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National Indigenous History Month
and one day in that month, June 21st
is National Indigenous People's Day.
So what's this month all about
and when did it, along with the day first start?
Let's get into it.
I'm Isabel DeRoy-Olson and this is
National Indigenous History Month.
♪ [light]
National Indigenous History Month became an official
celebration in 2009, but National Indigenous
Peoples Day goes back a little further.
So let's start there.
OK,
let's cue up the timeline!
In 1982, the organization now called the
of First Nations,
a National Aboriginal Solidarity Day,
as Mary Jane Logan McCallum, a professor of history
at the
National Indigenous Peoples Day
is steeped in, um, kind of late 20th century
indigenous peoples pushing for recognition
of rights, including treaty rights in Canada,
and so Native people came together, especially in like,
1981 across Canada, and did this Solidarity Day
in November and then the next year,
that's when the
let's have a day and we're going to pick,
you know, June.
Isabel:
in Canada established anything official.
That was when the province of Quebec established
a day to celebrate indigenous culture.
Fast forward five years, a group of Indigenous
and non-Indigenous spiritual leaders called the
Sacred Assembly
the
Both call for a day to recognise Indigenous peoples.
On June 13th, 1996, Governor-General
Roméo LeBlanc announced the Government's intention
to have an annual national day of celebration
for Indigenous peoples.
Eight days later, on June 21st 1996,
Canada officially celebrated its first National Aboriginal Day.
Now let's jump way ahead to 2007, when Dr. McCallum says...
Aboriginal History Month was actually a suggestion
of an organisation called the
the
and their executive kind of came together and started
a kind of campaign, emailing and letter writing
to government officials to try to have a whole month
dedicated to understanding indigenous history
and they were successful at the, at the city level
in Regina and then at the provincial level in 2007.
Isabel:
the
a motion to make the month of June,
National Aboriginal History Month and the most recent
date on our timeline 2017 is when Prime Minister
Justin Trudeau changed the names to National Indigenous
People's Day and National Indigenous History Month.
This was to reflect a national and international
preference for the term Indigenous over Aboriginal.
OK , so there's your crash course timeline
of how this month and day officially became celebrations.
So now that we know how it started, let's get into
what it actually is.
So you might notice the word history in National
Indigenous History Month.
That's a pretty big clue of what this month is all about.
Eldon Yellowhorn, an author and professor
at
Is intended to have topics that are related
to Indigenous people and their history with Canada.
He thinks it's important to note that...
We don't owe our existence to Canada.
Our people and cultures were around long before Canada
was formed and in the last 155 years that we've been
citizens of Canada is only a small fraction
of our entire history here.
Indigenous history in North America and Canada
dates back thousands of years, long before settlers arrived.
Some argue 20,000 years,
some argue to time immemorial,
some argue, like, 5 to 7000 years,
but, like, there is an enormous amount of time
and if we think about the time since contact,
we've got like maybe 400 years, 500 years in certain places
in Canada and I think that, yeah, like, we have to start
to think about that time period as part of our
history in Canada as well.
So the month...
..is a way of introducing ourselves to Canadians
and enlightening people on our history
and cultures and traditions.
And learning about those traditions, history,
and culture is so much more varied than learning about
a single history.
That's a mistaken impression given, you know,
500 or so years ago
and it's one that has tended to meld all indigenous people
under one term, one one umbrella term,
and that's "Indian".
So people talk about an "Indian culture" as if there's
one culture that encompasses all indigenous people.
There are so many different cultures and people that
make up the term indigenous and each has its own
distinct history and culture.
An amazing example that Dr. Yellowhorn gave us was...
Archaeoastronomy is, is basically the way that
indigenous peoples use the night sky and also how they
organized the celestial objects that they saw.
And so in Blackfoot tradition,
the sky is a separate realm.
The sky world, like the Milky Way,
we refer to as the Wolf Road...
[in alternate language]
..and this is told in our story about
the sky wolves who came down from the sky country
to help people live better on the Earth
and then when they went back to the sky country,
that Wolf Road is the path that they took to come down
from the sky and to go back to the sky country,
and as they were leaving the Earth to go back
to the sky country, the last gift that they left
with humans was the gift of song
and so the way that we sing at powwows,
powwow music is all about the wolf howls,
inspired by wolf howls.
So whether you know about indigenous history
or are just starting to learn, Dr. Yellowhorn thinks...
Well, I'll just say it out loud.
We've, they've been ignorant about Indigenous cultures
and the month of June, Indigenous History Month
gives us that opportunity to consciously look at
Indigenous people and to find out what our cultures are
and what our contributions to Canada are.
And Dr. McCallum says that
history and contribution are rich and complex.
It seems like this history of the day and the month
are also connected to, um, emotions,
our emotions about the past, they're either celebrating
or they're, you know, mourning,
and those are the only two
and they can be one or the other.
So I want to, I want to think about a kind of more
complex understanding of history that isn't just
celebrating, you know, the person,
this one individual, right
or, you know, being, um, being really mournful about
this one particular event.
And there's celebrations happening all across
the country, there's summer solstice festivals,
and celebration and education in schools.
There's also powwows like the one Traditional Jingle dancer,
Chanel Higheagle goes to each year.
I've been going to the events at the Forks
with my family since I think I was about 11 or 12.
For me, like, I dance Jingle and that's a healing dance.
So when I'm dancing, I'm praying for myself
and my family and my community,
and powwow is just, there's categories of dance
and there're different stories between each dance
and so, yeah, Powwow's are just a really good place
to come together as a community and to welcome
outsiders too, we're very welcoming people.
It's a beautiful thing to experience as well.
I invite anybody, and whether you're Indigenous
or not Indigenous, I invite you to come out.
You'll learn so much and you'll experience so much
and you'll meet new people
and that's always a fun thing.
But as with other months dedicated to learning
about history and culture,
is one month really enough?
Well, I think it's something that is an ongoing process,
so it can't be confined to simply one month.
However, by putting one month aside to consciously
make that effort, it does highlight the fact that,
you know, there's these people there,
but it shouldn't be just one month that, ah,
the process of knowing each other,
that should be an ongoing process for the whole year.
What could that kind of Year-round process look like?
Dr. McCallum points to another country as an example.
I wondered about New Zealand, right, they decided
they were going to, you know, re-do, restructure
the curriculum in New Zealand to fundamentally involve
Indigenous history so that grades 1 to 10
was going to have Indigenous history throughout
and Indigenous history was going to be a fundamental part
of understanding New Zealand
Even though Canada and New Zealand are two different
countries with different Indigenous cultures
and dynamics, it's not hard to see why
History that dates back thousands and thousands
of years takes more than one month to really understand
and learn about.
National Indigenous History Month is a great chance
to have some intentional learning,
celebration and conversation around Indigenous history
and Canadian history.
I hope you take some time to learn more about
Canada's history and Indigenous peoples
and cultures.
That's it for
For
[speaks in alternate language]
We spoke to some wonderful people who helped us
with this video.
Eldon Yellowhorn is an archaeologist,
professor and founding chair of Indigenous Studies
at
Mary Jane McCallum is a professor of History
and Canada research chair in Indigenous Studies
at the
Chanel Higheagle is a Traditional Jingle dancer
from Roseau River, Anishinaabe First Nation.
We also referenced information from...
The Government of Canada...
..and
♪ ♪