Sienna Warecki
September 22, 2014
How do I even begin to write down the personal reflection that has taken place in this class?
Let’s begin with a secret: sometimes I worry I seem too emotionally invested in class, with how I respond to information and activities. I laugh aloud at jokes and stories and I come close to having anxiety attacks on behalf of a people who have been so systematically defaced. It is typically not the done thing to relate so closely to the material being studied in a university class, and I wonder whether I am bothersome to the rest of my peers with my loud feelings. But then I remember this is what you are searching for in the first place: an emotional connection, a real link between us students and the Aboriginal people as fellow living beings, and then I know my level of investment is exactly where it needs to be for me to truly soak in the things you are teaching us.
I thought a lot about the Shut-Eye Dance story and the Residential School Activity, and the destruction of community that they illustrated. From the removal of the traditional leaders to the removal of the Bundle, from the outrageous rules about what made a person Aboriginal versus “civilized” to the removal of eighty percent of the children—it has left me with deep-seated unease, knowing that these injustices were perpetrated at all, and also with desperate disbelief that they are still being perpetrated today.
Not being allowed to take comfort in your own culture and tradition is not something I have experienced personally, but something I can nonetheless empathize with. I am a writer, and in one of my stories there is a character who is imprisoned for a long, long time; when he finally breaks free, all the rest of his people are gone, and they have taken their culture and tradition and knowledge with them. The rest of the world is oblivious they ever existed, and he himself has been shut away so long that even he cannot perfectly recall the traditions of his people, and it is agony. To this day I don’t know why I decided I needed to write a character like that, but nonetheless, I think this class is going to help me fully understand what the loss of a culture (and cultural identity) does to a person, and make me able to write him more accurately. And more relevantly, too, because the reason why this fictitious character of mine is important in this context is because I understand things through myths and stories just like anyone else, and being able to accurately represent this atrocity in fiction will help me (and hopefully others) to understand that the same atrocity happens in the real world, right here, right now.
I came into LIN3616 knowing a little more about the Aboriginal ethnocide than the average non-Aboriginal person my age, but even then I was not prepared for the things I was unaware of, or for the howling sense of unfairness they have imparted to me. I am glad you reminded us that the issue of decolonization and reclaiming Aboriginal language and culture is not about guilt, because I feel sorely ashamed of my ancestors—even if my own family immigrated from Eastern Europe around the World Wars and had “nothing to do” with the oppression of Aboriginal peoples, they and I are still non-Aboriginal people and thus part of the Kaswenta Wampum contract. We have a responsibility to help fulfill that contract, starting now, and I intend to do so.
And it may not be easy: if the Residential School Activity showed us what happens when a community is shattered, then the Shut-Eye Dance showed us the cost of trying to speak out against it. Sometimes in order to see things for what they are, to set them right, you will have to face dismissal and stigmatization. I hope we as a society are past that. But if that is what it takes to begin the process of decolonization, I will wear my red eyes proudly.
September 22, 2014
How do I even begin to write down the personal reflection that has taken place in this class?
Let’s begin with a secret: sometimes I worry I seem too emotionally invested in class, with how I respond to information and activities. I laugh aloud at jokes and stories and I come close to having anxiety attacks on behalf of a people who have been so systematically defaced. It is typically not the done thing to relate so closely to the material being studied in a university class, and I wonder whether I am bothersome to the rest of my peers with my loud feelings. But then I remember this is what you are searching for in the first place: an emotional connection, a real link between us students and the Aboriginal people as fellow living beings, and then I know my level of investment is exactly where it needs to be for me to truly soak in the things you are teaching us.
I thought a lot about the Shut-Eye Dance story and the Residential School Activity, and the destruction of community that they illustrated. From the removal of the traditional leaders to the removal of the Bundle, from the outrageous rules about what made a person Aboriginal versus “civilized” to the removal of eighty percent of the children—it has left me with deep-seated unease, knowing that these injustices were perpetrated at all, and also with desperate disbelief that they are still being perpetrated today.
Not being allowed to take comfort in your own culture and tradition is not something I have experienced personally, but something I can nonetheless empathize with. I am a writer, and in one of my stories there is a character who is imprisoned for a long, long time; when he finally breaks free, all the rest of his people are gone, and they have taken their culture and tradition and knowledge with them. The rest of the world is oblivious they ever existed, and he himself has been shut away so long that even he cannot perfectly recall the traditions of his people, and it is agony. To this day I don’t know why I decided I needed to write a character like that, but nonetheless, I think this class is going to help me fully understand what the loss of a culture (and cultural identity) does to a person, and make me able to write him more accurately. And more relevantly, too, because the reason why this fictitious character of mine is important in this context is because I understand things through myths and stories just like anyone else, and being able to accurately represent this atrocity in fiction will help me (and hopefully others) to understand that the same atrocity happens in the real world, right here, right now.
I came into LIN3616 knowing a little more about the Aboriginal ethnocide than the average non-Aboriginal person my age, but even then I was not prepared for the things I was unaware of, or for the howling sense of unfairness they have imparted to me. I am glad you reminded us that the issue of decolonization and reclaiming Aboriginal language and culture is not about guilt, because I feel sorely ashamed of my ancestors—even if my own family immigrated from Eastern Europe around the World Wars and had “nothing to do” with the oppression of Aboriginal peoples, they and I are still non-Aboriginal people and thus part of the Kaswenta Wampum contract. We have a responsibility to help fulfill that contract, starting now, and I intend to do so.
And it may not be easy: if the Residential School Activity showed us what happens when a community is shattered, then the Shut-Eye Dance showed us the cost of trying to speak out against it. Sometimes in order to see things for what they are, to set them right, you will have to face dismissal and stigmatization. I hope we as a society are past that. But if that is what it takes to begin the process of decolonization, I will wear my red eyes proudly.