SCHOOL BOARD BANS ‘CHIEF.’
If there were any doubt, there is no more: Canada is the stupidest country ever.
The evidence, already all around, is now irrefutable.
The Toronto District School Board, in its efforts to remain ahead of the Ontario government curve on all gender-cultural-political sensitivities, is not only contenting itself with following Education Minister Mitzie Hunter’s directive of early this year to review all potentially Indigenous-offensive team names and mascots, but also has declared war on the word “chief.”
“I can confirm that the title ‘chief’ is being phased out in various departments at the TDSB,” board spokesman Ryan Bird told Postmedia in an email Tuesday.
“It’s part of the ongoing work that the school board does through the TDSB’s Aboriginal Education Centre with regards to Truth and Reconciliation (Commission, or the TRC, which produced its massive final report in 2015).”
While apparently some key titles at the board were changed a few years ago, such as chief financial officer, among the recent casualties is the sign on the door to the office of Chief Caretaker Karen Griffith at Glenview Public School in the city’s affluent north end.
There, last week, staff noticed that the word “chief” had been blacked out on the door.
(Apparently, no thought or consideration had been given to how students of colour might react to the notion that a bad sign could be simply blacked out, and whether this is tantamount to cultural erasure.)
Presumably, board chair John Malloy will have to review and correct his C.V., where he is still described as former Chief Student Achievement Officer for the provincial education ministry.
Presumably, the board’s chief technology officer and chief information officer and chief social worker will all have to do the same. Etc., etc.
Attempts to find out precisely where in the TRC’s Calls to Action section there is any cry for the de-chiefing of the language in Canadian schools went unanswered. The board spokesman, Bird, tried hard on Postmedia’s behalf to get someone to respond but to no avail.
The best he could do, he said, was to suggest that the move didn’t necessarily come out of the TRC itself, but was “an aspect of a larger conversation staff have had” since the report was issued. Bird said he consulted with a TDSB elder who told him that probably “every Aboriginal person has been referred to as ‘chief’” in a derogatory way at some point in his or her life.
But the fact of the matter is that the word is Latin in origin and comes from the Latin “caput,” meaning head or leader, via the French, where chef is short for chef de cuisine, or boss of the kitchen.
If many people understand that caricatures such as Chief Wahoo, the mascot of the Cleveland Indians, might be offensive to Indigenous ears and eyes, it’s a struggle to get the notion that a non-Indigenous word such as “chief ” is equally insulting.
Bird said the remaining board staff with offensive titles were notified verbally last month. Because there’s no formal motion or document describing corrective action, it’s impossible to know what precisely staff were told to do.