{"id":17652,"date":"2017-06-28T17:02:24","date_gmt":"2017-06-28T21:02:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=17652"},"modified":"2017-07-05T16:24:39","modified_gmt":"2017-07-05T20:24:39","slug":"when-we-dont-stand-up-for-one-we-stand-up-for-nothing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/when-we-dont-stand-up-for-one-we-stand-up-for-nothing\/","title":{"rendered":"“When we don’t stand up for one, we stand up for nothing”"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Brock Weir<\/strong><\/p>\n

There was once a time when Todd Jameison worked as the operations manager for a large lumber company.
\nIt was a job with heavy responsibility and certainly not one the Oneida of the Thames man ever took lightly.
\nThat world was upended, however, when his sons came home from public school one day and said, \u2018Dad, we\u2019re not native,\u201d the image of two boys playing basketball in their driveways somehow in conflict with the idea of \u201cnative\u201d held by their non-indigenous classmates.
\nFor Jamieson, it was a moment, but a devastating moment, prompting him to quit his job to spearhead a program going into Ontario schools to educate students on what it actually means to be Indigenous.
\n\u201cAfter that day, my children had trouble standing up and saying they were Aboriginal at their schools with their friends,\u201d he explains. \u201cI want them to be proud and I want them to stand tall, but peer pressure is very big and I want to stop that.\u201d
\nMr. Jamieson, now a resident of Brampton, recently shared his experiences along with a group of other Indigenous leaders from the surrounding community, including water walker Becky Big Canoe, an advocate for Missing & Murdered Indigenous Women, Cree and Metis Micmac Elder of the Wolf Clan Laureen (Blu) Waters, who currently works at Seneca College as an elder providing traditional teachings, and Collette Youngchief, a Cree student and mother.
\nHosted by the Aurora Public Library, it was designed to foster a dialogue on issues affecting Aboriginal communities and looking to the future.
\nLooking ahead, however, all agreed that education is a keystone towards reconciliation \u2013 that is, education for non-Indigenous Canadians.
\n\u201cWe have so many new Canadians who have never seen a First Nations person and the first thing they are waiting for are feathers and deerskins,\u201d says Jamieson, who said the racial slurs of \u201cDirty Native\u201d and \u201cDirty Indian\u201d still percolate to the surface. \u201cIt puts blocks on our shoulders. Education Is not on our end, education is on your end, and it has to be open. We have to be open to questions.\u201d
\nIn many instances those questions are tough questions.
\nFor Big Canoe, asking a simple question can lead to a tug on a tiny thread which can lead to something far more significant. Once you begin to talk about one issue facing Indigenous Peoples, you quickly see how they \u201call tie together.\u201d
\n\u201cThey go to economics, capitalism, resource extraction and things of that nature,\u201d she says. \u201cWe continue to find fronts where we need to fight but there aren\u2019t enough of us. There aren\u2019t enough educators, lobbyists and researchers; it is usually just poor folks hopping in a car and going to the scene.
\n\u201cIf you put your children into school and they begin to learn the truth and history that you were denied, you should be angry at your own government and education system for shortchanging you the way they did. We so badly want to teach our grandchildren their true heritage and we only have little pieces of it left. We have to be able to make a climate generally for that kind of knowledge to be valued by everyone in society.\u201d
\nWaters too believes that everything comes down to education.
\nPart of Reconciliation, she says, involves acknowledging that the Indian Act was meant to \u201cannihilate every indigenous person\u201d and there needs to be accountability.
\n\u201cWhether or not people were directly involved, anyone who is Canadian is accountable,\u201d she explains. \u201cWe are all treaty people because it takes two people to make a treaty. As a Canadian, everybody is accountable. Then it takes change in action. That change comes through further education.
\n\u201cA lot of people walk around not knowing who the indigenous people are because, as Todd says, they are looking for the feathers, the headdresses, the jingle dresses, fancy shawls, and breech cloths. We are looking or that perspective because that is what we learned from TV and history. That is not what indigenous people look like. There are blonde-haired, blue-eyed indigenous people walking beside you every day and you haven\u2019t got a clue because of a lie that you were told, because of histories you were given from one side.
\n\u201cWe all have to be accountable, we all have to acknowledge what has happened in history and we all have to make changes because, as Indigenous people [we] have to sit down and say, \u2018I know you didn\u2019t make the Indian Act, however you\u2019re perpetuating the Indian Act by carrying on the story-tellings, by carrying on the jokes, by hearing someone else make comments that are not called for.\u2019 Whenever we don\u2019t stand up for one we stand up for nothing.\u201d
\nAs a young mother and college student, Collette Youngchief saw this perpetuation in action, so much so that when her children were ready for school, she registered the boys under a different last name, a move she tearfully says she regrets.
\n\u201cComing here, it was so exotic to be Native,\u201d says Youngchief. \u201cI am so proud of my last name, but to do that to my sons, it hurts a lot that I chose to do that and made a choice for them. The name represents something; as opposed to them being ashamed of it, they are very proud of it.\u201d
\nIn addition to education, Big Canoe says in order to achieve true reconciliation land will have to be given back. Young Indigenous people, she says, are \u201cdying, they are committing suicide because of where they live and what they are doing is nothing to do with who they are.\u201d
\n\u201cThey are using whatever is available to check out and they are in despair,\u201d she says. \u201cIf we don\u2019t get our land back we\u2019re looking at extinction.\u201d
\nAdds Mr. Jamieson: \u201cFor Truth and Reconciliation to be a factor, it has to come both ways. We need to come forward a little bit too. We have, for a long time in our history, given, given, given but we never got anything back. If we stop giving we\u2019re never going to meet in the middle. Through Truth & Reconciliation I hope we get that voice. We\u2019re holding big dreams.\u201d<\/p>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s a long road ahead to true Reconciliation, say community Indigenous leaders.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":17642,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17652","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general_news","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/2017-06-29-01.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-4AI","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-10 11:14:58","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17652","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17652"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17652\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}