This Land Is Our Land:
Using Treaty Education To Reconceptualize Provincial and Municipal Curricular Language
Conceptual Framework
This re-envisioning of the Ontario Grade 10 Civics curriculum, and the Toronto Municipal Elections Grade 10 Civics Supplementary Activities, is primarily centered around critical education. The disenfranchisement of the Indigenous perspective in curriculum documents ties directly to the critique of individual freedom and its inability to contribute towards equality. The critical lens questions the concept of political equality when pervasive economic redistribution and widespread cultural recognition are not enshrined within institutions or public life. Without equal distribution of power, equal opportunity cannot be achieved (Sant, 2019). Thus, is the purview of the critical educator to identify, critique, and speak back to those cultural and institutional apparatuses that implicitly or explicitly silence marginalized communities.
Within this context of critical education, this reframing uses the lens of treaty education to integrate the perspective of FNMI peoples into the Ontario Grade 10 Civics curriculum in a meaningful way. Tupper (2012) establishes treaty education as a framework that “requires all students to consider how their own lives and privileges are connected to and may be traced through, treaties and the treaty relationship”. Further, she identifies the structural and symbolic forms of violence inherent in the colonial discourses from which the curriculum is based. Structural violence “exists when unequal power is built into social structures, resulting in differential harm to some people’s life chances”; symbolic violence is the result of “the harmful consequences of social hierarchies, which require that some groups be marginalized while others maintain dominance” (Tupper, 2014). Structural violence against FNMI peoples is built in to the Civics curriculum, as there is no visible evidence of FNMI consultation, input, or writing of the document, thereby denying FNMI peoples the ability to construct their own narrative in education. Symbolic violence is evident when examining how FNMI peoples are addressed in the curriculum. The reader is warned that FNMI students may have had limited opportunities for formal schooling, therefore requiring special accommodations (Ontario Ministry of Education, 44), and that their parents may need special encouragement to feel more comfortable in schools (Ontario Ministry of Education, 48). Using treaty education to re-examine education policy will work towards students and teachers “engaging with the traumatic content that constitutes historical and contemporary relationships with First Nations people”, by “doing the difficult and uncomfortable work of coming to understand the significance of being a treaty person” (Tupper, 2014).
Treaty education will be used to compare and contrast FNMI protests about land use with municipal protests against unwanted facilities in local neighbourhoods, known as NIMBYism, or “not in my backyard”-ism. Wolsink (2006) defines NIMBYism as “an attitude ascribed to persons who object to the siting of something they regard as detrimental or hazardous in their own neighbourhood, while by implication raising no such objections to similar developments elsewhere.” Referring specifically to large projects that have deleterious environmental effects – also known as locally unwanted land use, or LULUs – the authors note that NIMBYism results in “peripheralization […] in which pollution-intensive activities might end up in areas populated by social groups that lack the economic and political resources to resist such activities” (Wolsink, 2006). NIMBY activities can take the form of participatory politics, defined by Khane, et al. (2016) as people trying to exert influence on issues of public concern by working outside the system of institutional politics and traditional gatekeepers. People who engage in participatory politics are those who are frustrated with what they perceive to be the inefficiency and lack of results from the electoral process, and prefer to engage in “lifestyle politics” such as protesting, blogging, reposting politicized social media content, and more. An example of this is No Jets T.O., an organization devoted to preventing the expansion of the runway at Toronto’s Billy Bishop airport through petitions, social media posts, media campaigns, and public awareness events.
Context
As my area of collaborative specialization at OISE is in Educational Policy, this critical reimagining will address two policy documents - the Ontario Grade 10 Civics curriculum, and the Toronto Municipal Elections Grade 10 Civics Supplementary Activities document, specifically Activity 4: Controversial Issues – Not In My Backyard. With regards to the curriculum document, the focus will be on the following expectations:
By the end of this course, students will…
B1.1 - Describe some civic issues of local, national, and/or global significance
B1.2 – Describe fundamental beliefs and values associated with democratic citizenship in Canada
B1.4 – Communicate their own position on some issues of civic importance at the local, national, and/or global level
B2.4 – Explain, with reference to issues of civic importance, how various groups and institutions can influence government
B3.3 – Explain how the judicial system and other institutions and/or organizations help protect the rights of individuals and the public good in Canada
C1.2 – Describe a variety of ways in which they could make civic contribution at the local, national, and/or global level
C2.1 – Analyze ways in which various beliefs, values, and perspectives are represented in their communities
I remain keenly aware that, as a heterosexual white male settler, it is not my voice that needs to take precedence in this examination. Any actualized changes to policy must be made for, with, and by FNMI peoples. My goal is to begin a conversation that can lead towards Tupper’s concept of “curriculum as intervention”, as made evident in the “foundational entrenchment of First Nations and Metis ways of knowing, content and perspectives” found in the educational policy of Saskatchewan since 2008 (Tupper, 2014).
Learning Goals and Approach
The goal is to critically examine and reimagine the language used in curriculum expectations, and supplementary activities, through the lens of treaty education, and suggest alternatives that move toward “curriculum as intervention”. McAvoy and Hess (2013), in their work on deliberative discussions, suggest that harmony between disparate groups is achieved when working with authentic and powerful issues, of which controversial land use is certainly one. They further suggest that groups should engage in conversations about ideological diversity; thus, the reframed curriculum expectations should include prompts to engage in the “difficult knowledge” of teachers and students recognizing their settlerhood where applicable. Sabzalian’s (2019) framework for anticolonial civic education will also be of use here. Ontario schools have begun to address the issue of place with the land acknowledgements read during morning announcements; presence and perspectives can be addressed with field trips, guest speakers, and the like. Reframing curriculum expectations, and supplementary materials, will move towards integrating political nationhood, by teaching about treaties; power, by explicitly challenging structures of colonialism within the curriculum; and, ideally, partnerships by having FNMI peoples actively involved in rewriting Civics curricula.
Reimagining - Toronto Municipal Elections Grade 10 Civics Supplementary Activities
In this supplementary package, developed by the Toronto District School Board, OISE, and the City of Toronto, Activity #4 is titled Controversial City Issues: “Not In My Backyard!” (NIMBY). The official literature here defines NIMBYism as “controversial situations where local citizens are opposed to government proposals to place new developments or services in their communities.” Further, it establishes a pro-government narrative by describing LULUs as means to help government operate more efficiently, provide needed services, create more jobs and a larger tax base, and to “run smoothly” (Livsey and Paglia, 2010). By positioning themselves as fundamentally beneficial to citizens, the government conversely frames any anti-government activity as anti-citizen; this showcases the technocratic position that NIMBY activity “reflect[s] irrational and narrow-minded, stubbornly hostile attitudes towards national progress and modernization” (Wolsink, 2006). While the municipal government and the NIMBYs may argue over whether or not the “backyard” should be developed, however, a treaty education framework must call attention to whose “backyard” it is. Tupper (2014) suggests that the underlying “myth of the empty wilderness”, upon which settler Canada is conceptualized, “is produced by agents of the state as a means of commemoration the arrival of early explorers […] Such discovery narratives underlie presumed property rights in settler colonial societies.” Any teacher or student using this package to supplement their Civics education must be aware that the conversation around land use is not a NIMBY-government diode; that the relationships they are being asked to learn about and critique have been brought about because of the “myth of the empty wilderness”, and that FNMI treaty rights must also be considered.
The pedagogical approach in this section of the supplementary activity is a placemat activity. It begins with the framing question -“How do I feel about the City of Toronto’s proposal to develop a new __________ in my neighbourhood?” - then provides a list of eight LULUs: casino and hotel development; incinerator; group home for youth with addictions; rail transit extension; landfill site; homeless shelter; new jail; and bicycle lanes. Each LULU is given four roles with ostensibly different viewpoints. Generally, they include some variation on the following: “local citizen”; “local business”; “person or group employed by, or requiring the services of, this LULU”; and “advocate connected to this LULU” (Livsey and Paglia, 2010). It is immediately evident that none of the placemat activities have even a cursory FNMI presence, nor do they acknowledge that the land being developed is subject to a treaty. One example is that of the homeless shelter. In the middle of the placemat, the reader finds a description of the issue as follows: “The City of Toronto proposes to place a homeless shelter in your neighbourhood that will provide housing for 120 men.” The four corners represented in the placemat are: “Local Resident”; “Social Worker”; “Local Business Owner”; and “Homeless Family”. While a teacher or student could extend any of these roles to have an FNMI component, the visible exclusion of explicit FNMI voices is problematic. Thus, a reimagining of the placemat activity is proposed. An additional fifth quadrant is added to the original four, changing the shape from a rectangle to a pentagon. This visually disrupts the “for/against” dialectic of the original placemat and suggests more conversational space than simply “right” or “wrong”. The tile previously titled Local Resident is reimagined as Settler Resident. This shift attempts a critical peacebuilding approach to agitate the foundations of presumed knowledge, hopefully creating chances to find connections in intersubjectivity (Tupper, 2014). The new fifth quadrant is titled Indigenous Community to have teachers and students meaningfully confront their own relationships with, and perspectives of, that community in the context of civic education. Finally, the explanatory centre tile is reworded to included the phrasing of Toronto’s land acknowledgement, as well as statistics on the percentage of Ingenious peoples who make up the homeless population in Canada. In this way, students no longer view the land as my community but as hereditary land of local FNMI peoples, that is occupied by their settler selves. The concept of NIMBYism is thus challenged as students and educators rethink the entire concept of the “backyard”. This reworking could be applied to any of the eight placemat activities in this resource, as none of them explicitly incorporate FNMI perspectives.
Reimagining – Ontario Grade 10 Civics Curriculum Expectations
A cursory search of the Ontario Grade 10 Civics Curriculum for key words and terms such as First Nations, Metis, Inuit, Indigenous, FNMI, or treaty provide scant representation. The phrase First Nations, Metis, and Inuit is used once in specific expectation C2.1: “analyse ways in which various beliefs, values, and perspectives are represented in their communities”; in the teacher prompts, it is suggested as an example alongside LGBTQ+ politics, environmentalism, disability rights, and other standards of identity politics. The word Indigenous is used only twice – once in the glossary reference to “indigenous species” of plants or animals. (ONTARIO) Suffice it to say that as it is currently written, the Ontario Civics curriculum does not adequately represent FNMI peoples or treaty rights.
In order for treaty education to be made visible in the curriculum, and for it then to be transmitted to schools, teachers, and students, it must be concretized in language. As such, a reconceptualizing of the language in the specific curriculum expectations is required. Below are some suggestions for how to proceed with selected expectations:
This new language embeds treaty education into curriculum expectations as opposed to being its own subsection, or an optional activity, thereby reinforcing the idea that Ontario teachers and students are also treaty peoples. By doing so, the curriculum-as-intervention contributes to democratic peacebuilding by “challenging epistemologies of ignorance that deny Aboriginal peoples’ daily experience of colonial oppression” (Tupper, 2014). This, coupled with the challenge to reconceptualize the “backyard” of NIMBYism through the lens of treaty education, reframes official language and, in its own way, works towards acknowledging and making recompense for the structural and symbolic violence perpetuated by the education system against FNMI peoples.
Conclusion – Future Research and its Consequences
Any forecasting on what could or should be done with curriculum revisions in Ontario to include treaty education must, first and foremost, be driven by FNMI communities rather than settlers. In order to frame any next steps for a project such as this, it is helpful to gauge the current climate of civics education in Ontario schools. Llewellyn, et al. (2010) note that “young Canadians are less knowledgeable about politics than any other age group in the country” and that “many young people that they possess neither sufficient knowledge of the political process, nor sufficient political information to be comfortable about voting”. It appears that Ontario educators and students are grappling with a deficit in basic civic competencies. One reason for this may be student disengagement from a curriculum that “only occasionally […] interrogates[s] courses of action that confront complex relationships of power that are fundamental to the democratic process” (Llewellyn et al., 2010). Confronting relationships of power is a ethically fraught task for any educator; many take the less pugilistic route of a pseudo-journalistic approach, covering “both sides” of controversial issues, such as NIMBYism and treaty education, with equal weight and without working through their own biases. Particularly with the Ontario Civics curriculum, engagement with controversial issues is disincentivized in the literature, which instead focuses on objective truths and “accepted” Canadian values. (Llewellyn et al., 2010).
To bridge this divide between the curriculum and the student, policy makers need to grapple with “difficult knowledge” that reconceptualizes commonly-held understandings of Canadian history (Tupper, 2012). One potential course of action is to rewrite all Civics, History, and Social Science curriculum expectations at the secondary level to include, where applicable, elements of treaty education and justice-oriented citizenship. To see if this results in increased student engagement, a longitudinal study would have to be undertaken over a period of several years; student and teacher input over time would be used to make relevant changes to curriculum expectations where needed. To support educators in delivering this curriculum, it would be beneficial to have a database of resources and lessons developed by FNMI stakeholders that teachers could draw from, to both challenge their own place in the settler-settled narrative, and to guide students in doing so as well.
Two challenges come to mind when formulating a long-term implementation of this proposal. First is that of formalizing instruction; whether or not students will be more likely to engage with the material if they pursue it in an independent inquiry model, or if it is part of the prescribed learning goals of a course. It may be difficult for students who do not regularly engage with FNMI peoples to see the relevance of treaty education, NIMBYism, land use, or other subjects that are not immediately evident in their world. Thus, it becomes the challenge of the educator to make evident these connections. Another is the cognitive dissonance of a settler government attempting to teach FNMI treaty rights to First Nations, Metis, or Inuit students, who may have already been traumatized, recently or historically, by their experiences with the colonizing state. Involving FNMI peoples as critical partners in developing treaty education curriculum, and supplementary curriculum documents, will be invaluable in ensuring that policy makers can “reframe citizenship education by developing mandates, teaching strategies, and curriculum materials that go beyond procedural knowledge to the heart of political debate” (Llewellyn et al., 2010).
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