Putting First Nations back in the textbooks

In recent years, it seems that First Nations are entitled to a little more recognition. Nothing that will erase the blood shed by the colonizers but a greater sensitivity to their presence, their culture and their survival. As much in Canada as in Australia or Brazil, everyone is slowly trying to reach out to the other.

However, we are far from offering all the space they deserve. Whether politically or didactically, their existence remains limited, even sometimes erased.

Hide these peoples from me

We were already showing in 2021 that the place of Canadian First Nations in education was minimal. In a very large part of the school literature, their presence was mostly dehumanized. They were often "inferior peoples civilized by Europeans." They were at best hailed for some of their technologies passed on to the colonists but nothing more.

Textbooks in general make little mention of First Nations. In Australia, as recently as 2017, the majority of history books serving in schools got rid of Aborigines entirely. They featured images of parliamentarians and gold miners mostly. Aborigines were seen as "beings dressing in animal skins" and having little culture.

The situation seems identical in the United States. Their textbooks summarize the issue of America's development of "good guys versus bad guys", Americans fighting against savages who refuse this civilization. Because approaching the subject differently, that is, from the point of view of the First Nations, does not give a nice role to the Europeans. As this University of Manitoba teaching assistant reminds us, incorporating Native people into textbooks means dealing with these difficult topics such as segregation, theft of ancestral lands, residential schools where thousands of children were forced to forget their culture, etc. Public education in British Columbia, for example, was initially funded by the dispossession of land belonging to these indigenous peoples.

So, yes, introducing these nations into textbooks means needing to gloss over what creates discomfort. Complicated for Canadian students to understand the contemporary situation of First Nations without telling them about forced sedentarization, Innu deportations, boarding schools or the Indian Act that is still in force at the time of writing. Some, particularly among conservatives, feel that this means only making whites feel guilty when the goal, as this American professor argues, is instead to provide a window into an entire historical swath obscured by education for decades. So much so that some are not even aware of the cultural richness of these civilizations surveying the land long before the European settlers.

Protecting linguistic heritage through textbooks

So, quietly, initiatives are bringing First Nations issues back into the spotlight in textbooks. Australian Aborigines are reclaiming their place through various educational projects. Today, books about these peoples are found in various libraries and teachers are encouraged to incorporate them into their curriculum. Moreover, First Nations people in North America have developed specialized publishing houses and bookstores in order to share the works written by their compatriots. Gradually, they are also finding their way into popular schools to raise awareness of their culture.

In some cases, textbooks additionally serve to keep endangered languages alive. Often with an oral tradition, some have realized the need to put the language into writing to prevent its disappearance. In Alberta, the Stoney Nakoda Nation published a book explaining their language in order to revitalize it so that the 1,500 students from reservations linked to this people could reclaim it. The Apurinã tribe, living in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon, numbers no more than 10,000 individuals. Their language has been withering away, forced for many decades to learn Portuguese. Thus, Finnish researchers, accompanied by members still mastering the language, developed a manual to safeguard this heritage and teach it to younger generations.

On the French side, the Ikas-Bi project works to defend French-Euskara bilingualism in the Basque Country. Moreover, they produce works in this language in order to revitalize it. Incidentally, the issue of Basque literature is at the heart of concerns to preserve this ancient culture.

Now, the difficulty is to find teachers able to use this knowledge and linguistics. For example, in Bangladesh, hundreds of textbooks have been translated into languages of indigenous peoples. Yet these materials are largely on the shelf for now because few people are in a position to teach them. Even when looking directly in the nations in question, individuals proficient and capable of passing on these skills are virtually non-existent.

This demonstrates the wrongs, unfortunately, of having prevented these peoples from passing this heritage on to subsequent generations. Nevertheless, these initiatives at least have the merit of revitalizing languages and histories on the verge of extinction. Let us hope that current efforts continue and that all benefit from First Nations cultural revitalization.

Photo credit: en.depositphotos.com

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