Essay on "Aboriginal Art"

Essay 8 pages (2442 words) Sources: 5 Style: APA

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Teaching Aboriginal Art

Canada has a very rich and unique history in the modern era, having maintained connections to its parent country while achieving independence in a peaceful manner. At first, Canada was also unique in the relationships formed between early settlers and the indigenous tribes that existed in the country for thousands of years -- since the beginning of time, according to many members of the First Nations. Unfortunately, Canada's unique peaceful and accommodating ways could not stand up to the test of time, and eventually many of the people of the First Nations and the other indigenous peoples of the Canadian region lost their ancestral homelands and eventually even their culture. Especially in the latter half of the twentieth century and into our current era, there have been several movements since the time these people were first marginalized to recapture and relearn the things the people of these cultures can offer.

Diversity is important and useful in schools in any situation -- it breeds understanding between individuals, so that students learn to take each other seriously as individuals, and not as representatives of something different, foreign, and inferior. With the world growing ever smaller in this Information Age, and the ability to talk to someone on the other side of the world at speeds that seem instantaneous (and, for all intent and purposes, such communication is instant) means that the appreciation of cultures that are often radically different from our own must be instilled in the next generation of thinkers and doers. Without this mindset, the world will at best find itself in a gridlock, and at worst will be the staging ground for numerous petty conflicts. The promotion of diversity helps to heal many social ills, and there are no institutions in any society better equipped to introduce diversity and foster its acceptance and appreciation in young and still-forming minds than in the classrooms in our schools.

Diversity is an important thing to keep in mind in all contexts, and especially so in a country now dominated by forces that, in essence, denied equal access and equal appreciation of different cultures. Modern Canadians have come a long way in achieving this equality and respect for all of the many diverse groups of people that make up this country, and have done since the beginning of its modern history. The First Nations and other aboriginal peoples that were here before this modern history began, however, are still being marginalized today; evidence suggests that not only do they have unequal access to many social institutions, including schools, but materials covered in the schools also neglect the teaching of aboriginal culture, which in a very real way amounts to exclusion of aboriginal students (Canadian Education Association [CEA hereafter], 2009).

Aboriginal culture is vital to accepting and celebrating the true diversity of Canada, which in turn is essential for fostering feelings of global cooperation in Canadian youth. One of the best ways to introduce young students to the rich and complex culture of the many indigenous people is through an examination of their art. In British Columbia alone there are over two-hundred different First Nation communities, each with their own distinctive artistic style (Aboriginal Tourism, 2009). This wide array of different approaches to art reflects the differences that exist in the various First Nation peoples, revealing how incorrect it is to paint any group with a broad brush stroke (pun painfully intended), no matter how tempting. This is something it has taken most societies and governments a very long time to figure, as even the most cursory examination of the treatment of aboriginals in Canada will reveal. Though the situation is far from perfect today, it is much better than the state of things in years and decades past.

Human history has shown a very general trend towards assimilation of conquered peoples into the conquerors' culture. This occurred repeatedly with ancient tribal cultures; most of the people that the Greeks and then the Romans conquered became first Hellenized and then Latinized. Other examples abound; the Turkish Empire and the Christian Crusades also had huge effects on the cultures of the various peoples involved. The issue of religion was also especially potent in the New World, and did much to determine the treatment of and attitude towards the native peoples found there. The assimilation of these people, however, was much more conscious and pointed than it had been in many ancient instances, and also involved heavy amounts of eradication. Basically, a system that completely denied the beliefs and way of life of many indigenous people was put into place, which did a great deal to shape the attitude towards aboriginal culture that is held by many people today, whether consciously or not.

George Heriot, an early explorer of North America, wrote of the apparent belief of many First Nation people in an afterlife that "this principle, almost universally received among the Indians, was of great utility, by enabling many of the tribes of that people to admit with less difficulty the doctrines of the Christian faith" (Heriot, ca. 1807, pp. 358). Like many -- if not most -- early and even later explorers of the region, Heriot saw only the opportunity for assimilation the similarities between European and First Nation culture, rather than recognizing any inherent merits in their culture as it stood to the First Nation people themselves.

The condescension that Heriot displayed towards the aboriginals he encountered -- and according to his text he encountered many of them, throughout the Americas -- did not end with a simple desire to show the natives the "right path." He rather hypocritically believed that their animistic religion displayed their lack of cognitive abilities simply because it contained fewer gods than he was expecting from a "pagan" tribe: "It is in proportion only to the diffusion of science, and to the expansion of the mental faculties, that the catalogue of any system of Pagan mythology becomes augmented" (Heriot, ca. 1807, pp. 366). This type of attitude unfortunately persisted long past Heriot's own time, and became part of official doctrine for much of Canada's history. It was long believed that the best -- and perhaps only -- way to educate aboriginals was to deny them access tot heir own culture and indoctrinate them in European culture, religion, and language in an attempt to "civilize" them (CEA, 2009).

This attitude led to major problems for the aboriginal community, which in turn has had an effect on Canadian society at large. By 1874, residential schools had been set up that removed aboriginal children from their homes and cultures in order to more effectively indoctrinate them in the ideals, beliefs, and values of European (now "Canadian") society (CEA, 2009). The detrimental effects that these now-obvious human rights violations had on the aboriginal community should be painfully obvious. Less obvious, though perhaps more insidious because of its subtlety, are the issues that such actions caused in Canadian society and the world at large. Though such programs have of course ended, the knowledge and practice of aboriginal culture was hugely diminished by their decades of use, and feelings about the inferiority and even wickedness or un-Godliness of aboriginal culture has persisted to this day, diminishing both knowledge and appreciation of the oldest and perhaps richest part of Canadian history.

Education in general has been unfairly balanced when it comes to the aboriginal peoples of Canada since the educational system was first formalized under the Canadian Constitution. For the most part, education of Canadians is up to the provinces, but aboriginal education has always been up to the federal government (Carr-Stewart, 2006). As late as 2000, the Auditor General of released a report that found, among other things, that the educational needs of First Nation peoples was not being met (Carr-Stewart, 2006). This reflected a larger trend in the Canadian education system of an almost willful ignorance of aboriginal issues, which occurred in both the First Nation schools and provincial mainstream institutions (Carr-Stewart, 2006).

At the same time, certain aspects of aboriginal art were being exploited for profit, as certain Inuit carvings began to be mass produced in certain communities (Cooper & White, 2005). At first this seems to counter the idea that aboriginal culture is under appreciated by Canadian society in general, but in reality the artifacts created by the Inuits in these situations cheapened both their skills and their culture (Cooper & White, 205). Far from helping to preserve the culture of the Inuits and other aboriginal peoples, the voyeuristic aspect that many "Western" or European individuals bring to bear when examining indigenous cultures further marginalizes the culture by making it something "quaint" and irrelevant in the modern world as anything but a curiosity piece (Cooper & White, 2005). Such exoticization even led to the widespread belief that aboriginal art practices were little more -- or less -- than a form of witchcraft.

This makes it very apparent that the attitude many of European-descended people towards the aboriginal community… READ MORE

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