Provocation #3: The Thinking Behind Creating Your Own Territorial Acknowledgement

Brief

Part 1: Explore the First People’s Map of BC

Part 2: Explore the Native Land Digital Map  and find your locale.

Part 3: What did you notice about these two maps?  Notice your observations about your locale, region and area. Name any connections, discrepancies, wonderings, surprises, or alignments. Review the two maps and think about what it means to create a territorial acknowledgement.

CBC put together an article named, What’s wrong with Land Acknowledgements, and how to make them better. This article highlighted the thoughts, advice, and expectations from five First Nations individuals to debunk the notion that land acknowledgements have become a tokenism and performative task rather than a deeply reflective and immersive experience and process of reconciliation.


Mapping Cultural Histories: Map Comparison

In the First People’s Map of BC, I found that it included information on the language, arts and heritage of each Indigenous group. I found it compelling that the Indigenous regions were layered over a contemporary map showing cities, territories and “Westernized” names of places. This approach made it easier to locate my are and understand the relationship to Indigenous lands, blending with historical and modern geographical references in a way that highlights the present-day identities first and foremost before thinking about the land’s Indigenous history.

When exploring the Native Land Digital Map and locating my area, I was struck by the layers of Indigenous territories, languages and Treaties that intersected with each other.  The biggest difference when it came to locating my area was how much more challenging it was with the Native Land Digital Map, as it presents  the land according to the original territories Indigenous peoples occupied before colonization, offering a distinctly Indigenous perspective. Navigating this map required more effort to locate my area, encouraging a more intentional reflection on land stewardship and my connection (or rather disconnect) to the land. This approach invited me to consider how our contemporary cities relate to their Indigenous histories, creating more awareness of the deeper cultural narratives embedded within the landscapes we inhabit today.

Residential Schools and Impact on Indigenous Languages

With my background in languages and linguistics, I decided to delve deeper into the kinds of information that the map provided about the different Indigenous languages of each region.

While looking through the various languages regions, there are statistics of the total population of each nation, with a count of fluent speakers, semi-speakers and active learners.

Many of the regions had only single digit amount of fluent speakers, and more had none fluent speakers left. I learned that languages are considered “asleep” when there are no first speakers left.

Many sleeping languages do not have fluent speakers at all, and those who are re-learning their first languages are considered “silent speakers”, meaning that they understand their languages, but cannot speak it. Often, these silent speakers are survivors of residential schools whose abilities to speak their first language were “beaten out of them” or lost them when raised in non-native foster families.

Residential schools systematically severed the ties which Indigenous culture is taught and sustained by “killing the Indian in the child” and actively contributes to a general loss of language and culture amongst Indigenous children. In other words, it is a purposeful attempt to eradicate aspects of Indigenous cultures and lifeworlds.

Cultural Continuity Through Language Revitalization Efforts

Languages are vital for passing down a people’s knowledge of their land and way of life. Below is a Youtube video where Khelsilem discusses the importance of preservation and revitalization of Indigenous languages in Canada, as they are crucial for maintaining cultural identity and community well-being for Indigenous communities.

First Voices is a website for communities to share and promote their language, oral culture and linguistic history, promoting linguistic diversity and providing a platform to work with experienced language educators, band councils and language communities to plan language revitalization and preservation programs.

Aligning with Khelsilem’s advocacy for language revitalization through community-driven education and use of technology, efforts towards creating professional audio recordings, physical archives of audio, photos and written sources are being made by younger generations to ensure that their Elder’s voices are preserved.

Land Acknowledgements at Langara College

With my previous position working at the Modern Languages Department at Langara College, I think the following are some potential points that are necessary to incorporate while thinking about Indigenization, decolonization and reconciliation when it comes to land acknowledgements.

Firstly, is to acknowledging the relationship between Langara College and the Musqeam peoples. Langara College is located on the unceded traditional territory of the Musqueam First Nation, and Langara College is honored to receive the Musqueum name snəw̓eyəɬ leləm̓, which means house of teachings.

Secondly, I believe it is important to acknowledge the privileges that we have currently to be able to speak, utilize, and learn about different languages and cultures freely, some with the intention to connect with their cultural heritage, or with the intention to expand their intercultural and linguistics competencies, as this was not the case for Indigenous children who were put into residential schools.

Lastly, in the context of languages offered at Langara College (i.e. Chinese, Japanese, French and Spanish) it is important to consider histories of these languages as tools for colonization; Chinese Mandarin as the language promoted through regional expansion during periods like the Cultural Revolution; Japanese imperialism imposed across East Asia as an effort to assimilate local populations into the Japanese Empire; and French and Spanish spreading through European colonization of the America’s Africa and Asia, often at the cost of Indigenous languages and local minority languages and dialects.

Highlighting the history of colonization shows the power of language policies and role it plays in colonization, while also emphasizing the power of languages as symbols of cultural resilience, making languages a form of resistance and cultural continuity, reclaiming identity and heritage and incorporation of decolonization efforts into language learning.

 

Truth and Reconciliation Reflection

Brief

The project brief was to find a document and explore the portrayals of indigenous and First Nation peoples in your chosen locale, and provide a reflection of how Indigeneity and Indigenous people represented in these documents make up our knowledge and understanding of the history of education.

Preface

Having grown-up and spent most of my adolescent life in Taiwan and its education system, we naturally learned about Taiwanese history and culture in our elementary to high school curriculum. The long history of colonization by Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish and Japanese, as well as the settlement of Chinese immigrants resulted in much tension and conflict amongst the diverse groups of people inhabiting the small island.

It wasn’t until coming to Vancouver and learning more about the Indigenous history and the overall activism surrounding reconciliation did I have the lens to reflect back on the ways I have learnt about Taiwanese history, specifically re-thinking the narrative of the curriculum and portrayals of Indigenous peoples, colonizers and settlers in relation with each other.

Project

The “document” I decided to choose for this project is the Taiwanese 2011 film Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale  directed by Taiwanese director Wei Te-sheng.

This film portrays the historical 1930 Musha Incident (霧社事件) of the Seediq (賽德克)  people against the colonial Japanese forces in response to the long-term oppression. Due to the nature of the subject matter, it does have explicit depictions of violence, forced assimilation policies, dispossession of land and natural resources, armed conflict, etc. which was a reality for many of the indigenous communities under Japanese colonialization.

This film was shown in competition at the 68th Venice International Film Festival. I chose this film as it was seminal in terms of bringing Taiwanese colonial history and “representation” of Indigenous peoples of Taiwan onto the international stage, creating an entry point when it comes to learning and understanding more of history of Taiwan.

Throughout the film, I am constantly confronted with this question:

What are the underlying themes being driven in this narrative and what is assumed of the positionality of that perspective?

As a film involving conflict amongst many different groups — Japanese colonizers, Han Chinese settlers, and the indigenous Seediq people — understanding the historical and cultural context from each group is necessary.

Below is a brief glance at the historical context of Japanese colonial rules and assimilation policies imposed onto the indigenous peoples, including:

Status and categorization – varying degrees of “barbarians” 番 (fan)
    • 生番 (sheng fan) : non-acculturated indigenous people; lived outside of administrative units
    • 化番 (hua fan) : semi-acculturated indigenous people; lived outside administrative units
    • 熟番 (shu fan) : acculturated indigenous people; treated with status en-par with Han Chinese as “natives of Taiwan”
Settler-Aboriginal Boundary 隘勇(yi yong)

The Japanese claimed all unreclaimed forest and mountain land in Taiwan as government property, denying the rights of indigenous people to their property, land and anything on the land. The Japanese colonizers reinforced the “settler-aboriginal boundary”  that further restricted indigenous people’s living space.

Japanization “kominka”  Era (皇民化運動)

After the Musha Incident, many new policies were put into place to control indigenous people and their resources, including assimilation through education, language and prohibition of indigenous cultural practices.


Naturally, the film garnered both praise and criticism. That being said, I believe the controversy is what creates an abundance of topics for critical conversation and discussion.

What are the underlying themes being driven in this narrative and what is assumed of the positionality of that perspective?

This rather broad/general/nebulous question not only generates discussion on the surface-level of media portrayal, historical narrative, but also in a self-referential way in terms of the critic needing to reckon with their own positionality and perspective through the act of critiquing.

As a student back then, we did not have the time nor space in the elementary, middle and high school curriculum to have a deeper and more nuanced understanding of historical events in general, not to mention having in-depth discussion on topics related to indigenous communities at all.

Living in Taiwan, there are traces of colonialism in everyday life. It is ingrained in the architecture, in the transportation system, historical documentation that is available to the rest of the world, and even the educational system itself. There is still a big gap in terms of restorative justice and the overall dissemination of the concept of truth and reconciliation and efforts of  decolonization, and I believe the first step and front lines of this dissemination is starting within the classrooms in education.

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