A First Nations educator, dedicated to the idea of learning as a way of transforming people, shared some of her ideas and experiences with teachers and principals during a conference held at Wahta First Nation recently.

Diane Hill is a learning facilitator, instructor and program co-ordinator at the First Nations Technical Institute (FNTI) on the Tyendinaga Territory in Ontario and a traditional healer and counsellor as a member of the Bear Clan of the Mohawk Nation, situated on the Grand River Territory of the Six Nations. She is known for her ability to link learning with traditional aboriginal ways of regarding the world.

“In First Nations education, I can do things I can’t do otherwise,” she told delegates at Rekindling the Spirit, a symposium for aboriginal cultural awareness organized by the Wahta Mohawks and Trillium Lakelands District School Board. “One of the things I can do is burn things.”

Crouching to the floor, she lit some sweetgrass contained in a shell and fanned it with eagle feathers, wafting the aromatic smoke throughout the room.

“When I bring these things out, my students get afraid,” she said, indicating the eagle feathers, drums, rattles and the shell with sweetgrass spread on a blanket on the floor in front of her. “We have to reacquaint them with their culture because they lost that in the era of residential schools.”

Hill did not attend residential school but her grandmother did, and she is well acquainted with the results.

She described the education at First Nation schools as being punitive. The purpose of the system was to “civilize” or westernize the First Nation people.

“It had a reverberating effect through generations,” she said. “Children were not allowed to speak their language or participate in their own culture. The goal of the school was the assimilation.”

The children were to be “made fit” for life as a citizen of Canada. In the fall of each year they were separated from their family and friends.

Hill attended a community high school off the reserve where she grew up near Brantford and experienced the pressure to ignore her Mohawk culture and adopt that of Europeans.

“You were taught if you’re going to be acceptable, you’re going to have to look and talk like them,” she said.

“I tried all of this but was never accepted,” she said. “They knew I came on the Indian bus.”

Later, when busing was combined, the children still did not mix.

“Indians sat at the back of the bus,” she said.

Hill’s grandfather was Irish-Mohawk.

“He was a farmer and while he was alive, we were well off,” she said. He taught his children that native traditions would not “put bread and butter on the table,” she explained. However, when he died, the family lost the connection with the white community and the farming way of life and experienced poverty.

Over the years, there have been those in the First Nations community who wanted to maintain the old ways, performing ceremonies and speaking their own language in hiding. They did not do this without opposition. Hill’s grandmother told her that in 1924 the RCMP came to the reserve and took away whatever traditional articles they could find.

“When you grow up like this, you learn to be ashamed of yourself,” she said.

To reverse these imposed attitudes, Hill advocates a holistic learning model that teaches wholeness and inter-dynamics of body and spirit.

“We use the technique of whole person development for people to see what is beyond,” she said. “The way to get to the spirit is through the heart.”

Holistic learning considers the whole person — mental, emotional, physical and spiritual, she said. And it is beneficial for everyone, she said, not only First Nations children.

The conference grew out of an aim to increase the achievement of First Nations students. “Its purpose was to engage board personnel in the concepts and issues of aboriginal education and bring it to the forefront of our thinking,” said TLDSB communications officer Jeanne Pengelly.

Students from Wahta attend Glen Orchard Public School, Bracebridge and Muskoka Lakes Secondary School and Gravenhurst High School.