Teaching First Nations Children in a Public School: Rude Awakenings of a Black Ghost

Yvonne Brown

doi:10.18733/cpi29727

Authors

Yvonne Brown Independant Scholar

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18733/cpi29727

Keywords:

English curriculum, Black ghost, assimilation, cultural anthropology, story- telling research

Abstract

This essay shares some episodes of rude awakenings and epiphanies that I experienced during my time teaching English to First Nations children, in Lytton, BC. In the essay, I map the contexts for my rude awakenings and epiphanies, and explain my miseducation in the British colony of Jamaica in the 1950s and early 1960s. As importantly, I show how my post-secondary education followed the same “civilizing mission” at The University of British Columbia. Finally, I pay tribute to three First Nations colleagues, whose innovative, research method of storytelling and life writing, influenced the topic and research methods I subsequently adopted in my doctoral dissertation (2005).

Author Biography

Yvonne Brown, Independant Scholar

Yvonne Brown, EdD, is a retired teacher, university lecturer and former school trustee in British Columbia, Canada. Dr. Brown is currently an Adjunct Professor in the Social Justice & Community Studies Department, at St. Mary’s University, Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Since retirement, Dr. Yvonne Brown has become an independent historical researcher and author. She enjoys conducting historical, autoethnography research, the method she employed to write her memoir Dead Woman Pickney: A Memoir of Childhood in Jamaica (2010 & 2022), published by Laurier University Press (distributed by University of Toronto Press). Dr. Brown has also published several journal articles concerning African/Black people’s status in the history of education in Canada. Dr. Yvonne Brown is currently conducting extensive archival research in Jamaica and the UK, and is writing a political biography of the Jamaican Charles Archibald Reid (1887-1944).

References

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