Panel

Niagara College – an institute seeking to highlight the way that education has failed Indigenous students – has itself not succeeded in providing tools to support educators who want to help tell the truths about Indigenous peoples.

When instructor Jamie Oresar wanted to help secure a licensing agreement to screen the documentary ‘The Nature of Healing’ about the Mohawk Institute residential school – colloquially known as the Mush Hole for its horrid food offerings for its captive children – there were scant resources to support the screening.

Niagara College Academics convened a meeting with NC’s Indigenous Education and invited the makers of the ‘Nature of Healing’, and residential school Survivors featured in the film to discuss how to move forward at the college. Two key decisions were made:

1. Niagara College would pay for a curriculum guide to the film; then
2. The college would give all of the intellectual property away to the Survivors

Karl Dockstader, Oneida Bear Clan cultural advisor to the college, was asked to join the team to build the curriculum by Survivor Dawn Hill.

This panel will highlight the truth about the gaps that Jamie and Karl learned about in Niagara College and by working with local Survivor’s voices. As this dialogue about developing curriculum moves to a national level it is crucial that projects don’t follow a rigid template. The parts of this truth in Kanien’keha, On^yote:aka, Anishinaabe, Lenaape, Nehiyaw, and more are specific to this truth from this school for this community.

The college partnered directly with the filmmakers, the Mohawk Village Memorial Park – the Survivor led charity that will own the final curriculum, gained writing support from Brock University, hosted the Survivor meetings on the grounds of Six Nations Polytechnic, and heard directly from two panels of teachers at the college on what they needed to present this curriculum.

Even with these efforts the work is still just beginning, but the story of the curriculum, guided so carefully by Survivors, needs to be heard.

“These are our ‘truths’ not ‘stories’, you have to really listen repeatedly to the absolute truths of the lived experiences of Survivors,” shared Mohawk speaker and Mush Hole Survivor Diane Hill, “don’t carry white guilt, feel this documentary as a child and connect to that – internalize it and think about the children in your lives.”

This isn’t a how-to guide – this is what our community decided we needed to do.