What seemed like a very long week went by a lot faster than it seemed.  I now only have one more week at the gallery to get everything in order, and then subsequently present what I’ve accomplished here to the gallery staff.  It feels like yesterday was my first day and I was terrified about what I was meant to do, whether I could do it or not, and whether I would accidentally create something that was ignorant of indigenous cultures and essentially fail my CFE placement.  However, now I feel much more on top of things, I’ve discussed my problems with gallery staff, worked together with the curators, and done a heck of a lot of research into indigenous issues to feel a lot better about my job here as an education program supervisor?  I’m not sure what my title would be but that sounds official.

What I learned this week was due mostly to the few documentaries I watched about indigenous issues to help with my content in the lessons I’m making.  One of them, “Stolen Spirits of Haida Gwaii”, is about the repatriation process that many indigenous groups are undergoing with museums and galleries in order to get back much of the material that was stolen from them over the last couple of hundred years.  Basically anthropologists, traders, Indian Agents, and many other individuals took cultural treasures from indigenous people (totems, bowls, tools, boxes, and even human remains) to either have in their personal collection or to sell to museums for display purposes.  This is an issue that came up in my classes at my high school practicum, about how cultural artifacts or objects get taken away from indigenous groups (mainly due to the banning of the Potlatch in the 1800s).  The video ends with many of the ancestral remains being returned to the Haida Gwaii, and a lot of the research I’ve done since seeing the video has been about how this process helps in a lot more way than simply returning stolen property to its rightful owners.  What repatriation helps accomplish is the healing process to mend the rift between indigenous groups and the effects of European colonization.  For the two groups to reconcile in the ways that would help both groups move past the issues of the past, repatriation is an excellent first step because it acknowledges the wrongs done to indigenous groups in the past, and helps them reclaim a small part of their identity as well.

I also had a wonderful conversation with a volunteer named Karen who is a retired teacher of the Vancouver School District.  I brought down my work as she was helping out with the Tourism Challenge and we went over the lesson plans I’ve made so far, as well as came up with a few ideas for non-social studies lessons that could integrate the gallery materials.  One example we came up with was for a theater or drama class have them come up with something similar to the Undersea Kingdom dances, where students would make a list of several animals in our local area, write down characteristics that represent that character (raccoons are mischievous for example), and then either make a tableaux or a scene that involves those characters.  They would perform the piece in front of their class and the viewers would try to guess which animals were which depending on their characteristics.  It would likely be a multi-lesson “unit” so that as they were coming up with characters and scenes they could visit the gallery and be informed more deeply about the animals and masks and carvings that indigenous people used in their own cultural plays/dances/ceremonies.