Learn, Teach, Challenge—and Change

Abstract

Learn, Teach, Challenge—and Change Linda M. Morra (bio) In the fall of 2002, I found myself in Vancouver, in conversation with a Kanien'kehá:ka man named B., who was trying to enlighten me about what it meant to be Indigenous in this country—what it meant for him personally and what the implications have been for his life and his community. "I don't really see what this has to do with me," I retorted. I was grappling with what he was telling me. "My parents arrived in this country well after the problem started. And they were also subject to all manner of racism upon their arrival." He regarded me silently for a moment. He did not judge me. He did not rebuke me. At first, he simply agreed that some immigrants to this country have been treated in the most appalling ways. Then, he told me his own story. He unpacked my assumptions and redirected my misguided logic. The most poignant moment was when he explained how I was yet the beneficiary of a system that oppressed others; as long as I remained quiet about that system and its structures of exploitation, as long as I refused to challenge it, I was cooperative, even complicit in such oppression. I listened. My defences crumbled. When I asked him how I should begin to change, he replied that just listening and having that discussion with him that day was a good place to start. It was. I would learn later that such personal stories and conversations are, in fact, an essential part of Indigenous pedagogies. Little did I realize how much this one interaction would inspire me to change and act in later years, so much so that I would not only advocate for but also eventually develop and teach a course on Indigenous literatures and pedagogies. [End Page 30] ________ Yes, I am impatient with myself now about having been both so defensive and offensive, about having been so obtuse—but I would learn how better to counter such feelings in the classroom, because I myself had experienced them and had to work through them. Before that moment, I had identified myself, first, as the daughter of Italian-Canadian immigrants, and in later years, as a specialist of Canadian literature and a settler scholar. Although I was born in Canada, Italian Canadians are too familiar with their own history of internment camps in this country, with the deep fissures of bias and prejudice that continue to inform mainstream English Canadians, who habitually like to claim that my community has not been so affected. But it has been. And it still is, to some extent. This identity should have made me immediately more sensitive to Indigenous histories of displacement, trauma, and oppression; however, it took me some time. Specifically, I was born to Italian-Canadian parents in the City of Toronto, on the traditional territory of several nations, including the Mississaugas of the Credit,1 the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples. My understanding, however, of Indigenous literatures did not really begin there, where I lived for the first twenty-three years of my life and completed my first degree in literature at the University of Toronto; and not even while completing my Master of Arts and then my PhD in Canadian literature/Canadian Studies at the University of Ottawa, situated on Algonquin Anishinaabe Nation territory. It began rather late in my academic career, during my postdoctoral fellowship at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, situated on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Musqueam people. Something in me woke up, became conscious and alert, and then began to grow, after I moved there in September 2002 and had that conversation with B. While at the University of Ottawa, I had at least taken a course in Inuit literatures. I studied no less than the likes of People from Our Side by Inuk artist, photographer, and historian Peter Pitseolak, under the instruction of Dr. John Moss who was both prescient and compassionate in developing this course. Several of the writers, however, were also Western (famously, James Houston, whose book The White Dawn we were...