Indigenous Exchange

To Promote Healthy Indigenous Communities

Education

We are having to find ways to recognize what it is that is happening to a child when he or she daydreams, because this kind of visual thinking, you know, might be of more value with respect to learning how to live with one another than learning how to work a mathematical problem…there is something spontaneous and religious about visual thinking which is being ignored in public schools.
-Ted Mahto, Red Lake Chippewa, from The Everlasting Sky

Education Dave Anderson on Education Harvard Pays Scholarships Listening

... there is a beautiful meaning in the passage of ideas through the stories the people told-the ability to tell a visual story-the words spoken between a father and son.

Some White teachers believe that Indians just can’t learn how to read well, but the people have the subskill memories… through visual concepts-like daydreaming-which is an area of education that is almost totally ignored..

I think we are going to have to learn in the public schools, Mahto said, “to recognize the Indian children who daydream as a very constructive kind of behavior, rather than to say he is not interested in working, you know; this kind of visual thinking is extremely important to everyone.

-Ted Mahto, The Everlasting Sky,
Gerald Vizenor, Native Voices, Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2000.

-Peter Matthieson, the Snow Leopard
Childhood is full of mystery and promise, and perhaps the life fear comes when all the mysteries are laid open, when what we thought we wanted is attained.  It is at the moment of seeming fulfillment that we sense irrevocable betrayal, like a great wave rising silently behind us, and know most poignantly what Milarepa meant: “All worldly pursuits have but one unavoidable and inevitable end, which is sorrow; acquisitions end in dispersion; buildings, in destruction; meetings, in separation; births in death…”  Confronted by the uncouth specter of old age, disease, and death, we are thrown back upon the present, on this moment, here, right now for that is all there is.  And surely this is the paradise of children, that they are at rest in the present, like frogs or rabbits.