STEPPING BACK IN TIME
High school students learn aboriginal history through 45-minute ‘blanket exercise’ led by an elder,
Three dozen high school students in stocking feet wander quietly over colourful blankets spread across the floor. They are roaming their land. It is centuries ago and they inhabit a vast place that will one day be known as Canada.
“You represent the indigenous peoples, the people who have been here for at least 10,000 years,” their narrator tells them.
“Long before the arrival of Europeans, Turtle Island was your home, and home to millions of people like you.”
In reality, they are students from five Toronto Catholic high schools engaged in the Kairos blanket exercise, a powerful interactive lesson that teaches indigenous history through re-enactment.
The morning begins with 13 blankets, a script and a circle of teenagers. It will end with a new perspective of Canada that for too long has not been taught.
As the 45-minute session unfolds, students with numbered scrolls take turns reading in the voices of First Nations people, describing their lives, how “everything on the earth is to be respected” and how events affect them.
Their observations are punctuated by the arrival of Europeans and what follows, from the time of the earliest treaties that begin the process of appropriating their land, through colonization, forced assimilation and resistance. With each encroachment, blanket edges are folded back as indigenous lands shrink. By the end, what remains is a fraction of the original population, several crumpled blankets strewn across the space and some dislocated students on the bare wooden floor.
In the talking circle that follows led by elder Bob Phillips, an aboriginal educator of Mi’kmaq heritage, some teens speak about the injustice. Others remark on how much they hadn’t known. Many are speechless.
“It was eye-opening to see how the land was changed so much over time, going from great space to withering away,” 13-year-old Maddy Driscoll said later dur- ing a break. Lessons in school about indigenous history “only scratched the surface,” added the Grade 9 student at St. Joseph’s College School.
“Because of this (exercise), I want to know more.”
The blanket exercise is a far cry from social studies taught to earlier generations of Canadians based on the notion that North America “began” in 1492 with Christopher Columbus.
It’s also a powerful one as students connect with a dark side of Canadian history that’s only recently emerged in public consciousness as the result of a growing social movement and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada.
Acknowledging and teaching the truth about the damage inflicted on indigenous people is considered the first critical step toward reconciliation.
By the end of the current school year, 900 students from the Toronto Catholic District School Board will have participated in the blanket exercise, thanks to a partnership launched this fall between the board and Kairos Canada, an ecumenical group of churches that promotes social justice and education and also provides the program to other groups. Every Wednesday throughout the school year, Kairos facilitators and indigenous elders lead Catholic board students in grades 4 through 12 at the University of Toronto’s Mary Ward Centre for Education, Spirituality and Justice.
Resources are in demand. Within 24 hours of announcing the Kairos partnership, every slot was booked through the end of May, says Vanessa Pinto, a First Nations, Métis and Inuit program support teacher with the Catholic board.