“Roots”

As I review “where I am” in my teaching focus, a story emerges from my recent past.  Teaching in a small rural town of Lumby for two years, I came away with an interesting experience with one of my male colleagues.  He pulled me aside one day and said, “you know, Deanna.  I think you’re a great teacher.  But you teach too much about Indigenous ways.”  He went on to tell me about how he worked hard for everything he had and wasn’t handed anything in life.  I was left wondering if he will ever see his privilege as a white, male, growing up in an affluent area.  It did not change my course of teaching, in fact, it strengthened my pursuit.

As I read Aoki’s and Thom’s chapters, my own privilege has just dawned on me.  Actually, it kind of struck me as I read your words, “In deep ways these peoples and their (hi)stories touch and impress upon my own [(Japanese)(Chinese)(Canadian)] being and becoming.” (Thom, 2024, p. 4)  Suddenly I recognize that I know my roots, that I know my family history, that I feel embedded in them.  I am privileged to have had this experience to shape me into the person I am today. I don’t question my roots.  They are me.  The Japanese-Canadians had to fight to know themselves, to become.

As Thom describes this familiarity in these stories we hear, I recognize similarities between the Canadian government’s treatment of Indigenous peoples and Japanese-Canadians.  They not only stripped the Japanese of their homes and their belongings, but they stripped them of their identity as Canadian’s.  The government fingerprinted them, imprisoned them and treated them as criminals.  Through these stories, comes the repetition of loss, identity-struggles, voids, irreparable damage to a people and a culture.  Hearing the way the Cumberland people are committed to telling their stories makes me recognize there is room for another word here: Courage.  Courage of the people who are reliving their trauma to share their family history, and speaking the truth.  

The courage of the Japenese-Canadians in Cumberland is profound to me.  One of the Acts of Reconciliation for our Indigenous people of Canada is to not forget their past, and to speak the names of the survivors of Residential Schools.  In Cumberland, the act of creating a museum, sharing photos, names, family trees, stories and history with the future generations, is an act of courage and healing.  The people who suffered are not forgotten when we say their names.

I had a moment of epiphany when Douglas Aoki was walking through the trees they planted to commemorate the loss of a community in Cumberland.  He said, “You still have that living tree there.  To have that literally living connection with all sorts of people, that was extraordinary for me.” (STORYHIVE, 2019)  He even picks an apple from one of the trees and holds it, like it were gold.  

The trees are living.  Their stories are living.  

Reference List:

STORYHIVE (Director). (2019, July 15). Hayashi Studio. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSTkdp9M18s

Thom. (2023). Understanding curriculum amidst doing curriculum research.