Mancini, R. (2007). Telling their stories. Education Forum, 33(2), 15-17.

“Take [this] story. It’s yours. Do with it what you will. Tell it to friends. Turn it into a television movie. Forget it. But don’t say in the years to come that you would have lived your life differently if only you had heard this story. You’ve heard it now.”  -Thomas King

This article opens with King’s thought-provoking quotation. The meaning that I take from it is that there is power and responsibility in sharing stories, in being a storyteller or an audience.

Mancini then quotes startling statistics about violence against Indigenous women in Canada, including the fact that, in the last decade, more than 500 Indigenous women have gone missing in Canada, and that Indigenous women are “eight times more likely [than their non-Indigenous counterparts] to be killed by their spouses after separating, to be forced into a life of drugs and prostitution, or to contract HIV” (15). These statistics are particularly relevant to me, as my students are all female, but they should be repugnant to all. The article then offers the stories of women who have been traumatized by the colonial government, through loss of status, residential schools, and other horrors. Although the article isn’t specifically about education, it relates to the idea of culturally responsive schooling:

“Kerrie and Sara were educated in systems where not one of their teachers looked like them or taught in a manner that was culturally like their own. In class they were often asked to provide the “Indian” opinion, as if they could speak for all Indigenous peoples… Janie struggled within the mainstream education system. She didn’t see how the knowledge she gained there related to her daily life. Her classes were not taught in her native tongue, and the traditional ways of her people were “add-ons” to course curriculum” (16).

What will the audience do, since they’ve heard these stories now?