Learning to Listen #15 - When I Was Eight

 This week I read "When I Was Eight" by Christy Jordan-Fenton and Margaret Pokiak-Fenton. This picture book is Margaret's story of coming to a residential school in a desperate search to learn how to read. Her triumph is the direct result of a resolve like none other, and she is the victor despite the educators who try to beat her back.

Stories like these break my heart a someone who has been a teacher my entire adult life. That anyone could hold someone's education hostage, that anyone might believe it is a power only for some, that anyone might think they have the right to bestow or deny as they wish - these are the very worst poisons in our society. We are only beginning to purge the scourge, and we have so very far to go.

It was the very first paragraph, though, that stayed with me all week. Margaret write about all the things she knew when she was eight - sled dogs and caribou and the sun cycle and fur trading. She knew. She knew. She had knowledge at eight that I don't have now as an adult. In my search for understanding, perhaps my greatest enlightenment is that the white centering of importance is an ignorance that must be dug out from deep in ourselves. White people have decided what knowledge is worth learning. They have defined what it is to be educated. They have decided what family should look like and what foods and customs are better than others. White people have placed themselves at the top of the pyramid, and while we might tolerate difference there is no doubt that we have still placed it in a hierarchy. Consciously and unconsciously we look down on different from the top of the pyramid and rate it in terms of its closeness to whiteness, or its value in its exoticness, but never do we embrace it as equal.

I find as I walk through my days now, I open my eyes to the multicultural tapestry around me. I listen to a different lilt in the English language and I will myself not to hear "broken" English but instead a beautiful variation. I see the shift of a colourful fabric draped in an unfamiliar style and I wonder at the feel and freedom it might give. I smell a new spice and wonder at the hands preparing the dish and the comfort it gives of home, and marvel at the thousand flavours that dot the earth.

It is a conscious shift in thought - like the practice of gratitude when we must will ourselves to think each morning of what blessings we have, big or small. This practice is willful right now, but I hope as I continue that my mind will gradually adopt this new way of thinking.

In the author's words:

"I knew many things when I was eight. I knew how to keep the sled dogs quiet while Father snuck up on caribou, and to bring the team to him after a kill. I knew the sun slept in the winter and woke in the summer. And I knew that when the sun-warmed Arctic Ocean shrugged off its slumbering ice, we would cross it to trade furs with the outsiders."

"I pulled the handle. It was locked. A scream built in my chest, but I held it in. I closed my eyes, pulled up my stockings, and breathed deeply, until I could feel my father's presence. He wrapped his arms around me in the darkness and I spelled out my Inuit name to him, whispering, O-L-E-M-A-U-N. His proud smile made me stronger, so I worked through the name of my distant home, B-A-N-K-S- I-S-L-A-N-D.

"I felt a great happiness inside that I dared not show. I quietly took my seat. I was Olemaun, conqueror of evil, reader of books. I was a girl who traveled to a strange and faraway land to stand against a tyrant, like Alice. And like Alice, I was brave, clever, and as unyielding as the strong stone that sharpens an ulu. I finally knew this, like I knew many things, because now I could read."