Indigenous studies in East Van

It’s 2018. Downtown Eastside Vancouver. It’s an Indigenous-focus school, the first (and only) of its kind in Vancouver, and I tutor elementary school kids after school. The school is changing its name from Macdonald Elementary to Xpéy, which means “cedar” in Musqueam. The ministry I volunteer with aims to alleviate the poverty of the Downtown Eastside by helping kids with learning difficulties get back on track.

If I was less worried about the boy being chased through backyards with his uncle by an “old Chinese man with a knife,” I’d spend a moment wondering about the inclusiveness of the word “uncle.” It’s a Tuesday, and an otherwise normal beginning to our tutoring session. The classroom is old and green but naturally lit and spacious enough for our tables to be placed together. The boy – we’ll call him Andrew* – is taking fourth grade classwork. He sits across from me with a marker and a whiteboard, ready to begin the hour of reviewing flashcards and reading small sections of our book. Andrew loves to draw, so when we get a section done, we both draw something he’s interested in. He’s good at it. I’m not. Andrew laughs as he tells me that. Our entire hour – like the one the week before, like the one the week after – has its rhythm, and Andrew never speaks about the knife or the fence or the Chinese man again.

Ecosystems and entries

Andrew is all boldness and all shyness. As tutors we are taught to always respond with kindness and praise, because the children seem to expect to be discouraged, to be shamed. One moment Andrew might be throwing himself into our project, reading lines, pronouncing each letter and battling through difficult words, but the next he might slump his shoulders, arms limp, and look at me with a sigh. I’m the one introducing myself to his learning ecosystem, am I invasive? What am I displacing? I teach English spellings, words, rehearsals of the letter “s” over and over like a visual mantra, Orton-Gillingham as method. Is this the way to words (to Word?) that will help Andrew thrive?

Xpéy is trying to make a way forward that is entirely its own against circumstances that refuse the ways of their ancestors. There’s supposed to be a way for Indigenous people to co-govern their own education, their own ways in the world, without violence. Isn’t that what treaties were for? Against violence. The treaties haven’t exactly worked to make white settlers and Indigenous peoples co-equal as decision-makers about land, education or governance.

Making meaning in the context of state

Present-day, I study at Vancouver School of Theology, where we have an Indigenous Studies element to our theological training. I read, on recommendation of an outdoorsy friend, the works of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. Simpson is a renowned contemporary writer, a Michi-Saagiig Nishnaabeg re-creator, in Indigenous study and thought. She tries to bring to life a new way for Indigenous people to live fully into their identities, writing in As We Have Always Done about the necessity of a reemergence, of creating meaning through living in ways still grounded in tradition, grounded in place, and grounded by creation stories saved from assimilation.

Simpson builds and weaves her politics and epistemology, her knowledge-making and praxis, through Relationship and Land. Meaning is made every day in the actions of the individual centring Indigenous knowledge and practice. She gains her understanding from Indigenous elders who still live with what she calls “Grounded Normativity” – a knowledge directly from relationship to place, communicated over time not by concepts but by relationship and practice.

Simpson names her opposition clearly: Settler colonialism dispossesses Indigenous peoples of their land, employs capitalism (which orders a world on resources instead of relationship), upholds white supremacy, and uses heteropatriarchy to reinforce systems that allow for violence against women. Those who participate with or reconcile with the current Canadian State, which is built on those four processes of opposition to Indigenous well-being, are not welcome in the radical resurgence Simpson is keen to see. Meaning must be made separate of settler colonialism.

“We had the ethics and knowledge within grounded normativity to not develop this system,” Simpson writes about extractivist capitalism in As We Have Always Done, “because to do so would have violated our fundamental values and ethics.”

I can only begin to scratch at the surface of what is meant by aligning with a resurgent indigenous identity. We have a holiday coming up, a day for truth and reconciliation. What does a day instituted by our state, the Canadian State, mean for the well-being of ourselves and of our partners in governance? Simpson suggests it’s meaningless unless it becomes radical, unless it breaks her list of oppressive forces: dispossession, capitalism, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy. Are her goals also my goals?

We all want something more

My goals are, similarly to Simpson’s, complicated: a sense of meaning that requires practice and grounded knowledge every day, a knowledge passed down from my parents (and their parents, and their parents) of the mystery of a Creator God who loves and is in relationship with people, a love of creation, a continual sense of growing and learning, a future hopeful against all odds.
Truth and Reconciliation Day seems like an easy day in September to wind down summer and ease into Autumn. But it’s not an easy Truth, and it’s not an easy Reconciliation.

Andrew’s Auntie came to pick him up from tutoring one afternoon, and sat next to me as we waited for him. She was older and harried but cheerful. She said, “He likes you, you know.” I warmed at the idea, but said nothing. “He’d never say it,” she added, “but he does.” Andrew arrived then, with a small smile and a wave goodbye.

*Name changed for privacy.