The Burnaby School District would like to acknowledge and thank the Coast Salish Nations of Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh and Squamish, on whose traditional territory we teach, learn and live.
Those words sounded pretty profound to Gilpin Elementary School mom Gillian Bassett when she first heard them read out – as per Burnaby school district policy – at the beginning of a school assembly last year.
But she didn’t know what they meant, and neither did the kids she asked.
“I sort of vaguely understood they had something to do with aboriginal people, First Nations, but not the significance of the different groups and where they were located,” said Bassett, who came to Canada from England four years ago.
Then-secretary of the school’s PAC, she set out to raise awareness, teaming up with then-principal Sean Gaster (who has since moved to Edmonds Community School).
Their efforts – helped along by a $3,500 Arts Starts grant and a large chunk of old-growth red cedar made available by hereditary Squamish First Nation Chief Bill Williams – culminated last month in the presentation to the school of a skumay, a traditional women’s canoe built by Squamish First Nation artist Aaron Nelson-Moody
Nelson-Moody, whose Squamish name means Splashing Eagle – Splash for short – spent three months at the school, three days a week, interacting with students and building the stubby vessel traditionally used by Squamish women and girls to ply the swamps and narrow streams of their territory.
“The women would paddle up next to like salmon berries, smack the bush with their paddle and all the berries would fall into the canoe,” Splash told the NOW. “They would also pick things like bog cranberry, wild rice, some of the bulrush tubers and the bulrush stalk, used for weaving.”
There was no mention during his sessions with students about the problems aboriginal girls and women face in Canada today, but those issues weren’t far below the surface, according to Splash.
“We’re implicitly dealing with it because we’re talking about the alternative, the kind of respect that women had, the kind of work that women historically did and are still doing,” he said. “The roles change, of course, as the world changes, but the mutual respect and mutual support doesn’t have to change.”
Splash, who has worked in schools for 20 years, said he prefers projects like the Gilpin canoe that allow him to stay awhile and get below the surface of kids’ understanding of his culture.
“People have a bunch of stuff in their minds about aboriginal people,” he said. “There’s a kind of nebulous identity out there, so they’re kind of asking about that. Then, when they start to learn a bit more, the questions actually get really interesting.”
That kind of learning was exactly what Bassett had envisioned when she first started thinking about bringing a First Nations artist-in-residence into the school.
“I thought it would be really nice to have something deep, you know, where the kids can build on knowledge, something deep rather than broad,” she said.
For district aboriginal resource teacher Tracy Healey, who’s been with the district since 1998, the timing of the project and the choice of a local First Nations artist couldn’t have been better.
“The ministry is doing this big push with the new curriculum about embedding aboriginal knowledge into the curriculum,” she said, “and teachers have no idea how to do that or even where to start, and the place to start is the traditional territory that you’re on. Find out about the local First Nations people and reach out to them and build relationships with them.”
For the Gilpin project, it helped that Splash is both an artist and an educator, according to Bassett, who said her two boys came home bursting with information about the Squamish people during the project.
“My youngest son is in Grade 1, and he is fully informed on the salmon and the importance of salmon to the Squamish people,” Bassett said. “I mean, it’s amazing. They sort of hold forth at the dinner table.”
Normally, she said, it’s hard to get her boys to say anything about their day at school.
She credits the difference to the multi-sensory nature of the canoe project and to Splash’s charismatic teaching style.
For Splash, such projects are the way of the future if schools are serious about integrating an understanding of First Nations into every student’s learning.
“The big decision is whether you want a little bit of information out of a book or whether you want a relationship with local First Nations, and I think they’re trying to foster relationships,” said Splash of schools that take up projects like the canoe at Gilpin. “Just memorizing facts isn’t really what most schools are after. It’s where they start, but, in the end, we’re trying to develop a better relationship between Canada and First Nations.”
