One of the curators who was sick earlier this week was in today, and she was helping me along with my work to make sure that it fits in with what the gallery wants, as well as being accurate to the themes of indigenous issues without diminishing, or misrepresenting any of them.  This is the same sort of thing I would do with my SA at my High School practicum.  They would get every one of my lesson plans, go over it on their own, before meeting up with me, usually before school, to talk about any issues they saw with the lessons and suggestions for me to move forward with it.  And my “SA” for the gallery was as helpful as my SAs for my practicum in guiding me toward better language, and more useful information to include in the lessons.

Of the several lessons I’ve created, the curator had a few things to say about several of them, and a couple she just outright enjoyed and had no feedback for.  The following are just notes about how she felt the ones needing changes needed to be changed

Storytelling:

Students are to come up with their own story, and to make it more true to indigenous styles of storytelling try and combine truth with the “supernatural” (word choice is iffy here, but she said using supernatural is alright).  This connects the oral history part of indigenous cultures with the idea that their stories were often shrouded in myth and supernatural events, but had truth to them at the same time (Great flood for example)

Indigenous Medicine and Plant Uses:

Take out the medicine uses unless it’s common knowledge.  She found that certain knowledge of plant’s medicinal properties have historically been taken, exploited, and used by large pharmaceutical companies and now that plant that indigenous cultures used to use is now scarce.  She meant that some information needs to stay within the people that know it, and not to be told to everyone.  Worry that certain information can be exploited.

Importance of Cedar:

Make sure to pick ONE term to describe indigenous people.  Found that I constantly switched between calling them First Nations, Indigenous, Aboriginal, etc. and it just gets confusing.  Also need to cite and source the information I pull up as she wants to know where SHE can go and see these stories or sources I’ve used.  In the content make special note about how felling trees, making bark, making canoes, and making baskets and the like were not done by everyone, and that individuals in each group were selected, trained, and shown how to make specific things.  So in a village of 100 people maybe only 10 would possess the knowledge of felling trees, not everyone.  Emphasize the idea that there were knowledge holders who would select specific people to learn their trade.  Try to include the government definition of a Culturally Modified Tree (CMT).  Also talk about the sustainable practices used when harvesting cedar, not just commercial exploitation (for example the use of rhino horn in some east Asian cultures could be sustainable, but they exploited the resource and now theres no more rhinos left).  Also to watch word use, at one point I write how the cedar tree is considered the “life giving tree” to indigenous cultures and I compare this to the idea of a “god” tree.  She just wanted to make sure the word isn’t misused and thrown around in case it offends people.

Traditional Ecological Knowledge:

In the rationale, discuss more about how the cooperation between science and TEK can benefit everyone involved.  Also to source and cite the graph I used.

Indigenous Environmental Sustainability:

Talk about how objects were used for life, and not just made and thrown away (make a bowl, wash it, reuse it, connects to sustainability).  Talk about how fish stocks were managed by catching them in the river rather than the ocean (that way you can see how many fish there are and select how many you can take so as not to harm the population).  Also the sustainable practice of using totem poles to tell stories, and oration to tell stories, rather than books.  Looking at Chapters you see a million trees all sitting on shelves, but a totem stands for all to see and easily read for hundreds of years.

Repatriation of Indigenous Objects:

Need a glossary maybe? In case teachers don’t know certain words.