Treaty Recognition Week in Grade 6

The first week of November is Treaty Week in Ontario.  For me, it is important to approach this week with the goal in mind of educating my students on what exactly treaties are, who was involved, and stress how the Indigenous people who signed these treaties were not treated fairly.  This was a busy week for me as I was focused on Treaty Week in my own classroom, created daily announcements for the school, and encouraged other staff members to cover the topic in their own classrooms as well.

On Monday I had my class complete a simple sticky note activity.  Purple for "Things I Already Know" about Treaties, and pink for "Questions I Have" about Treaties.  Below is a picture of what this ended up looking like.

As you can see we definitely had more questions than we did knowledge.  It was also interesting to note that much of what "we already knew" was somewhat idealistic and not exactly accurate.  I knew we were in for an eye opening week.

Tuesday we were lucky enough to have a guest speaker/presenter visit our junior classes to discuss treaties.  Esbikenh taught us about the importance of provisions, wampums, and why it is important to learn about treaties.  This was a great interactive experience for my students to take part in.  Thank you so much to Gretchen for setting this up for us at A.A. Wright!

Throughout the rest of the week we had valuable conversations about how in Ontario we are ALL treaty people, our own ancestral backgrounds, and how many individuals in our class have strong cultural ties to the nations who are represented in our treaties here in Ontario.

At the school level there were announcements read each morning to give some background on Treaty Week and what that means living in Wallaceburg.  These are the topics that were covered each day:

• Monday - General introduction to Treaty Week.  Posed the questions what is Treaty Week?  Why do we recognize it?  What do you think you will learn this week?
• Tuesday - Unfortunately I was sick this day and an announcement was not read.
• Wednesday - Overview of the McKee Purchase and Treaty 2, which is the treaty area that we live in here in Wallaceburg. 
• Thursday - Focused on Bkejwanong (Walpole Island) and how it is an exception to Treaty 2 since it is unceded territory.  Quickly discussed what unceded means and why Bkejwanong is unique.
• Friday - Tied our Ojibwe word of the week initiative to Treaty Week by explaining we were honouring the Indigenous people in our area who were not treated fairly during treaty negotiations and respecting the language of the Indigenous people who continue to live in our area.

I also created a couple of short videos in Clips that could be showed in classrooms.  You can check one of these out below:

Background information on the McKee Purchase and Treaty 2.

Staff members were also directed to our Program Department's blog to check out all the fantastic resources that Gretchen had curated for us to use!  If you would like to check those out click HERE.

All in all, I think it was a week of rich learning for our students.  I am hopeful that their increased knowledge of treaties in Ontario, and who was involved in them, will lead to a more in-depth understanding Indigenous perspective and history moving forward.

Thanks for reading!
- Allie

Ojibwe Word of the Week: November

This month our words of the week are changing from what we were doing the last two months. We started with learning greetings/sayings in Ojibwe, but after two months we are ready for a change. We have decided to learn an Ojibwe story each month and pull words from the story to use as our words of the week. If you'd like to know more about how we decided on this idea, please read our other blog post about meeting with Nancy from the SLNFC. The first Ojibwe story we are going to learn is the story of Turtle Island.

We needed to share why we are switching gears with our school community as well, so we shared why with a clip in our video announcements. We have shared that video as well.

Maang - Loon
Mzhiikenh - Turtle
Nigig - Otter
Zhashkoonh - Muskrat

Click here to access the Ojibwe Word of the Week November Words PDF

Below is the video we shared to explain the new direction for Ojibwe Word of the Week

Words of the Week for November

Treaty Recognition Week

Since 2016, the first week of November has been recognized as Treaty Week. We wanted to create awareness about the topic for our staff, students and school communities. We recognized that treaties are a complex topic and in order to make them accessible to students we needed to simplify without losing the importance of the information. We decided to make short videos with treaty information and facts that would be shared daily throughout the week. One of the ways we simplified the idea of a treaty for younger children was to present it as a promise. Chantima and Jen teach primary grades so they focused on the importance of keeping promises and what can happen if a promise is broken. They started the conversation by watching an episode of Franklin the Turtle called "Franklin's Promise", and then had classroom discussions about the importance of promises between people. Then, they connected those ideas and feelings to treaty relationships between the British Government and Indigenous People.

Below is the first Treaty Recognition Week video that was shared with their schools.

We also found a bunch of resources on our school board's elementary program blog. Gretchen curated a great list to support teachers and students. Click here to check out her resources!