October 23rd was slated to be a day of learning for the class and myself. According to the plan, each student was intended to participate in some of the day’s lectures and report back their learning here in the form of a blog post. For myself, this plan was not going to go exactly to plan given the fact that Friday the 23rd was a foggy, cold, windy day on the west coast. See, on Friday I was making a journey from Victoria to Nanaimo on a sailboat named “Lapse of Reason”, and having a hard time balancing the workload of navigating the vessel while at the same time getting to my scheduled lecture. Adding to the complicated nature of the day was the fact that the internet was spotty, meaning that connecting to anything more than an email account was challenging to say the least.

Thankfully for me, we were presented with the option of listening to some podcasts in substitution for the day’s lectures. As I did truly want to get as much out of the day as possible I took it upon myself to listen to several different podcasts ranging in topic matter from Indigenous suicide to outdoor teaching methods. One of the podcasts that stood out to me was one presented by Harold Johnson via the podcast series “Think Indigenous”. In his lecture, Harold focused on two central themes. The first of these, was the theme of internalized stories and how they can be used to create a character or person. Harold touched on the fact that he had internalized the story of himself as a rough and tough miner and portrayed this in his outward character. This character was fluid, however, given the fact that Harold took on an entirely new character after having kids and taking on the role of the “protector”. From this realization and much-lived experience, Herold determined that internalized stories can be key to an individual’s success or failure. According to Harold’s point of view, people with internalized stories that are positive are far more likely to succeed than those who have the opposite.

With this established Harold moved on to his second theme, this being the reasons behind Indigenous failure in society. In terms of this theme, Harold had several theories, the main one being that the story of Aboriginals as “victims” sets them up to have a mentality of failure right from the start. Negative messaging like this makes individuals feel “lesser than” and for this reason, Harold feels that the first step in fixing Indigenous failure is to change the underlying story surrounding Indiganaity to a more positive one.

I must say that I really enjoyed this talk given the fact that it provided a take on the problems facing Indigenous people. The perspective taken by Harold seemed to me to be contrary to the current philosophy being embraced by society at large. I feel that a lot of the time First Nations are portrayed to be the “victims” of colonialism and of residential schools. Although this is absolutely the case, however, painting First Nations in this way does not help them move forward and away from these past traumas. I also liked the fact that Harold was not looking for outside help regarding solutions to the problems facing Canadas First Nations. Rather, he was a change maker, looking to impose his solutions on the system and make a real difference for his people and his country. The world needs more people like this as it is rare that simply complaining about something will result in solutions to problems.

I hope to use what I have learned from this and the other talks I listened to on Friday to improve my practice going forward. I learned a lot from Fridays’ Pro-D and I hope this learning continues going forward.