After the Appology...

After the residential school appology and absorbing the things I learnt that day, I thought a lot about being Metis.  We did a full family tree and after significant pushing got my mother to submit her paperwork to register in the Metis nation.  She is diffident about the whole thing but with enought poking she did it.  It was pretty amazing the see how far back we could track people.

We also started identifying our girls on their school forms, but each year when the form came back for us to confirmm the information in the self identification section was empty again.  I guess the girls did not look metis enought to get to self identify.  Then two years ago the province did a more rigorous self identification exercise.  Suprise.  First Nations, Metis and Inuit children are still not being well served by the school system.  So we filled out that form.

And....we got a lot more calls from the social worker that year.  Maybe I am just overly sensitive but it seemed to matter a lot more what my children were wearing or looked like.  We were offered money for snow suits and to take courses.  I grew up proud poor and we never took nothing.  It was hard not to have that instinctive anger that they thought we were poor and to be more thankful that they were trying to help -  but the way it comes out seemed very unhelpful.

And every year it seems to be a similar story with the teachers.  It seems to require a trip to the school wearing a suit and a government employee badge before my children's issues are seen to be legitimate and not just the result of bad parenting.  I am probably being oversensitive about this stuff but I still wonder.

After my mother got her acceptance in the "nation", and I know there are a lot of politics there, I felt a little bit more legitimate.  I had claimed my Metisness for my family and then for my children, but not yet for me.  I do not "look metis" and i do not have a relationship with a metis community, but I have deep metis roots and I wanted to claim them.  Our family was proud to be Metis when it would have been easier to just assimilate.  I feel a reponsibility there.  One of the things I was also considering was "self declaring".

In the government there are four groups, women, people with disabilities, visible minorities and indians of all flavours who are encouraged to self declare in order to support the government in it's goal of being representative of the labour representation of these groups.  This is a highly problamatic definition in a lot of ways and overall representativeness has mostly given way to issues of actual representativeness, i.e., these people are not only represented in low level entry jobs.  In my category of Policy Analysts there is not good representation and in the Executive class it is even less.

I thought alot about self declaration as a person with disabilities but decided not to declare as my issues are mostly pretty easy for my employer to address and I worried that I would be taking away an opportunity from someone else.  This was really my thinking on the issue of self declaring as a metis as well.

Then about a year ago the department I work for brought in an Elder to talk about how the department could be more welcoming to First Nations peoples.  She gave a very thoughtful talk - none of her ideas have been persued.  At the end there was a space for questions and I raised this issue of self identification and explained how I didn't want to take away opportunities from someone else.  She looked right at me and said that when I think like that I am living out the very steriotypes that continue to hurt aboriginals.

I think that broke something in me.  I was colonalizing myself.  I was playing out the steriotype of the drunk indian on the street and since that wasn't me, I had to be white.  Thus began the year of reclaiming.