When it comes to writing about Indigenous education, historians are probably more cursed methodologically than even anthropologists! No … I take that back, anthropologists are the most cursed … hmm, then again… . The anthropologists have too often placed Indigenous Others inside of culture but outside of time—a people without history. Historians, on the other hand, have tended to trace changes in policies and social and economic conditions over time, but from constrictive and often ethnocentric renderings of Indigenous reality and experience. Writing Indigenous educational history is an enormously complex task because of the vast distances between Indigenous knowledge systems and Western/modernist interpretations of reality and events in the past. In Canada, the Truth and Reconciliation Report, released in 2015, made a direct connection between present-day social suffering in Indigenous communities and the legacies of cultural genocide from the residential schools. And, just as there is no way to exile this colonizing history to the past, as if the past were some foreign land, emergent decolonizing methodologies assert that those who study Indigenous reality cannot maintain a detached positionality—a researcher studying an Other. Non-Indigenous settler-scholars are now describing themselves as part of the story and not simply the detached tellers of stories about storytellers.
Paying close attention to new directions in Indigenous historiography, educational historian Helen Raptis has, in essence, skillfully written two books integrated into her one book about Tsimshian education. There is the story of the struggles of the Tsimshian people, forced to move from their homes and adapt to complicated conditions of colonization and the dilemmas and paradoxes of day schooling. There is also the author's story of a struggle to conduct the research in a way that would be respectful to the community and to larger principles of relationality as a decolonizing move. So, in a sense, this is not just a book about educational history, it is also a text for considering methodologies in the researching of Indigenous history. Raptis's personal story of performing this research is a compelling and essential part of this book.
In chapter 1 the author introduces some animating questions about the schooling history of the Tsimshian people in Port Essington, British Columbia. Raptis finds a class list in the archives that shows the region's students mostly attended day schools rather than residential schools. Finding this list begins a somewhat iconoclastic inquiry that reconsiders residential schools as the absolute form of schooling to a more diversified view of education that includes traditional teaching and learning as well as language and culture. Clearly, residential schools were only one component of a totalizing system of cultural genocide—at times venomous and monstrous indeed, but not the exclusive location of racism and colonial domination through education. In subsequent chapters, the author follows the threads of both Indigenous scholarship and narratives from the community members she interviewed to arrive at potent and convergent conclusions about the contrasts between Indigenous and Western education: “In short, traditional Tsimshian education was holistic in that the spiritual, emotional, intellectual, and physical capacities of the child were nurtured together by close family members. By contrast, Western approaches to formal schooling are premised on the separation of mind and body” (p. 55).
In many respects, this book is a masterpiece of cross-cultural historical research. The compact central premise of the book, that we must look more carefully at integrated schooling and “beyond the shadow of the residential school” (p. 155) to understand the experience of colonization through education, wanders beautifully in the sections where her Tsimshian collaborators, coauthors, and storytellers have their turns at the text. Readers accustomed to conventional, read linear, versions of histories may be looking for Raptis to take tighter control of the book in these sections. She does not do this. Those who have experienced the ways Indigenous Elders speak in comfortable community settings will smile with familiarity. The stories do sometimes seem to go all over the place, so to speak; nonetheless, we know the author is still in the room, but listening without interrupting the Elders. Each of these members of the Tsimshian Nation provides a rich and extraordinary account of their life at school, in the community, and on the land that makes their culture real and eternal. It is a courageous and visionary scholarly practice to stand aside and let Aboriginal people tell their story on the center stage without interruption.
Raptis wrestles a bit with the impossibly complex conditions of placeness as the central epistemic consideration of Indigenous knowledge systems. She sees “two opposing views” with regard to “how Indigenous students can maintain elements of cultural identity while living at a distance from their communities” (p. 136). As she presents it, one view is more insistent that land and its physical-metaphysical properties is essential for identity fortification while another view would look beyond this assertion to focus on other factors that are more portable, such as cultural participation/expressions. While a practical kind of questioning, it tends toward a binary mode of inquiry that can miss the subtle interplays between Indigenous consciousness, which is foundationally place-based, and Indigenous identity, which is a resilient convergence of many waters. Later in the book, the author seems to answer the thorny question about primacy of place and land in Indigenous education—perhaps all education: “Where possible, land-based teachings should be promoted as appropriate vehicles for fostering the growth of children's traditional languages and cultures” (p. 149).
The “where possible” part of this sentence is the most challenging for educators. Making place-based learnings more possible as core elements of decolonization and transformation will require an enormous inertial shift in both resources and consciousness. It will actually require a paradigm shift in curriculum and knowledge positions in schools for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous students. For example, the value of taking students away from school buildings and into the natural world while informing them of ancient Indigenous stories and relationships becomes clear as we read the narratives in this book.
Helen Raptis has written an important book about Tsimshian educational history. It is also a book about building research relationships with Indigenous communities. It is a work that recognizes, implicitly, that Indigenous history does not run in a straight line but is more liquid and circular. The journey to understand the Indigenous past requires deft canoe navigation through riptides and crosscurrents, past colonization's half-submerged debris. Landing on the beach, one discovers no conventional separation between past, present, and future. There are only the stories—the stories and the sacred landscape.
