Transcript: ILLUMINATING WORLDVIEWS on Emotional Competency S1:1
Ayana Young Over the past few months, I have journeyed to the Yukon in partnership with Illuminating Worldviews. Illuminating Worldviews serves as a space to examine the worldviews amidst which we find ourselves and see how they actively shape the material realities of our lives. This project, rooted and colored by the land of the Yukon, makes space for questioning, examination and future visioning centered in Indigenous ideology and the sentiment of journeying. In person and on the land, I had the chance to speak with incredible thought leaders with deep connections to the Yukon—all with a live audience in the beautiful city of Whitehorse except for the last event, which was in Dawson City. Though this series is deeply local, it has broad implications for our culture as a whole, and I'm so excited to share it with you.
This series was produced thanks to the generous support of the team at Illuminating Worldviews held by the River collective and the Northern Council for Global Cooperation. We are so grateful to the organizers, speakers and audience members who made this series possible, and also a very big thank you to the land of the Yukon, the boreal forest, the rivers, the lakes. I am honored to have been asked to be part of this.
In this episode, I'm joined with Dr. Lee Brown and Elder Mark wedge to discuss emotional competency and how we can regulate ourselves amidst all that this world brings.
Dr Lee Brown is the former director of the Institute of Aboriginal Health in the College of Health Disciplines and the Indigenous doctoral program in the Department of Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia, where he wrote his doctoral thesis entitled: Making the Classroom a Healthy Place: The Development of Effective Competency in Aboriginal Pedagogy.
Mark Wedge has long been actively involved in economic and social development, land claims, negotiations, ceremonial leadership, and dispute resolution in his community and throughout Canada and the United States. Mark currently sits on the Board of Governors of Yukon University, chairs the Tagish River Habitat Protection Area steering committee, is a guiding Elder of the Illuminating Worldviews project, and is leading his nation's treaty negotiations with British Columbia.
Dr. Lee Brown But you cannot do colonization with a natural heart. It's our Native belief that human beings are naturally loving, naturally loving people. The real essence of decolonization is to regain our heart.
Ayana Young Whew, okay. Jodi, thank you so much for inviting me here. Thank you all for joining us this rainy evening. As I was sitting with these two gentlemen earlier, I was informed that tonight we are going to be speaking about the divine nature of reality. So, get ready, we're going in deep.
I actually thought it would be nice to start off with a quote from Dr. Lee to ground us in tonight's many themes. Quote, "Humankind has gone through a suppression of the heart, which has caused a split away from the values of interconnection. We educate the mind, but do not educate the heart in emotional development."
So gosh, that's a big one. And I want to break that down, not just for those of you sitting there, but for myself as well. And I think to start us off, I'm wondering if you, Dr. Lee, can offer us a bit of a background on what emotional competency is and how the framework—that emotion and reason are distinctly separate and that's become integrated into our earliest childhood education systems.
Dr. Lee Brown A person is emotionally competent if they're driving down the road and somebody really upsets them, and they do not go into road rage. [unknown] A person is emotionally competent if they can choose, because emotions are always a choice. No other human being ever makes you feel anything. An emotionally competent person can choose the emotion that is healthiest for them in the moment that they are in. An emotionally competent person has the skill to change from one emotion to another when that is something that they need to do for their well being.
So this requires people to have the capacity to identify emotions, to communicate them to others are within himself, to understand the feedback process of emotion, to have developed emotional skills, and to have, in this day and age, undergone maybe a little bit of emotional healing because, for us as human beings, to return to emotional maturity and get out of some of the insanity that we're involved in on the face of the earth.
There's two things we have to do. We have to heal ourselves of the past hurts, and we have to educate our children from 1st to 12th grade and how to be emotionally competent. Right now, the British Columbia educational system is 98% cognitive, and I think I can take a little credit for the fact that it's 2% social and emotional because it used to be 100% cognitive. We educate the heart, but we do not educate the mind. We educate our children as if they are psychopaths. We educate our children as if they are sociopaths. We educate our children as if they have no emotional state. If they do have an emotional state in the school system, they're often in trouble. They're often asked to leave the classroom. Our children are pushed along till they're pushed out. Many who come to school the first day are hurt. Many come to school the first day of school as five or six year old children have multi generational trauma. I was one of those children that had multi generational trauma, and it's not dealt with. There's no healing aspect.
I think it's time to think, and I do a lot of teacher trainings. I just did a teacher training for 200 teachers in the community of [town name], British Columbia. And I know what teachers tell me all the time—that the curriculum is full. There's no room to do anything. There's no space. They're overworked. They're underpaid. All that's true. Still, I think it's time to think of the teacher as a healer. We need some healing of the hurts that we've been through. It's very hard to develop emotional skills if you're hurting really badly. People are hurting.
Elder Mark Wedge I was thinking as Lee was talking, How the heck they get into this stuff? Whatever happened? I remember at schools—at schools, I have a problem. I only speak half a language, and that half the language is English, because I don't know Tagish. I don't know Tlingit, and I've worked with it. One of the things I asked Auntie Angela and my mother, Dora Wedge just one summer because I thought I'm going to learn, I'm going to learn language. And I said, "Don't speak me in anything but Tlingit. And they kind of joked and laughed. They said, "You're just trying to get out of work." But I did notice something, sometimes they would be talking in Tagish, and somebody would walk into the room and they had switched to English. I thought, That's interesting, right?
And then later on, Mrs. Sten Bratton, bless her heart and soul, who is the English teacher. And in Grade 12, I went up for final exam. You had to go up to the front of the class, and you had to get your exam and go down to write them. So I went up to get my exam, and she looked up and said, "Who are you?" I said, "I'm Mark. I'm on a list." She said, "Where have you been all year?" And I thought, I never missed a class.
And I think one of the things—that's why I don't speak Tagish and Tlingit today, and I know Lee will talk more about that in terms of how we suppress a learning process, and how we build these things. So I was going to be bold, and I decided I'm going to write the Minister of Education what I thought about . Because I was graduating, I figured they can't kick me out of school. Now I don't know if anybody remembers Hilda Watson, who was then the Minister of Education. So I wrote her a letter, and I said, "Madam Minister, you might want to think about how we look at education of Indigenous peoples. Oftentimes we don't learn as individuals, we learn as collectives. We learn in groups, and we learn these things. And if there's something that you could do towards looking at that kind of a learning process, it would be great."
I never got a response. And that's not a criticism because I think the thing is, is that what happens a lot of times, you know, how do you promote change? And I think that's when we talk about Illuminating Worldviews, stuff that Lee is doing, some of this stuff—how do we start changing systems that are so...? And, again, it's not a blame or anything, but the systems have become so entrenched, right? That you start saying, to actually start changing those systems—it's really hard.
Anyway, I think one of the things that helped me a lot and started looking at...And this is where we were in the last couple of days, we started talking about these types of things, of where one comment by a teacher that, right, potentially stopped me learning my language. You know? And it's not a blame. It was sort of, but that's how I was emotionally immature, to be able to process that hur—as I'm learning from my esteemed brother.
Ayana Young A word that I'm being reminded of that you both spoke to is 'suppression.' And I would really like for us to take a moment to maybe have a little lesson on the history of this emotional suppression back to the Stoics. And I think that could really help us understand how we came or got to where we are now?
Dr. Lee Brown Well, I was the Director of the Institute for Aboriginal Health at the University of British Columbia for the last 10-12 years of my career, and that was a wonderful job. And before that, I directed a doctoral program with PhD students. And during that time, the University of British Columbia decided to get a new model. They paid a firm $400,000 to develop a new model for the University of British Columbia—Motto, M-O-T-T-O. And $400,000 got them four words, five if you count UBC. UBC, A Place of Mind. Not a place of mind and heart, not a place of mind, heart, body and spirit, not a place of holistic and healthy learning. A place of mind—a place that continues what one of our beautiful Mi'kmaq sisters calls the "cognitive oppression of mankind," which, you know...
When I went to do my doctoral work, I'd had a really great teacher when I was doing my Masters named Dr. Daniel Jordan, and they had another great teacher named Dr. Donald Streets. Dr. Jordan was the first professor of my life where I lost track of time in the classroom. It was nine o'clock—man, that was noon. Other classes it was nine o'clock—three hours later it was 9:15.
And when I took the doctoral seminar at the University of British Columbia about 20-25 years ago, you know, you have to read a lot of stuff. One of the articles I had to read said, "You can do a PhD in education on any topic you want—" This is what it said, "except emotion." Don't make the mistake of studying emotion. "Emotion is not a valid academic topic." That's an exact quote. So I had to argue to do my PhD in emotion. People didn't want me to. "Emotional Education—Making the Classroom a Healthy Place: Educating the Heart Along with the Mind."
I traced the suppression of emotion in education back to a guy named Zeno, a Greek mathematician. I like mathematicians. I consider myself a mathematician. I think a mathematician is very important because I think math is very important because math is a symbol system of which we understand the environment. When people are good at math, the Earth is taken care of. People are not good at math now, and Earth is not being taken care of.
But anyway, I traced it back to Zeno. He thought emotions were not good. He got some other guys that agree with him, and they formed an organization that changed the course of human history, the Stoics. They begin the emotional suppression of the European heart—the colonization of Europe; the colonization of the heart. Zeno had some amazing students, Plato. Between Zeno and Plato, emotions went from being not too good, and this is an exact quote: "The source of all evil." The source of all evil. Aristotle said there's no place for emotions in the classroom. He was also a student of Zeno.
For 2000 years, Europeans colonized themselves. I'm not putting anybody down, but you cannot do colonization with a natural heart. It's our Native belief that human beings are naturally loving. Naturally loving people wouldn't do that. It culminated with Descartes, "I think, therefore I am." Didn't say, "I think and feel, therefore I am." The exact quote is "I think, therefore I am a man." And if you do not think, you are not a man, which means that if you feel too much, you are not a man. The ultimate suppression of emotion.
You know, there was a TV show sometime on the history of candidates on the Knowledge Network, and it shows the historical incident of a year of a Catholic priest—no offense to Catholics. Of a Catholic priest going out to a Huron village and distributing dolls to the children of that village. Each doll had in it a piece of smallpox blanket. I don't know if you know if you know what smallpox looks like, but it is a horrendous death. Smallpox is a horrendous death. That means there was a man with what I consider to be a colonized heart that reached down to children and gave them a smallpox doll, knowing that in three weeks they'd be dead. Who could do that? Who could do that, but a person with a suppressed heart?
I had the wonderful experience 15 or so years ago of being the keynote speaker for the German Association of Psychiatry. A world association of German psychiatrists who have an annual meeting, and I was a keynote speaker on Saturday night. On Friday night, the keynote speaker was a woman named Joy DeGruy, and she wrote a book called Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome. I think that's the correct title, and she said, "So many Africans were thrown overboard from slave ships that the sharks begin to follow the ships." The pattern of shark migration to the Atlantic Ocean, to this day, follows the pattern of the slave ships from Africa to South America to Central America to North America, including to Canada. Those slave ships that came to Canada. That means that there was a human being who could take another human being—sometimes still living, sometimes a boy, sometimes a girl, sometimes a man—and throw him over the edge of a slave ship into an oncoming herd of sharks. Who could do that? But a person with a colonized heart.
The theories of Descartes came to the Indigenous people of this land through a man named [I'm having a senior moment] through a book called The Treatise on Government by John Locke. [Thank you, that's my fifth senior moment today. I'm starting to get a little worried about that.] He went around the East Coast looking at the Cherokees. I'm a Cherokee person. I'm an Iroquois person. Looked at other Iroquois Tribes, and he said, “These people are entirely too happy; therefore, they are not." In 1696, John Locke wrote in his book, “Terra nullius. The land is empty. There are no human beings here." As John Locke thought that they were not human.
They say in the churches of eastern Canada and eastern United States...In the 1700s every church had two books, the Bible and the The Treatise on Government by John Locke. Ministers read from the The Treatise on Government by John Locke, "The land is empty. You can take the land." Nobody's here. There's no human beings here. John Locke also wrote, "This the duty of Christianity to suppress the hearts of African people, Asian People, and Amerindians," as he called us, or Native Americans. "So they can be," and this, again, is an exact quote, "almost as good as an Englishman." If our hearts could just be suppressed, we could be almost as good as a European, according to Descartes, Zeno, and Plato, and Aristotle.
And this came to us in many Native communities through the residential schools. Canada sent a man named Daven down to the United States to look at our boarding schools, which still exist. And he came back and he wrote a paper to the Canadian government. And in the third paragraph of the first page—following the thinking of John Locke and Descartes—in the third paragraph, he said, "The first duty of a residential school will be to suppress the emotions of their ancestors." The first duty of the residential school must be to suppress the emotions of their ancestors. You know?
And so, we have been suppressed. I have been suppressed in my life. I'm in recovery. The real essence of decolonization is to regain our heart, to regain our values and our emotions. But we need the schools to bring the competency. We need every lesson plan from first grade to 12th grade to have an aspect of emotional learning. Imagine the kind of human being we could produce.
So, we as human beings—all of us together—we are in the same boat. We're in the same boat. Our hearts have been suppressed. Look what's happening in the world. How many people were bombed today? How many people were killed today in wars in different places in the world? How many people are exiled and homeless? How many people are homeless in the city of Vancouver? You know?
So here's a statement. The sum total of a society's moral competence is the emotional competence of the individuals in the society. Moral competence is an aspect of emotional development. Not spiritual development—emotional development. Spiritual competence is spiritual development. Moral competence is our ability as a society to take care of each other—ensure that everybody has a good good diet, everybody has good food, everybody has good housing. There's more than enough for everybody. There's enough money in the world right now in American dollars—actual money in the world, I'm talking about money—for every human being to have $3 million. Do you have 3 million? I don't. It relates to our moral competency. The sum to all of our emotional competency.
[Musical break]
Dr. Lee Brown Go ahead, pass it back—or Mark, do you want to say a comment?
Elder Mark Wedge Yeah, I'll say a little comment. What makes you cry? You know, there's this guy called Premier Harper. I don't know if it will remember him. And Premier Harper because truth and reconciliation. A lot of the work that has been done over the years to start trying to look at, how do we correct some of these things? So Ken decided to do an apology. And I thought, I think I'm going to stay home today, not go to work, because I want to watch this. And there's always comments about, "You know, was it sincere? Was it not sincere?" Whatnot. But when I heard that apology, I started crying. I started bawling. And not for me, so much, but I thought, My mother had just passed away a year or half before that, and I thought she needed to hear that. She's the one that needed to hear that. And what he said is, "We're sorry. It's not your fault."
Those are words that start a healing process. And it sounds simple, and it can be however you define it. But I think one of the things that happens is that when we start talking and we start looking at truth and reconciliation—we start talking about some of these things—is those kind of words that are healing words that begin to start, I think, this development. We've been talking about this. What's the first step you know when you start trying to find your your competency as being a human, right? And as we've been discovering and exploring, is that emotions are one of the key beginning places to regain your balance, to regain these things.
In about 1920, I think was Spanish Flu…One of the flus hit the Yukon. And what happened is Uncle Johnny and Uncle Peter were quite young then. Took my mother and others, and they went up to this place called, we call it Black Lake, or Monroe lake. And on the southern lakes, when the water is freezing up, right? Or breaking up. You can't travel on the lake. It's really hard to travel by boat. And I think what they were doing is they were saying, "How do we protect our children from being exposed to this thing that was happening?" They knew something was happening, right, with this epidemic that was happening. And part of the reason they did that because at that time, you would be taken to jail if you didn't let your children go to those schools—if you kept them out of residential school, right?
And I think some of those things that you start talking about is that you know...And a lot of times, you know, we when we talk about intergenerational stuff and things like that. I was up in Fairbanks. We were doing some meetings, talking about different things and whatnot. And this young man came to me, and I was pretty young myself then, and he started saying, "My parents abandoned me. They left me. I grew up in an orphanage. I grew up in the streets," and he was angry at his parents. And I asked him, "Well, do you know what happened to them?" And he said, "No."
Because that's what some of our parents were going through. Do I go to jail or do I save my children? You know, do I...You know, those were choices and again, that's just sort of what happened, right? That started this trauma that leads towards suppressed learning process. And that's what we've been sort of discussing is that when you start talking about these suppressed emotions that block the learning process. And in the colonial structure…
I was the first one to graduate in my family. My family was so proud of me, and it was a struggle for me to actually graduate from high school, you know, as we talked about. My brothers and whatnot, as soon as they got to 15, they could leave school. They were gone. I'm sure, you know, a lot of our, you know, our parents were that, you know? Once you could leave school, you were gone, right? Because it's not a place you want it to be.
And I think one of the things is that you start looking at this—this is part of that, that all the stuff, right, that we have to deal with. And I'm so proud of a lot of teachers out here because I know you're not blocking through that emotional suppression. We've started to move forward, right?
Ayana Young Oh, there's so much in what both of you have shared, and I keep coming back to trying to connect the heart and values and identity. And this is something that we were speaking about earlier that I wrote down from you, Lee. "Instinct becomes emotion. Emotion structures our values. Values become our identity. Identity is what we do in life." And I'd love to follow that train of thought a bit more because I think it explains a lot of how we got here and how we continue to make the decisions as a dominant culture.
Dr. Lee Brown Here's the thing—instinct. Carl Jung said, "When instinct becomes conscious, it's an emotion." Instinct is a natural reaction. If I come up behind you and make a loud noise, you're gonna go like that. You're not gonna think, Oh, I should go like that. There's no thought. There's no feeling. You just go like that. But then there is thought and feeling. So instinct becomes emotion and emotion structures as values.
When Dr. Jordan first got me into this in 1981. You know, I might go to a lot of traditional gatherings. I go to a lot of ceremonies. I'm a singer for a lot of ceremonies. I sing in six different styles, and occasionally I'd have a nice moment with an elder, and I'd say, "Hey, how did the Indians used to teach emotion? How did we do that?" They'd always get this funny look on their face, like, What are you talking about?
It took me five years to realize I was asking the wrong question. We didn't teach emotions. We taught values. We had societies like Sundance Society, for instance, which if you wanted to be a part of it, you had to uphold certain values. And those values were structured emotion. What do I mean by that?
Take, for instance, the value of courage. What emotion is in courage? Fear. But there has to be something else to overcome the fear. Possibly love for the people, caring, compassion, something. Maybe more than more than two. Every value is two or more emotions. An emotion structure is identity. Dr. Jordan said, "A value is a relatively enduring patterned use of energy, and this develops into our identity."
And to me, the identity has five aspects. And it's very important in school to educate these aspects, and we are not doing it. First aspect is body awareness. How do you feel about your body? How do you feel about your skin tone? How do you feel about your size of your body? How do you feel about being tall or short? How do you feel about being gay or straight? We should have curriculums that ensure that every child feels good about their physical being. We need to educate the self-concept to feel good about our intelligence. How many emotions are there?
I was doing a teacher workshop one time I asked them to list every emotion they could think of. They came up with 32. Teachers. There's about 450, so they're short over 400 emotions that children they're teaching are never going to hear about.
So anyway, the moment you begin to have a feeling about how you're feeling, you can start to work with changing your emotional state. There's a lot of people in our community—Native and non native, but especially Native community. There's a lot...Let me say there's a lot of guys in the community where I live, they're angry. They're angry all the time. They're angry at you, and they don't even know why. They're angry at me. You know?
I was counseling at Round Lake one time. I was counseling a guy and he said, "Oh, wait." He said, "Man, I've been angry for 25 years." And he didn't know. And I said what a counselor should say, "How do you feel about that?" You know, "How do you feel about being angry?" And then you can begin to change it, as we were sharing earlier. Anger—there's no such thing as a negative emotion, if it's the emotion you need at the time. If there's something to be angry about, such as an injustice, then you should be angry. Abdul Baha said, "To be angry at an injustice is a virtue."
But the thing is, if you're emotionally competent, then you can do something very positive with that anger. You can make a change. But if you're emotionally incompetent and your heart has not been educated, anger can be very destructive.
And so, in the center of our being, we have self determination, which comes from our volition, which comes from our will—how we feel about what we can become. And here's an important statement, all the emotions you will ever have in your life stem from your movement towards what you think you should be. Now what I think you should be. What you think you should be.
[Musical break]
Ayana Young I wanted to reflect on how much sense it makes that the colonial project wants us to hate ourselves, wants us to be disconnected from the land. It's by design, and, so, I think there's a lot of faults removed in that. And it also reminds me of something we were speaking about earlier—stress and illness, and the biochemical reality of emotions. And that's bringing in the body part that both of you just spoke with too. So, I wonder if we could close out this segment of the evening by speaking to the biochemical reality of emotions and maybe discuss how stress and illness are connected in that?
Dr. Lee Brown Okay, here's a sentence that sums it up. Then we'll talk. I'll explain the sentence. Voice tone affects your muscle tone. Muscle tone affects your heart choice. Heart choice affects the reality of your bloodstream. The reality of your bloodstream affects the health of your kidneys, your gallbladder, your pancreas and all the organs of your body. Voice tone affects the way your muscles react.
If I start yelling at you right now. And I haven't yelled in years, but if I was to start yelling, my body would go like this. The heart would start being a little faster, say, There must be danger! Look, at least start stressing out! We need adrenaline in the bloodstream! We need cortisol
There's 1400 biochemicals that the heart can choose—the heart can choose, not the mind. And there's lots of professors at UBC that would tell you, the heart's just a muscle. The heart doesn't do anything, but don't believe that's true when whatever is being put in your bloodstream, of course, it affects the reality of every part of your body. And if you have multigenerational stress and trauma, what happens when adrenaline goes into the bloodstream? And it's just one example of hundreds that we could use.
If a guy comes through that door right now with AK-47, my body's gonna start pumping adrenaline. And what does adrenaline do? It shuts down my kidney function. Shuts down my pancreatic function. Shuts down the function of my gallbladder. You got a guy comin' back with AK-47 you're not going to think about going to the bathroom when your bladder shuts down.
And what happens if it's pumping right now, when I'm not in danger because I'm coming out of multi generational trauma? My kidneys are still slightly shut down. My liver is still slightly shut down. I'm not functioning. I'm not a fully healthy human being. That's why emotional education, which we've just scratched the surface here tonight, that's why it's important to create a human being that is healthy if you make healthy choices.
If I can tell one more story before we go into questions...One of the wonderful things I got to do when I was Director of Institute for Health is have a garden at UBC farm—an experimental Indigenous garden. In that garden, I had 68 medicinals. 68 medicines. And often told my students, our first medicine is water. Our second medicine is food. And our third medicine are the plants in this garden—the Indian teas, you might say.
I developed a youth program to bring youth in care to Vancouver Aboriginal Child and Family Services to bring youth in care to the garden. Still going on, even though I'm retired, that program is still going on. But in my time there, I had about 300 youth in care that I brought to the garden. The first thing I would do to them is I would take him over on the first day toward a grove of juniper. I'd offer a little tobacco to the Juniper, because I wanted to tell them what a tobacco offering was like Mark was saying. And then I'd say, "Because I offered a little Juniper tobacco, I can take a little piece of juniper and taste it? All the kids would say, "Okay, can we taste it?" "Sure. Just have to offer a little tobacco."
White Tobacco because Tobacco is the gold of the plant kingdom and has nitrogen and every plant needs nitrogen. So you're giving the plant something it really needs. You give them a little Tobacco. Give them a little nitrogen, and I would say to them, "This is Juniper. We use it for our first bath. We use it for our last bath." My girls asked me recently, "Dad, what do you want for your funeral?" "So well if you could, you know, if you're up to it, you'll bathe my body with Juniper tea, you know, and dress me for my funeral. I would like that." I felt really good that they were comfortable enough with me they could ask me that question. And there's a high-level emotional competency right there. Hopefully that won't be right away.
But anyway, the point is...Here's the point—not one of 300 children that came to the farm that had been taken in care, some of them from the time of birth. For some of them, this was their first interaction with the Native world. Not one could identify one tree. And this goes to what Mark is saying. We'd go to Juniper. I would teach him about Pine. I would teach him about Balsam, and the medicine of Balsam and Pine. Fir, the emotional medicine of Fir. Fir is a big tree for emotional health. Birch, Cedar. For the rest of the summer, when we go by the Juniper tree, I'd say, "What's that?" "Juniper!" "And what's it good for?" "Kills germs!!" And for the rest of their life, when they see Juniper, they'll know Juniper. And here's the thing, meaning brings health. To walk around in the environment, to have an educational system that's unconnected to the environment. We create children for which the Earth doesn't have a meaning. Meaninglessness brings sickness. Not only do we have to have a holistic curriculum, it has to be connected to the land. Has to be connected to the Earth itself.
Elder Mark Wedge There's so much going through my mind right now, but I do want to share a bit of a story. A couple of years ago, we're watching the graduation at Yukon University, and there was a young gentleman from our community, David Gansby, and he was asked to give the valedictorian speech. And he started off, and he started saying, "You know, I didn't want to come here. And because I know it's going to be hard to actually get this Bachelor of Business Administration. I know it's going to be hard. And I was scared. Could I do it? Could I do it?" And he said, "You know, after going through this," he said, "it's not as hard as a four day fast. A four day fast is harder and scarier to actually do than a Bachelor of Business Administration." And I started thinking about that, you know, because we have these processes and these systems, right, that actually supplement these learning processes.
And do we teach spirituality at the school? When Randall was there, he did have sweats at the university, at the college, then, right? How are we incorporating? And I'm not talking about religion, I'm talking about spirituality. What does it mean, right? You know, to have that dialog. Because when we start stopping, that's when we start forgetting how to be honest and truthful and kind and these things right? Same with the emotions, we stop feeling.
So one of the things I'm struggling with, and I need your help with this. Maybe I'll probably get in trouble, but I'm gonna have courage. What was it? Fear?
Dr. Lee Brown Overcoming fear.
Elder Mark Wedge Okay. Overcoming fear, okay. 1969, what happened? The Eagle landed on the Moon. It was a huge scientific endeavor. People around the Earth cheered. To a lot of the Indigenous populations, there are prophecy that says when the Eagle lands on the Moon, something's going to start happening. This Trail of Tears, this colonization is going to start in the East Coast of Turtle Island. It's going to go to the West, and it's going to go from the South to the North. They say when the Eagle lands on the Moon, it's going to change. And there's much more to these teachings. You know that this is just sort of the short version. After that, when that Eagle lands, it's going to be reversal of that process. The healing will start from the North and start moving South, and then it's going to go from the West and start moving East. It's going to be the reverse of what happened with this colonial, with this hurt.
In 1969, there was something called a White Paper. Pierre Elliott Trudeau was asked, "If Canada wants to be a nation, what do we have to do?" And he said, "Well, we have to repatriate the constitution of Canada. We have to get control of this. To be self governing, we have to have control of it." And the question was asked, "What you're going to do with the Indians?" Because they were wards of the state under the Indian Act. They couldn't vote, right? They couldn't own assets. They couldn't do a lot of stuff, just like women. So in 1969 when this White Paper came out, there was a lot of discussion, what do we do? And this guy called Caulder in BC, said, "We have rights. We're not just Canadians. We have rights." We have rights and went to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court said, yeah, we have rights. And we don't know what they are. The delegation actually, who came from B.C., Yukon, of Indigenous people, went to see the Queen. The Queen, in her wisdom, said, "You have to treat," to Canada…Said, "You have to treat these Indians fairly, like we have." So he said, "Okay.”
So in order to get that constitution going, they created this thing called Section 35 of which nobody quite knows what it is. And one of the things that started was in the North, and they said, "There's no province here. There's no provincial." So they said, "Maybe we could start a treaty." And a modern treaty process is eleven Yukon First Nations became self governing out of the eagle landing on the moon. It started 1973. There's a document called "Together Today for Children Tomorrow," where elders got together and said, "Look, we gotta start this process," right? 1992—first treaties were signed. 2005—last four were signed. Eleven self governing First Nations. Nobody quite knows what it means. 1981—the first treaties failed because there was no self government, there was no land, and there was no cash. And the elders said at that point in time, right? "Self governance is not good if you don't have access to capital," right? And so it was negotiated. So when they took the second round those things, self government, became a part of it, right? What's interesting is, "Together Today for Children Tomorrow," said, "We don't want to do this alone. We want to work with the governments." To actually walk in two worlds for that future generation. They said, "You should be able to walk in two worlds: in this Traditional Knowledge—traditional worlds—and the contemporary world."
And so far, we've not done it in Yukon, right? Because we've gone through, you know, the [unknown] Report, you know? Pierce McDonald, who's the premier, went through and said, "Look, we got to do something about this." Then there was the other thing, then the [unknown] process. There's good intention. And don't get me wrong, it's not about being mean or anything. People are trying right through this Jeep process, we started looking at, okay, what does a joint education action plan look like? Right? Auditor General came out and said, "Look at you're still Yukon. You're still not getting the results that's required." This is what, two, three years ago, Audrey General's Report, First Nation School Board.
What the elder said is, “When we started self-government,” he said, "we need to be able to determine, have self-determination for our citizens." And so the way we set up a paramountcy of laws, and I know these are legal terms, paramountcy of laws. That we can pass a law that supersedes Yukon law and Canada's laws for the governance of our citizens. We've done that. We've sort of drafted a law, but in order for that law to be drafted, Yukon as the government has to vacate the field. In order to do that, you have to have a program of service transfer agreement. I don't want to make this a course in treaties, but it's important to know.
So I've been asked at various times to be an advisor to some of these boards and whatnot. And I said, "You need to know, if you want me to work with some of these boards and committees, I'm going to advise them to actually look at an Education Act—First Nation Education Act." Why am I going to do that? In 1981, we started working. We started talking about how do we get emotional competency in school? We started another time where we started looking at, how do we do this? And we've tried to work with...we've met with ministers. Actually had a deputy minister go down and visit with Lee. Because Lee got to the point saying, "I don't want to talk about this stuff anymore. I want to do it. I'll come and help you do it, but I don't want to talk about it.
Ayana Young Thank you, Mark and Lee.
Victoria Pham Thank you for listening to this episode of For The Wild's collaboration with Illuminating Worldviews made by Ayana Young, Erica Ekrem, Julia Jackson, and Victoria Pham. The music from this episode is from Cole Pulice's, new album Lands of Eternal, courtesy of Leaving Records, Carlisle Evans Peck, and PaloMah. Thanks for listening.
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