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When I ask Cindy to describe Native Studies (NS) 161, her eager response is that the course has something in it for everyone - especially for those of us who are settlers on North American land. “I think everyone who has the opportunity to do so, should take this course,” she encourages.
Cindy shares that from her perspective as an Indigenous person, the course was beneficial because it helped her to develop tools for navigating the various microaggressions and discrimination that she has endured. While she confides that very little in the class came as a surprise to her as a result of her lived experience, Cindy says it was helpful for her to learn about and understand how such damaging stereotypes came into existence in the first place.
“I liked how the course material was organized,” Cindy tells me. “Each of the modules tackled a different stereotype, using media outlets such as news articles, blog posts, academic articles, videos and even a short film by an Indigenous filmmaker. It allowed us to consider the information we were being given from all different angles, so that if we didn’t really connect with one source there were alternative, hopefully more accessible options available to us. Confronting the issue of stereotypes head-on and dismissing them as untrue without making a history lesson out of it was really valuable, because one of the misconceptions about Native Studies is that the subject is all history. There is this general sense that when you talk about Indigenous people you’re talking about the past, about something that has been but is not still present. There is this idea in the dominant Canadian mentality that Indigenous peoples are a thing of history and a feeling of ‘Why can’t we just move on from the past?’ when in reality we’re still here.”
I ask Cindy if she has any advice to offer on how to be a respectful student in an environment where topics are up for discussion that may be sensitive for a variety of people for different reasons. “I think that if you’re reading course content or interacting with course materials and you are starting to feel emotional or defensive, whether that’s getting angry or sad or triggered, it’s important to be self-aware enough to recognize the reaction you are experiencing. Being aware of: ‘Hang on, I’m getting riled up,’ or ‘I’m starting to feel frustrated or defensive about this,’ is what helps you to identify where those feelings are coming from. Sitting with that for a while and resisting the urge to react to it or suppress it and push it away because it makes you uncomfortable and taking the time to reflect and think about it before you speak out, will likely help you to respond from a calmer and less emotional place. And I think that advice applies to students of all subjects, not just Native Studies. Those emotions that arise are very important and you shouldn’t push them down, but it’s really all about how you communicate your discomfort and work through it.”
I ask Cindy if any of the course content came as a surprise to her or if she had gone into NS 161 having already experienced such stereotypes in life. “I am acutely aware of all of the stereotypes about Indigenous people. What was enlightening about the course for me was going more into depth about where those stereotypes and misconceptions came from. You can kind of uncritically accept that you don’t know why something is wrong and fail to question where this discrimination came from. That was really interesting for me. Also there was a unit on the portrayal of Indigenous peoples in film, which was really interesting to me on a personal level, as was seeing some of the contemporary filmmaking that is now being done to tell Indigenous stories in Indigenous ways. There are definitely still misrepresentations in contemporary film.”
Cindy is personally interested in studying relationality, more specifically, the Indigenous relationship to land and how it pertains to resource extraction and subsurface rights. We discuss how movies like the new Avatar: The Way of Water, with its story about Indigenous tribes and spiritual connections to land and water, are often glorified without any recognition of the Indigenous cultural themes woven into the plot. “There have been Water Walkers and protectors of water in Indigenous culture forever,” Cindy explains, but where North American settlers have discriminated against Indigenous spirituality, people were all too happy to celebrate it in a fantasy world developed by the Canadian director James Cameron. “He took an Indigenous story and turned it into a big blockbuster. There are Water Walkers in Ontario,” Cindy points out - which happens to be where Cameron grew up - “who are involved in activism protecting the Great Lakes, for example. As much culture and language and tradition and ceremony that has been lost, it does still exist. Indigenous peoples are keeping their traditions alive; ceremonies continue to be held today. Whether the mainstream media reflects that or the general public acknowledges it is a different story.”
Cindy indicates that taking a look at the way Indigenous issues are covered in the media can reveal how Indigenous people, in general, are perceived by the rest of the population. I suggest that negative media representation could be equally as damaging to the self-image of Indigenous peoples as it is to the settler population’s perceptions of them, and Cindy confirms. She describes how public bias can be internalized, “especially when Indigenous people are isolated from one another and don’t have a strong sense of community. Take myself, for example: my mom is Indigenous, but my dad is a settler. My parents divorced when I was really young, and I was raised in a white household. I’m one of those people who identifies as Indigenous; I am Indigenous, I’m a member of a band, and I do have people who claim me, but I wasn’t raised with those traditions, that language or that culture. So a lot of the ways I was introduced to or made aware of Indigenous culture was through media and movies and depictions on the TV or stories in the newspaper - and they all tend to be pretty negative. It does a number on you.”
By the end of our discussion, Cindy convinced me of the absolute cruciality for all North Americans of a course dedicated to the interruption and dismantling of Indigenous stereotypes. “When you come away from the course,” she concludes, “It’s a lot harder to accept or spout those stereotypes, at least without thinking critically about them, because you have a deeper understanding about where they’ve come from and how misguided they are.”