idea of who we are is that it is a reflection of what we see around us, and books that tell us who we are. And so we're talking about creating sort of a self esteem within a community. I don't think love was lost between generations of people. I think that symbols of oppression surrounded a people and they saw themselves as less than they were, and I think that, to me, we need to be able to say what "tea" is. Tea, I think it's like high heels, sort of, and that we have to critique, we have to look back and critique these symbols that are symbols of oppression. We may not necessarily need to get rid of them, but understand them, and that gets me into our school year, and I think we can make changes. Why do we use grades? I want to get rid of them. I think that we really have to do it. I'm not sure how. I know we can't just tear it down, but I think we can start by doing more of this with our classes, getting rid of Robert's Rules of Order.
Background laughter.
Patrick Johnson: Yeah, I make a motion that we adopt Sake'j's Rules of Order.
More background laughter
Male Speaker: I think it is disorder.
Patrick Johnson: Only in the eyes of the beholder. Out of chaos comes order. We're not all lost people. Some of us displaced.
Speaking as one of the lost Thirteen Tribes of Jews, I want to go a little bit more to brief...a sense of identity for most individuals has been lost in the turmoil of education. During your very young days, well, in my days, I was depicted as one traveller of the woods, wanderer of the woods. I thought it was romantic.
Female Speaker: Hunter-gatherers.
Patrick Johnson: No, we weren't even hunters or gatherers.
(People interjecting, laughing, and wandering.)
Patrick Johnson: We were just wanderers. We were just lost souls.
(Laughter)
Stacey Sulewski: I think it's interesting that people can see this kind of thing as disorderly. Someone I worked ith at York - she died actually a couple of weeks ago, a wonderful person - she didn't call this kind of thing disorderly. She called it a different kind of living order, and that's the way her life was. She used to leave her grass and her trees grow in her yard, and her neighbours started to complain, and her kids were getting it from all sides. When the kids would go to the neighbours' houses, and they would say, 'Why didn't your mother cut her grass?', and 'Why doesn't she trim her shrubs?', and she sent her kids back out into the neighbourhood with the story that she was a landscape artist and that she liked to take her lawn mower and run it through her grass at angles to make neat shapes.
(Laughter).
Sake'j Henderson: I was thinking today that on one of these snowy nights like this we were having a discussion in Eskasoni as how are we going to create our first generation of Mi'kmaq teachers just for the school. At that time, I think we only had one, since 1978-1979, one Mi'kmaq with maybe one or two teaching degrees, and our object was that since we are taking over the Eskasoni School that we needed Mi'kmaq teachers. And we had contacted UCCB and asked them to help us forge this program on Indian Affairs, and sort of agreed to do it, and they really said they didn't want to get involved, sort of lovely and coldly and unimpressively. Eventually we got the University of New Brunswick to offer a program in Eskasoni to teach and they were ready to sort of get the program going, but we wanted to choose. You know, we wanted to say, well, the most fragile thing about this is to begin. When we have these students, I forget if it was 20 or 25 we wanted. But then the thing that really bothered us was what was the first course we were going to teach them. To have the whole success of the whole program, the whole dream that Alex talked about earlier, taking over education, in the first course being somewhat of a success, it had to have an early context, the right teacher, the right topic, and it was a quandary.
We went through the list of all of the University of New Brunswick faculty, and we could sort of hire whoever we wanted, not that we were paying them a whole lot of money, but we had enough to pay the person. And we went through PEI, and we went through Dalhousie, we looked at UCCB staff, and we looked at Newfoundland faculty, and we looked at everything. When we came down to it, we decided we wanted a certain kind of person with a certain kind of background, and it didn't matter what the discipline was, but we were looking for a soul - an intellectual force of vitality that could provide a spark for teachers, to take this arduous path from being high school graduates, drop-outs, rejects, people who in many cases, like Murdena, have not been to school in 20 years. And she wanted the products of this process.
We had come through that one year 22 students, but 13 made it through, and one won the Governor General's award at the University of New Brunswick for grades. But they all went through as a group, and they all helped each other. But we could envision everything falling apart, and UNB had one version of how we were going to do this, and they had chosen the professor to start it off, and we said no we didn't like it. We didn't like the choice. And we finally chose a professor, and after a little negotiation, and reluctantly, UCCB loaned him to us. And he started off the course with a very innocent paper. It was the - what was the paper? It was the International Covenant of Human Rights, a very simple paper that we chose for him which sparked this whole process. He was younger then. (Much background laughter). He did such a great job of not, well, I guess he transmitted knowledge. I wasn't there in the classroom, but setting up a role model of what a teacher could be, and unfortunately he couldn't follow. We didn't have another Graham [Reynolds] to teach the next course. We got a lot of different variations, but since Graham was first, he was always the model that Mi'kmaq compared every other teacher to, and I don't think we have ever publically thanked him. I would like to thank you, Graham.
Graham Reynolds: Thank you very much.
Sake'j Henderson: It is my pleasure, believe me, because all the other stuff we have here called Mi'kmaq Studies is an overflow of that simple decision, but more concerned with the character or the appearances of the teacher, versus the technique or the discipline. And that was the way we started it, but we haven't been able to go too far; that Murdena is the same kind of model of Graham, she models herself after Graham, as well as elders. but most of these people would have remained housewives. Which is not to belittle them because they are the teachers, whether they like it or not. As Alex used to point out to me, every parent is a teacher, whether they want to be a teacher or not. They ought to take the prime course that most of us, of course, are too busy to do that. The economy won't let us do it, and there's a lot of excuses, but if they would have, we would have lived our lives and lost a whole generation.
They are teachers now, mostly at Eskasoni School, but now they're facing the same impediments that we had when we started, and that's the external forces that control the school at Eskasoni, not to break the mold, and to condense the people who didn't go through the process that you can't create another educational system based on neutral values, or values that you admire and want to build on. That it seems that divinity of these parents, how much they honour their own integrity, the sense that they understand that they are intimately connected to a certain place, be it a beautiful place like Kelly's Mountain or a bog. It's all a form of life that has supported them for centuries and centuries, and they just can't turn their back on it without losing some of their soul. They didn't create the island, but the island has always nourished them for centuries and centuries and generations and generations, and that once anytime as an indigenous people that we fragment ourself from the environment, as Aaron suggests, we do damage to something that should be enriching, and that fragmentation that Graham talks about, the fragmentation that Richard has talked to you about.
Somewhere in there are clues of the systems and also clues to the solutions. I don't have the slightest idea what they are really, because we're still in the descriptive mode - that we know we need a certain kind of person - but we never know how this person gets through graduate school, or doesn't lose their zest for knowledge and doesn't become calloused and doesn't become hardened. We have seen that in our own revolutionary peers of indigenous people who made it through the system that ninety percent who made it through law school for one reason or another believe in the system we are taught, which has nothing to do with us, that we've been perpetuated...
Sometimes we reflect on it privately but most of the times we just ignore it and that's what Marie talks about, how the cognitive imperialism is getting into our minds; compartmentalizing it, making us lose our sense of values, but also giving the sense of great loneliness to 'melon colony' in the head that comes from having two or three voices, ducking their heads, telling you what to do. And we have to make that terrible value choice of what you're going to do and how it impacts on you...
Alex Denny: I think the fun part of having those teachers trained was once they were trained, we wanted to get them employed. You know how a union is until you want to get rid of an employee. Indian Affairs ended up paying those people five years of their salaries for walking the streets so that we can get our own people, our own people. It is unfortunate, but that's, those are some of the facts. The other thing was that teachers came in from what we envisioned as a socioeconomic development package for all of the Mi'kmaq of Nova Scotia and was supposed to have been a 30 year plan. And the first fifteen years would be paid for by the Department and the sixteenth year money would gradually go down. By the thirteenth year we - and give it strongly or rightly - as we would be self sufficient again, and that, you know, once the Department of Indian Affairs saw that 22 out of 25 who started, graduated, and one of them at the top of the class; immediately the Department stopped.
You know, it's the same old thing that I saw when I was growing up when centralization started, when we had what they call a warehouse - a plant in Eskasoni whereby we have a mill. We produce doors and sashes, and we produce coffins, and then a couple of businessmen from town wrote to their politicians, you know, telling them that those Indians are selling products more than we are, and they are not taxpayers. The following year, the funding stops. So you know, things are not changed.
I feel that it is very unfortunate that the so-called socioeconomic development plan did not go through because I think the people who held the purse strings with the department who have a number of years to go before they are retired, I think made sure that the funds for that did not come, and that we did not, that we would be able to finalize our so-called "stupid" dream or whatever you want, you know, something that's going to work. I think we have come to this so-called University College of Cape Breton, we worked so hard with Allan Sullivan at the grass roots stages after it was the St. F.X. Extension Department before we received this university status was the reason why we supported it. UCCB would be for the people of Cape Breton, and we knew the help was tremendous that would be given for our students.
I just felt that the university, that this organization may be alone in this small island in Cape Breton, but it belongs in the union of all the universities in the world. And I just felt that if they have something in Japan that these people can use, they can just go grab it, sooner or faster than I could. But this has not materialized. I don't know, it's maybe the way we are at it is not professional or scientific enough...
Ruth Schneider: I just liked Sake'j's image when he said 'melon colony in the head'. (Much laughter). I think that's what our education finalized us.
Russell Barsh: I think, picking up on that, it is really terribly important to understand that the opression and the terrorism has not stopped, and the most devastating kinds of terrorism that we are dealing with now are the least violent in any obvious way, the least coercive in any obvious way. You have to deal with demonstrations and symbols of power and inconsistency. It's like the East Indian Nationalist Ramadranis [unclear] at the turn of the century, used the image of a monkey on a chain - that every colonized people is like a monkey on a chain. You let the monkey go out a little bit, and then you pull the chain back and choke it. And then you let the monkey go out a little bit and then pull it back and choke it and after a while the monkey just sits there and trembles. Psychologists know about this. They have you know, random, random schedules for rats in a Skinner Box. You know, how something where randomly the bottom of the box is electrified, and the rat never knows where it's coming - just all of a sudden a random schedule - and the rat gets shocked. And after a few runs of this thing, all the rat does is sit in the corner and tremble because the world is not only terrifying, but unpredictable, and what is unpredictable is always bad. You just don't know when it's going to happen, but you know it's going to be bad, and this is what is still being done to Aboriginal people, to the Mi'kmaq people.
It's exactly that. It's still being done. It's being done at every level of the non-Mi'kmaq world interaction with Mi'kmaq people, and I would argue, and I don't know this university too well, but I taught at a university for a while working as the chairman of an Indian Studies program, and I would be willing to bet that that is the way that university is received by Mi'kmaq people. You get a little bit ahead, and then - ah - the chain is yanked, but after a while everybody just trembles. There is no way of knowing what is going to happen, or when, except that you know it's going to be bad. And that is terrorism. I mean, if you do it in a family, if you treat your children like that, they can be awfully mixed up, weird kids, and they sure won't love their parents very much. It's a way of totally brutalizing, totally brutalizing anyone, you know. And it is something which says, 'I'm in control' by whoever has the chain, better than anything else.
That has to be fought. It's not just laws and policies and things like that; it's the bloody inconsistent, arbitrary exercise of power, even to the extent of silly things that are done to students. You know - 'You've got to do this paper this way or I'm going to fail you. I don't like your penmanship, I'm going to fail you. No, that's not a good excuse, I'm going to fail you'. That keeps telling them over and over again 'I got the power, now I'll use it any way I please, thank you'; and that's happening at every level of Mi'kmaq society - that Mi'kmaqs are being treated that way by everyone else, and it's still happening. You can't have that kind of an external environment and expect people to heal themselves, because everyone has internalized like a rat in the Skinner Box, and the minute they step outside the circle, they're going to get shocked again. And it's unconscious; it's not even something people think about anymore. It's built into their nature and passed down from generation to generation, and that's everyone else's responsibility, particularly a university which is not supposed to be an instrument to terrorism. But unfortunately, it frequently is. And the point that Stephanie started exploring about teachers that went around it, that struck a chord with me. Who are the best teachers? Who are the teachers we really want to hang onto, to foster?
We were reading recently a novel by an East Indian writer who used a theme in her novel, Ghandi's maxim, 'My life is my message', and a journalist asked Ghandi at one point what his message was. You know, 'Mahatma, what's your message?'. He said, 'My life is my message. I'm not going to give you ideologies, I'm my message. The way I live, the way I treat people, that's my message. People should live like this if they want to be at peace with themselves'. The reason those 'housewives' - in quote inverted commas - the reason those housewives arree such good teachers is because their lives are their message. The love that they give their children is their message. That makes them good teachers. That's exactly why they're the ones that need to be fostered, but of course, what the problem is, is this very, very tiny, very tiny percentage of the community that has come through whole enough to be able to give that love and to be strong enough to share it with a lot of people, with their children, with their neighbours. It's such a tiny percentage. They're carrying the whole thing on their backs, and then when on top of it, you give them all these crazy, arbitrary rules and university terrorism, you break their backs, and you destroy the seed of what begins the healing process.
Sake'j Henderson: We found out in these dialogues that if you go past 2 hours people suddenly start losing an edge and coming lesser and lesser...(Laughter). I would like to ask anyone who hasn't spoken to say something or say some closing remarks because we all know they've been saving it for the end, and the end is very near. (Much laughter). It's personally a matter of choice. Scott, do you have anything?
Scott Stewart: My thoughts have been pretty fragmented all night. I have thought of a few things. I remember my niece, a two year old, when I graduated. They asked her what I was graduating with and she had a lisp, but she said Doctor of Philosophy, and my sister-in-law said, 'What do they do?'. And my niece said, 'They say,'Why, why, why, why, why, why, why?'. (Much laughter). I felt like that tonight a bit. I've been skeptical of some things, and I don't exactly know how to verbalize them. I know when Russell was just speaking, I was thinking that there's a difference between rules, and applying rules indiscriminately and arbitrarily. The rat in the box isn't necessarily afraid of rules. He's afraid of them being applied arbitrarily. I think that's a big difference. I know as a teacher, and I feel this is a problem in myself. Sometimes with the best of intentions, sometimes just becasue I'm wishy-washy, sometimes because I'm too lazy, I don't apply rules consistently, and I think that creates also problems.
Just to continue from this fragmentary source thing, I remember when we were talking about time earlier, I remember as a child - I think I was probably about 7 or 8, and we had just finished school in June, and I'm sitting on my verandah, or standing on my verandah looking out over sort of a panoramic view including the ball field where I loved to go every day, that I felt this incredible sense of jubilation that, 'Boy, I had time' - when you're seven, two months seems like forever, and I thought that would last forever. Unfortunately it didn't, and I had to go back to school, and I remained there until I was 31. (Much laughter).
One other point - I think we deceive ourselves. We talked a lot tonight about the nature of teaching, and we have been hard on universitites in some ways, which surely they deserve in lots of ways. But in some sense it is a form of elitism and egotism to think that we do more than we do. We meet our students three hours a week, and they come informally to see us sometimes. I was talking to somebody today, a teacher of English, and she was saying that she never had a student actually come and want to talk literature with her. They came because they wanted an extension, or whatever, for a variety of reasons. But we do what we can. This is not an apology for bad teaching, but I know as a grad student, I know as an undergrad, I learned the most in relating with other students, and we have talked about that tonight.
We have an informal teaching mechanism, that, if we're lucky enough, we can invoke, and we shouldn't expect too much in some sense. We should expect a lot more than sometimes we get, but we shouldn't expect too much in formal teaching, teaching methods. I found since I came here, just for what would seem an unrelated reason, inconseqquuential reasons, that this university stuck where it is in the middle of nowhere creates real problems, because I find students - I have the sense that students don't really hang around and just talk with one another. And that's something that I don't know as educators we can do much about unless, I think, we sd just blow up the place and maybe move it somewhere else that would be a better space because this space is incredibly ugly. Well, I'm starting to ramble so I'll pass the floor. (Laughter).
Sake'j Henderson: I think Andrea, Andrea is next on the list as a nonspeaker.
Andrea: Well, I guess one thing that strikes me is I think there is still a grieving process to hang on for Mi'kmaqs in that there is a loss of culture, but what's pitiful about the dominant culture is that we don't have the sense to grieve and we don't even have a culture to be a cushion to society. What we have is a group of individuals that obviously see the need to compete because they have no common bond between each other, and there really is no sense of community among European society, transported to this continent, and that's something that really has been overlooked in this discussion. And I was thinking about people who are fully mixed, people who are shopoholics, people who are trying to grasp at every sort of material good or sort of recreate their physical being, or in some way even religious dogmas, or a way of recreating a self because there's nothing that's shared, that there's actually a strong community base, you know, in most society, and that was just one thing that I was thinking about.
Margaret Migliore: I don't really have a lot to say. I just want to say I agree with Russell that our system of education does tend to brutalize its people, and I also really liked what Graham said, and the optimism that you've displayed. I hope you're right, and I really appreciate hearing that. Other than that, I don't have anything else.
Sake'j Henderson: That brings us back to Peyton.
Peyton Chisholm: I think what I feel what happened this evening is that I have a sense from Mi'kmaq people that I know that there is a real deep-seated consciousness there. I don't know if I could say anything more about that other than I know it's different than the consciousness that I have. I feel lucky that I can touch the fringe of that, and that there is a sense, to me, of a generation of 'we're here for a while and we can make a contribution, but that there are other people coming after us that maybe we don't know yet, but they are very important people, and that our job is to provide a way', and I think what Alex said, too, is that in another 500 years that will there still be any of us here at all of Mi'kmaq, European immigrants, or whatever, and that that might be part of the struggle that is going on now. But there is a consciousness that is different than mine I think I can learn from as well.
Sake'j Henderson: Well, I would like to end it. I would sort of like Marie to give us a Mi'kmaq travelling song because I know the roads are icy. (Laughter)
Marie Battiste: (Drum Beat): Go in snow, go in sleet, go in ice, go in peace.
(Much more laughter).
And so the Dialogue is just beginning... If you have some comments or thoughts you'd like to share, just e-mail us and we'll add your words.
