Rahel Leshgold in Gold River
Wednesday, Thursday, Friday.
You know that feeling when life slows down, you watch yourself from a distance, and try to capture the moment? Although not particularly busy days, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday were rife with these slo-mo moments, largely due to the wonderful students in my Nuu-chah-nulth class.
On Wednesday’s NCN class, we moved on to discuss the importance of oral history. Realizing that I should locate myself as settler, I decided to tell my own oral history – the story of how my great grandmother, Rahel Leshgold escaped pogroms to eventually arrive at Ellis Island at the turn of the century. As I told my settler story that had been passed down from my great-grandmother to my mother to me, I looked around at the students to whom I was speaking. Time slowed: for the first time each student was fully engaged, somehow hanging on every word of my family’s precious story. I was shocked that they were so interested. At the same time, I felt the magnitude of my own situation: here I was on my home island, telling my settler story to the people to whom the land belongs. Colonialism, history, shame, and gratitude smacked me in the face. How lucky am I to share my settler story on my home island with the people to whom the land rightfully belongs?
I heard a saying the other day that each person dies two deaths: one when they actually die, the other when someone utters their name for the last time. In that moment, short, brown-eyed Rahel Leshgold was alive in Gold River for the future leaders of the Mowachat-Muchalat nation.
In speaking with the teacher, EA, and aboriginal support worker after class, I was informed that this was just the kind of story that these students need to hear. In the fight against ongoing colonialism, they told me that these kids have been well educated about their nation’s past and their own responsibilities for the future. They needed to learn that although there is a different tradition, oral history exists in cultures around the world, and that theirs is not the only history that includes systemic discrimination. We ended that class with a discussion of how First Nations oral history has affected modern treaty development, then students read transcripts of oral history from one of their classmates grandfather. When at the end of class we went around the circle to share one thing we would take from class, I was surprised that so many of them said they would remember Rahel Leshgold. International>National>Local.
During Thursday’s class we played physical multiple choice (a game I will definitely be coming back to) to review information about oral history and modern treaties. Instead of chosing option a, b, c, or d, we went with the 1-4 in Nuu-chah-nulth. The students wanted to read more local oral history transcripts. For a moment, I became jealous. For all the horrors of colonization, how wonderful -- how important is it that they are getting class credit to read the stories of their elders that they never met? About time.
Friday’s class shifted focus onto personal storytelling. Even if this was not feasible within the time-frame, I wanted to leave my students with the knowledge that their stories matter, that “the personal is political”. We discussed the importance of personal experience in larger human rights movements, and went on to study the digital storytelling project “Humans of New York”.
Teaching this class was invaluable for my perspective on Aboriginal Education. Instead of teaching Aboriginal content to settler students, I had to completely reframe my unit for students immersed in their traditional culture. They did not need this white lady to teach them about Aboriginal storytelling: they needed to see how these traditions did not in fact isolate them, but instead connected them and made them special within western society as a whole.
