King key to Indigenous education movement
Teacher urged students to treat their mother tongue as a living language
Last week, we lost a muchloved educator who played an important role in the movement for Indigenous control of our education.
Cecil King was born on the Wikwemikong First Nation on Manitoulin Island, Ont. in the beautiful Georgian Bay of Lake Huron. First Nations reserves have informal neighbourhoods and his was called Buzwah and, to further complicate things, his area of Buzwah was called Two O'clock.
“Wiki” is located on unceded territory and is occupied by Ojibwa, Odawa and Potawatomi people, also known as the council of the three fires.
King was raised in a household with three generations and his grandparents had a profound effect on his upbringing. He attended the reserve schools where the teachers were all First Nations. They believed in the potential of their students and saw them through the
first eight years of their education. They left King with the strength and confidence that his people could be teachers.
He attended high school at the Garnier residential school at Spanish, Ont. Because he was older, he was able to rise above the abuse and bullying that was rampant in boarding schools. He was older and knew his language.
He said that his fellow students developed a culture within a culture by speaking their language in secret and used it to circumvent the forces that tried to dominate their culture. He was the valedictorian of his graduating class. He received his bachelor's and master's degrees in education at the University of Saskatchewan and his PHD at the University of Calgary. He adopted Saskatoon and became an important part of the movement for Indian control of Indian education.
In the early 1970s, there was a major movement across Canada that eventually led to closure of the residential schools and school strikes as parents fought to establish their own schools.
The result was the move to develop reserve schools and the need for First Nations teachers was urgent.
King worked with the University of Saskatchewan and developed the Indian Teacher Education Program (ITEP). Over the years, the institution turned out a steady stream of Indigenous teachers who took their place in reserve schools as well as urban schools.
The alumni were not just teaching Indigenous students, but became part of the professional landscape in many city schools. They stood out as role models and tore down many of the old stereotypes simply by being professionals. In addition to ITEP, King also was the first director of the Aboriginal Teacher Education Program at Queen's University. He also developed Ojibway language courses for institutions across North America.
The Ojibway language is part of the Algonquian language group, which covers most of Eastern Canada to the Rocky Mountains, and south to the Mississippi, and the eastern seaboard. It includes Cree, Blackfoot, Naskapi, Innu, Abenaki, Gros Ventre, and so on. Algonquian is arguably the largest Indigenous language group in North America.
Ojibway is called Chippewa in the United States and Saulteaux is also known as Plains Ojibway, but for all the people, their language is
Anishinaabe. It's an example of how colonialism has defined our people in separate compartments.
King loved his mother tongue and urged his students not to treat it like an artifact, but to treat it as a living language with daily application.
He was honoured by his people and the country at large. He received the Queen Elizabeth Golden Jubilee Medal as well as the Saskatchewan Centennial Medal. In 2009, he received the National Aboriginal Achievement Award for his lifelong contribution as an educator.
Earlier this year he released his memoir, The
Boy from Buzwah. In it, he wrote, “We need your voices. We need your songs. We need your stories. For what must be remembered must be said. Our words must reveal the flesh of our culture. Our words must reveal our world views. This is our legacy. This is our duty.”
Last week, at 90 years of age, the final school bell rang and he began his journey to the next world. King may have moved on, but his work lives on in the hundreds of teachers whose lives he touched.