Category Archives: Module 1

Module 1 – Post 5: Taiwan’s Indigenous Peoples

Each year my school hosts International Week, during which the school’s international nature is celebrated. Flags from each country represented at the school are hung along the school walkway, special guests come to classes to share their culture, the PTA hosts a whole range of activities (games from around the world, story telling from around the world, dancing from around the world), and the highlight is always the international lunch we share together! Without a doubt, International Week is the highlight of the year for most students, parents and teachers.

It was during International Week in my first year here that I first became aware of Taiwan’s Indigenous Peoples. I was quite surprised on national dress day to see so many Taiwanese students wearing Indigenous dress. It was really interesting to see the Taiwan exhibit put on by parents where the majority of the posters/images were of modern, Chinese Taiwan while the dress worn by the parents and the games offered for students to play were all Indigenous.

As I read more about Taiwan’s Indigenous peoples I am disheartened to learn that they are often viewed as ‘second-class citizens.’ It made me feel that this is a rather archaic/colonialist perspective and one that I had hoped was no longer present in the world. Seeing the ways in which Western countries are working towards improved relationships with and respect for Indigenous cultures, it saddens and concerns me to know that there are countries that are not moving forward and working to improve the rights of Indigenous peoples.

I am curious now as to different countries and the rights of Indigenous peoples and how Indigenous peoples are viewed, but am also a little reluctant to find out more as I fear things may not be moving in a forward, positive direction. Regardless, it is very interesting to consider Indigenous cultures outside of North America as I know so little about these peoples.

Entry 4: Videos on identity

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The titles below offer links to two Youtube videos on identity.

The first video, Recognizing Aboriginal Language & Identity, is developed by the Human Early Learning Partnership Aboriginal Steering Committee in 2013. Speakers from various Indegenious groups promote the importance of language, culture and self identity among the youth. There is a certain respect, honour, pride and identity that comes with knowing who you are and where you come from.

The second video, The Threat of a Loss of Cultural Identity, is developed by Discovery Education in 2010. Dr. David Suzuki narrates a brief documentary on the loss of an Inuit culture . Alienation, suicide, drinking and confusion over identity are all threats to the way of life in Pangnirtung.

Module 1:2 – Going Places

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Going Places: Preparing Inuit high school students for their future in a changing, wider world

This video describes the hopes and challenges of bicultural, bilingual high school education in two Nunavut communities, Clyde River and Pangnirtung. Interviews with students, school administrators, parents and other community members encourage students to stay in school, to have hope for the future. Inuit leadership in the education system recognize the importance of deep connections and relationships with culture and community, yet they also express a desire that their children’s education be “on par with the rest of the world” – an education that will set them up to live anywhere, to succeed wherever they choose, and even to be Prime Minister one day. The challenge for students to maintain a positive outlook in the face of so many suicides of friend and family is discussed.

Naively, I was struck by the use of the word “bicultural” to describe how students are learning about their Inuit culture and the culture of the Canadian South. Upon reflection, I think that I have subsumed Inuit and Aboriginal cultures (in my mind) as part of the wider Canadian culture, when really they are distinct and stand alone.

Entry 3: Culture and Closing the gap

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The Australian Governemnet offers programs that help to foster a “strong cultural identity [which] is fundamental to Indigenous health and social and emotional wellbeing.” This article highlights the initatives “strengthen Indigenous culture and languages.”

” Closing the Gap, which is a commitment by all Australian governments to work together to improve the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, and in particular, to provide a better future for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children.”

By strengthening the Indegenious culture and language, the government is woking towards reducing the disadvantage of the Indegenious people. Targeted areas include early childhood, health, schooling, economics, self governance and community.

This article indicates the many positive benefits that are associated with Indegenious people who know and are involved with their language and culture.

http://arts.gov.au/culture-and-closing-the-gap

Entry 2: Technology and Identity

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In Technology & Identity : Is rapidly accelerating technology eroding our sense of who we are?, Barbara Molony of Santa Clara University reports on a disucssion by three panelists about our identity and culture in relation to our use and dependence on technology. Questions such as,, “Is our identity as a society eroding because we are unclear about the survival of our cultural legacy?,” help clarify the impact of technology on our individual identity and community identity. The potential of the Internet’s influence on our identities can have both a positive and negative impact.

The globalization of information allows for an openness of ideas, and a feeling of being connected. Yet, the internet can also lead “American ethnic communities to vanish and that online communities often result in a narrowing of focus,” as people are less connected emotionally. Although the internet can “help us forge old-fashioned connectedness in a seemingly disconnected, modernizing world,”

One panelist, John Staudenmaier (Professor of History, University of Detroit, Mercy), “felt that we all need “offline time” to find our identity, and suggested we consider fasting from the Internet one night per week.”

http://www.scu.edu/sts/nexus/summer2001/MolonyArticle.cfm

Entry 1: Is technology stealing our identity?

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Psychology Today offers an insigthful look at how technology may be ‘ shaping our identities in ways in which most of us aren’t the least bit aware.” Jim Taylor indicates that present self-identity is altered and shaped by popular culture, making it more difficult to develop and understand who we really are. In other words, technology is creating the new you and me.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-power-prime/201107/technology-is-technology-stealing-our-self-identities

Module 1:1 – Anomie

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The article “Coyote and Raven put the ‘Digital’ in Technology – Hands Up and Down to Earth” by Peter Cole and Pat O’Riley sent me on many cyber-journeys. One of them was to discover the meaning of “anomie” – a new word for me.

but Coyote we desire things because we lack as my old friend Jacques Lacan (2007) used to say the stuff is filler because we are empty we have a lack of being if you’re lonely or sad or suffering from anomie you buy you consume (Cole & O’Riley, 2012)

According to the OED Online it means:

“Absence of accepted social standards or values; the state or condition of an individual or society lacking such standards.”

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica Online it means:

in societies or individuals, a condition of instability resulting from a breakdown of standards and values or from a lack of purpose or ideals.

The Encyclopedia continues to describe the term:

The term was introduced by the French sociologist Émile Durkheim in his study of suicide. He believed that one type of suicide (anomic) resulted from the breakdown of the social standards necessary for regulating behaviour. When a social system is in a state of anomie, common values and common meanings are no longer understood or accepted, and new values and meanings have not developed. According to Durkheim, such a society produces, in many of its members, psychological states characterized by a sense of futility, lack of purpose, and emotional emptiness and despair. Striving is considered useless, because there is no accepted definition of what is desirable.

Of course, this made me think of the high suicide rates among indigenous people in Canada. (See Suicide Among Aboriginal People in Canada). So I began to look for more information about Durkheim, who is also new to me (having never studied sociology).

Summaries of Durkheim’s four major treatises are available on the website The Durkheim Pages http://durkheim.uchicago.edu/ where I read about Durkheim’s belief in the importance of society as something that regulates and constrains human behaviour, and…

“… when society is disturbed by some crisis, its “scale” is altered and its members are “reclassified” accordingly; in the ensuing period of dis-equilibrium, society is temporarily incapable of exercising its regulative function, and the lack of constraints imposed on human aspirations makes happiness impossible. This explains why periods of economic disaster, like those of sudden prosperity, are accompanied by an increase the number of suicides, and also why countries long immersed in poverty have enjoyed a relative immunity to self-inflicted death. Durkheim used the term anomie to describe this temporary condition of social deregulation, and anomic suicide to describe the resulting type of self-inflicted death.”

[From The Durkheim Pages/Suicide which is itself an excerpt from Robert Alun Jones. Emile Durkheim: An Introduction to Four Major Works. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, Inc., 1986. pp. 82-114.]

Looking for a modern interpretation of Durkheim, I found a chapter in a 2008 book by Diane Harriford and Becky Thompson: “Emile Durkheim and embodiment in the age of the Internet” (in When the Center is on Fire: Passionate Social Theory for Our Times, available as a full text ebook from UBC Library). In this chapter the authors take a new look at the sociologist’s ideas about social norms and social order in the context of the Columbine high school shootings. Although they reject many of his ideas (about women, about primitive societies) they are compelled to take a fresh look about his ideas about social integration and social order, and how the Internet may be contributing to social dis-integration and social dis-order:

The Internet is virtual fantasy and virtual freedom, a space with virtually no rules. After the Columbine murders, however, we found ourselves asking, might this be a new form of anomie—a lack of social control and a condition of normlessness where there is little or no sense of authority or moral guidance. (Harriford & Thompson, 2008, p. 173)

Cole, P., & O’Riley, P. (2012). Coyote and Raven put the “ Digital ” in Technology – Hands Up and Down to Earth. Transnational Curriculum Inquiry, 9(2).

Harriford, D., & Thompson, B. (2008). Emile Durkheim and embodiment in the age of the Internet. In When the Center Is on Fire: Passionate Social Theory for Our Times (pp. 155–177). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Mod 1:4 Wapos Bay

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Wapos Bay is a children’s television show that is set in a reserve community in Northern Saskatchewan. It features three Cree children who are learning to balance old tradition with modern life. The children are guided by their elders, their extended family and their curiosity for the world. The children learn through experiences and stories about courage, honesty, and other important values. The show is broadcast on APTN, SCN and can be streamed online through WaposBay.com .

Even in Northern communities in Saskatchewan there are many trappings of modern life and families in these communities today are learning how to embrace the new without forgetting the old. Wapos Bay is a television series with a gentle yet effective way of reminding us of the importance of tradition with the use of technology.

Native Americans: Culture, Identity, and the Criminal Justice System

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Historically, the fate of American Indians has been in the hands of others: politicians, the military, and varying justice jurisdictions at the federal, state, and local levels. Simultaneously, Native Peoples’ success was dependent upon functioning in a European-based sociocultural environment that was diametrically opposed to their own social and cultural foundations. The entry reviews the experience of the Native Peoples and the adaptations they have had to make in order to survive. It also examines their perception of and relationship to the U.S. criminal justice system.

It examines the history in four main categories:

First Contact and Conflict
Paternalism and Dependence
Allotment and Assimilation
Indian Rights and Movement toward Self-Determination

There is a good statement made in regards to something referred as “discovery doctrine”: The idea of Europeans justifying their dispossession and domination of Native Peoples. This doctrine was the guiding practice of dominant culture with Native Peoples and took the form of institutionalized superiority of Europeans over Native Peoples.

The entry focuses on the United states but much of the article could be applied to Canada and its relations with First Nations people. For over 200 years, the government has attempted to destroy Native societies and their justice systems. Ironically, Native methods of resolving conflict are now of interest to members of the dominant culture who want to update their courts by integrating the concept of restorative justice into their own legal system.

I find it hopeful and interesting that there can be a class such as this one today that attempts to study reflect and learn from Aboriginal culture and ideas. Some people I know feel it is “too little, too late” to make a change but I don’t think it is ever too late to change the opinions and attitudes toward Aboriginal culture.

Source:

Love, S. (2009). Native Americans: Culture, identity, and the criminal justice system. In H. Greene, & S. Gabbidon (Eds.), Encyclopedia of race and crime. (pp. 586-590). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc. doi: 10.4135/9781412971928.n236

Module #1-5: Australia

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According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, there were 176,057 school students in Australia who had identified as Aboriginal at their time of enrolment in 2012. This represents an increase of 7,254 (4.3%) over the corresponding figure for 2011. These students now make up almost 5% of all school students. This figure is only for primary and secondary schools and does not take into account higher education, but I assume the number of Indigenous students enrolled in higher education should be increasing accordingly. Since indigenous communities are often located in remote areas, distance education will be key to providing a proper level of education and training for them.

In Australia, the Queensland Government formed the Indigenous Lead Centre in 2006 to ensure Indigenous peoples have access to culturally appropriate and relevant courses including distance education, course materials, and training products that enable them to fulfill their professional and personal aspirations. The Indigenous Lead Centre has also developed a variety of user-friendly e-learning resources; Internet technology like this could definitely help support students and job seekers in remote communities. However, infrastructure is the big issue among Indigenous communities and peoples. According to this article published in 2011, only 6% of residents in some remote Indigenous communities in Australia had a computer, while 80% of Australians access the Internet regularly—in some communities, as few as 2% of residents had an Internet connection. In 2011, the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network (ACCAN) started a project called Home Internet for Remote Indigenous Communities to assess the reasons for low internet take-up and use by people living in remote Indigenous communities, determine the needs of remote Indigenous communities with regard to home Internet use, and provide advice through empirical research.

Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education in Northern Territory, an educational institution for the tertiary education of Indigenous people of Australia, opened a new e-Learning and Research Building in 2008. This was a $2.86 million project funded by the Federal Government. Internet technology must be effectively employed to provide quality education and training to Indigenous peoples. Creating Internet access requires stable infrastructure, and an Internet development budget funding is essential to making the project come to life. It is not an easy process!