Module 2, Post 5
About a decade ago (way back during my undergrad years at UBC) I was a special needs worker at an off-campus after school care center. One day a fellow co-worker and I made a wrong turn onto a First-Nations reserve and she commented…”I honestly thought they lived in Tipis, not modern houses!” I wasn’t surprised because I had a few acquaintances and friends who were first nations.
Looking back on that incident and knowing what I now know she said what she did because of the stereotypes that are so entrenched in the dominant society about first-nations. Some may call this ignorance, but I would go further and state that it shows how powerful the dominant society has been in defining aboriginals and first-nations, that even a non-white Canadian would believe the stereotypes.
For my final post on Module 2 (which is late, but better late than never)…I decided to do a little comparison about how the dominant society perceives first-nations and how they represent themselves:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHCGuvE2mbk
I need to look into this a little more because the idea of stereotypes can be terribly reinforced through photographs or broken apart through them.