The first thing worth really thinking about was in the preamble. Being the bedrock upon which students rely is a reminder so simple and obvious that it often needs to be made. You cannot help someone else as well or at all if you are actively falling apart.
This means that if you are the converse, one of the people being helped, it is critical to be aware of the potential stressors of those helping you and to mitigate those stressors as much as possible.
This draws into the later talk of Niigan Sinclair and his explanation of the troubles of building a fire. Creating the spark and building it up into a more resilient fire can take hours with thousands of tries that are exceedingly repetitive and soul draining at the worst. Beyond the understanding that the important and necessary activities are often difficult fire making is more like the action of rebuilding trust that was broken. To rebuild trust in what has been lost to the failures of the educational profession to indigenous peoples we will need to do the difficult work. It is very likely that all the work we do will have no visible difference but the underlying change is necessary to build the foundation of reconciliation.
Another point that stood out to me was the difference in what was ‘private’ and public information. When Mr. Sinclair mentioned his families’ different perspectives concerning menstruation I was quite happy that I had decided to view it asynchronously since I was very much in the camp of the Catholic Grandmother and find the topic significantly awkward to discuss in public. That the beginning of menstruation was held in such high esteem is something that is outside of my direct experiences, beyond advertisements that hide the fact behind various quirky metaphors.
Needless to say I have a few more topics to ponder following Niigan Sinclair’s presentation and will happily find another speaker for the next Pro-D event, if such a speaker will be forthcoming.
How great is the technology we have… To take the work of a day and shrink it into mere seconds…
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