Letter to Manishan

Dear Manishan (not real name),

Today we commemorate National Truth and Reconciliation Day, and yesterday you wrote to me because you were worried about failing your sixth grade. I taught you in fifth grade in a small village called Natashquan, six kilometers from yours, Nutashkuan, a distance you covered every morning by bus, when I could walk to work. I now know why you come back to me; I learned it by reading Yvan Illich, outside the university programs. You come back, because no child returns to the teachers who based their teaching on authority.

In your language, the anthem-aimun, katshishkutamatsheutshuap means “school”. In its literal translation, we read rather “house where one learns”. The concept of school, such as it is institutionally enshrined, does not exist, just as that of the house remains to be reviewed according to the colonial history of sedentarization. The root of the word tells us that the place of knowledge is “where we learn”. It is therefore there, in a prospector’s tent, for example, that you learn elements of your culture by observing your surroundings, in a moment of availability to an enchantment as vast as your territory.

When you write to me like this with discouragement, I encourage you to persevere. These are words that we know well – school perseverance – but the truth is that I cannot speak to you in terms of resistance: I am afraid of harming you in this system bigger than the two of us.

I know you feel cramped in a classroom. I saw you at Nabisipi’s cabin running along the seashore, making a boat mast with a piece of drowned wood and a plastic bag, not being accountable. At school, there are a lot of rules that belong to white culture, and you sometimes find them random. You may think, as An Antane Kapesh said in 1976, that if the non-natives were in turn to follow the workings of the Aboriginals, no doubt “that they would not understand anything and perhaps well they could not. not comply ”.

The closure of the boarding school in Sept-Îles, which you know from your grandparents’ story, gave way to provincial public schools and, “a few years later, we did not even realize that we were transferring [les enfants] to the school board, ”she also quickly observed. Every day, the legacy of residential schools continues to affect new generations in this neocolonial system that shapes Quebec schools.

In its structures, the progression of learning (PDA) is not considered for children whose mother tongue is other than French, even if, it should be remembered, Innu-aimun is a local language. Aboriginal children are therefore overrepresented in what bureaucrats define as “learning difficulties and the need for intervention plans”. This feeling of humiliation felt by a child when he accumulates failures creates deep roots that directly affect self-esteem. All the more so since parents have unwavering confidence in a system supposed to renew equal opportunities, but it is clear that this quest for a diploma, which is linked to the student’s personal value, only redistributes divisions more increased still.

I don’t know if you remember, Manishan, but you told me about the different treatment that native children received from non-native children, in addition to this inability to identify with the books in the library or with the history of the settlers of New France. It is indeed Quebec that was built in your country, to use the words of Emmanuelle Dufour. The Aboriginals remain in the blind spot of the Quebec public school, which becomes, for many, an invitation to submit and, for some, an invitation to drop out.

For the moment, the school is considerably detrimental to education, as it obstructs the possibilities of children with a compulsory curriculum and exams that discriminate against those who are immediately disadvantaged compared to the mainstream culture. I would like to experience, one day, as a teacher, what it really means to learn from a creative perspective when the students in the classroom are equal in wonder. Because the teacher’s role is to create a vacuum in him to welcome the other and to offer him the tools to grasp the surrounding world, in complete cultural safety.

Manishan, do you remember when we discovered poetry together? With a constraint of only five words, in French and in Innu-aimun, you had succeeded in creating sublime verses. When you reread it, you didn’t ask if you were spending your year. You simply existed.

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