Saint Thomas Aquinas Secondary School, West Keith Road, North Vancouver, BC, Canada
While stuck at home with COVID, I read the book Seven Fallen Feathers by Tanya Talaga. It speaks about the deaths of seven Indigenous students attending school in Thunder Bay. Police did not take helping Indigenous people, their missing reports or investigations seriously, and as a result, First Nations youth had no trust in the police when experiencing racism and even assault from white people in the city. Despite residential schools being closed, students were still dying and being found in rivers all along Thunder Bay. Intergenerational trauma, racism, leaving home to live in a big and unwelcoming city were factors leading to alcohol abuse, hate crimes towards Indigenous people and the lives lost. What shocked me the most about this book was that this all happened between the years of 2000-2011. We were all alive; I was not too much younger than some of the victims.
Stories are powerful; they have the ability to mentally transplant you into another person’s world. This makes me wonder how many stories are lost, especially from Indigenous people who had lived in the Metro Vancouver area and experienced hardships from colonialism. Furthermore, I wonder how many stories there are today about hardships faced by Indigenous people that are not widely available to the public, or are just not sought out for by others.
I took a visit to St. Thomas Equinas, which is a private school in North Van. It sits on the site of a former residential school. It ran from 1899-1958, and is now the private school’s staff parking lot (CTV, 2021). When I visited the school, there was no sign documenting that a residential school once stood here. It seems as though the school is trying to erase the story of a dark past. Where do those stories live now? What can the land tell us about the dark side of Vancouver’s history? As future educators, how can we support decolonization and make sure that stories of the Indigenous are heard? This visit left me with more questions than answers. “We strive to lead our students to re-cognize, in the full sense of coming to know again, that constructed cityscapes within urban contexts are also natural landscapes in that we are all part of “the natural.” They exist in a relationship with Land that was originally occupied and continues to be occupied within Aboriginal peoples’ traditional territories” (Styres et al., 2013). This means than Saint Thomas Equinas is a natural landscape existing in relation to the land.
I would like to find more stories about Indigenous stories from Metro Vancouver. I have been struggling to find these stories from the land, and it seems like google searches offer mode immediate information. Perhaps using the internet, I can find more stories about places in Metro Vancouver.