Explanatory Notes to The Native Literacy Field
- Work, action, movement towards change is activism. It doesn't immediately
mean negative, violent, disruptive action. “Care must be taken
to hear rather than to silence, to honour rather than to appropriate
First Voice or the Circle method itself (Graveline 1998:235). In fact,
“guiding students to undertake ‘en-act-ed’ forms of
expressing their learnings...to show their learning through doing...encouraging
them to ‘get in there and help’( Graveline 1998:198) provides
the demonstrations required by Literacy and Basic Skills(LBS).
- Trickster is a figure in Ojibway lives and literature. Trickster
through his experiences and antics, teaches resilience and survival.
Like traditional trickster figures, contemporary Native characters are
frequently tricked, beaten up, robbed, deserted, wounded and ridiculed,
but, unlike the historical and contemporary Native characters in white
fiction, these characters survive and persevere and, in many cases prosper.
Putting the Trickster back among Indigenous peoples reestablishes harmony
and balance to Indigenous peoples’ way of being, seeing, and doing
(Armstrong 1993:37)”. Lenore Keeshig Tobias explains that Trickster
“help[s] us see our own mistakes, helps us laugh at ourselves,
and each other, a necessary strategy to keep us strong and sane (Armstrong
1998:215).”
- Research (Milloy 1999; Bird, Land, Macadam eds.2002; Barman, Hebert,
McCaskill eds 1994, 1999; Hart 2002; Chrisjohn 1997) describes the enormous
negative impact of the education system on Aboriginal peoples. The inter-generational
impact of residential schools alone, is part of the current extra-ordinarily
high illiteracy issue in Aboriginal communities. This negative impact,
exacerbated by the Indian Act, encompasses the whole of the lives of
Aboriginal people and this is what Native literacy practitioners are
heroically attempting to accommodate.
- ”Walk your talk, heal [educate] the healer [practitioner]: We
cannot begin to help other people deal with their imbalances unless
we first begin to heal [educate] ourselves and deal with our own imbalances...
(Graveline, 1998:79).”
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