Inuit and invisible in school
“Do you live in an igloo?”
It was the kind of question Olivia Lya Thomassie would be asked on a regular basis when she first arrived in Montreal from Kangirsuk in Ungava Bay.
She was only eight, a shy girl forced to move 1,600 kilometres due south to live with her father in Rosemont after the death of her mother.
At home in Kangirsuk, Olivia had witnessed her mother being murdered by her boyfriend. Two years later she would go back north to testify and see him jailed for life.
But whisked off to Montreal that terrible week in 2006, speaking only Inuktitut, Olivia was placed in a classe d’accueil — welcome class — as if she, too, had come from a faraway country.
Out of the mouths of children, the igloo question was taken in stride. But as the children grew into adolescents, and the stereotype of the Inuit morphed into the lazy drug addict/alcoholic, Olivia began to see a pattern.
While she was bending to southern Quebec culture, her classmates were learning nothing about the North and Indigenous Peoples today that would put the image of the lazy Eskimo to rest.
One day at her private Montreal high school for girls, a day-long event was devoted to learning about First Nations in Canada. One day was better than none, Olivia thought.
By the time she reached CEGEP, however, she could see what 11 years of schooling — minus a day — had achieved.
A teacher spoke of the “primitive” or “prehistoric” peoples of Quebec, flashing 200-year-old images of Indigenous Peoples on the screen. Another introduced a section on “Eskimo” art. Olivia told her the appropriate term was Inuit art but the teacher disagreed.
Only Nanook of the North — the 1922 documentary shown to her cinema class — was presented as a product of the time, and prefaced with a comment that it does not represent the modern-day reality of the Inuit.
“Already I found it difficult to believe what the teachers were teaching about geography and history, when everything they said about First Nations wasn’t true. If they didn’t tell the truth about Inuit, what else were they wrong about?”
She enrolled in a program at CÉGEP du Vieux Montréal called Arts, lettres et communication.
“They should have added ‘par et pour les québécois,’ ” Olivia says now. “It aggravates me because the whole education system is done just for white, francophone students. Everything is meant for them. I had a course on language and society. It said joual is the spoken language in Quebec without mentioning anything about Inuit or Indigenous languages. As if we don’t exist.”
In December 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission — established to respond to the abuse of Indigenous children in residential schools — issued its findings. Olivia was in Grade 10. Among the 94 calls to action: that the government of Canada, “in consultation and collaboration with Aboriginal Peoples and educators,” develop an age-appropriate curriculum for kindergarten to Grade 12 students on residential schools, treaties and the historical and contemporary contributions of Aboriginal Peoples.
Since then, efforts to reform the Quebec high school history curriculum have been at the mercy of politics.
The latest version of the history curriculum, whose reform was begun by the Parti Québécois and finished and implemented by the current Liberal government, includes some information on residential schools and treaties, but says nothing about some of the events that form the context for the social and economic conditions of First Nations today.
Among other things, the curriculum does not include: the 1960s scoop of Indigenous children who were taken from their families and given to white families to raise; the history of the Hudson Bay Co., which launched the commercialization of the North; the tuberculosis epidemic that sent hundreds of Inuit south for treatment; the mass slaughter of sled dogs by police in the 1950s and ’60s; or the relocation of Inuit from Inukjuak to the High Arctic.
Without adequate teaching in schools, Olivia says, she is forced to be a walking, talking textbook and set people straight wherever she goes.
Aside from devoting more class time to the history of Indigenous Peoples, Olivia suggests, there should be exchanges with modernday Inuit villages “so that people in Quebec know what happened there and what’s it’s like.”
“Not just to feel guilty for everything but to know the truth — to do better and to truly reconcile.”
Three months ago, Olivia decided to go back to Kangirsuk to get reacquainted with her people, language and family whom she hasn’t lived with for 11 years.
“I got fed up,” she says of her decision to leave Montreal. “I always felt excluded, even in my own country. I wanted to go back home.”