Time and school

 

Woods in Port Alberni, Nuu-chah-nulth territory

Report published in 1996

This section from Indian Residential Schools: The Nuu-chah-nulth Experience struck me:

People on the coast are very aware of the seasons and refer to that daily so it’s now herring season, then it’s cod season, then sealing time, then spring salmon time or it’s berry picking season, or cedar stripping season, or it’s the time to go out and dig clams, so a sensible awareness of season is central to the way we live, and to Nuu-chah-nulth ways of looking at the world. To be taken from that and to have to live in a place where seasons were irrelevant and it's snowing outside while you go outside and play at 3:30-4:30 if it’s raining outside then you go out and play at 3:30-4:30 and if it’s a blistering hot day then you go out to play from 3:30-4:30 and when the bell rings regardless of what the weather is doing Sumer, Winter, Spring and Fall you hop to get in your lines and march in for supper, that alteration in the way we perceive the world relevant to time is real significant loss of culture.

People in traditionally Nuu-chah-nulth culture make time for other people who have a need when they can. They make time when they can to help when others have work that needs to be done that requires more than just their own effort. People make time to help others who are in pain when there is a loss in a family or there’s trouble with someone that’s extremely sick and so on. Other people pitch in and help out that sense of time, our time being important and that we use our time to benefit our own family and other families around us to support village life, that sense of time went out the window when children went to Residential school and they began to live by bells and whistles, line up and get into the school and line up and go to the chapel and pray and line up and go have your shower and stand by your bed at attention till the bell rings, then go to bed, the bell rings get up. That change in the sense of time was very dramatic and I don’t think that it changed over time, I think that it was dramatic for people in 1900, I think it was dramatic for people in 1940 and in 1970. The sense that our time doesn’t belong to our family, isn’t there for our family to benefit from, or for us to benefit from changed so that our time is there at the disposal of people in authority. 

You did each of the other activities because someone else set down your blocks of time and lots of times students had a very hard time in school because they knew it was time to be doing something and they weren’t able to be doing it. All they were able to do is go to class.

These reflections on time exist in the chapter Loss of Native Culture. Sense of time, or changed sense of time, appears again in the next chapter, Going Back Home.

In all cases, no village on the coast operated on school time, or operated around the kinds of timetables that students were used to in Residential school. So, often time, they thought that things were un-organized, disorganized, not really very well plotted out, or that the lack of minute-to-minute plan represented the fact that people were stupid, were dumb, and not able to plan their days well. That someone could sit around and leisurely work on a canoe when they pleased, do hunting when they pleased, sleep when they pleased, eat when they pleased, and visit their family when they pleased... seemed un-organized, disorganized, or, at best, at least, disturbing, different, other, foreign, to them, in relation to the conditioning that they received in Residential schools.

Feelings of sadness and shame come up for me. I have been a schedule-obsessed person, and the structures of school fed and reinforced my interest, so that even when I wanted to care for people around me, or care for myself, the conditioning was too strong. The pandemic, the case of sickness and death in my family, did at last break through. I have some new attitudes toward time and who and what deserve it.

School, though, remains a sticky subject. I'm a teacher in a public school system. At this point, schools are schedule-obsessed. The description of Residential school with regard to time is still fairly accurate. Beyond acknowledging big holidays, schools don't seem to recognize seasonality, let alone personal, family, spiritual, and social obligations. Sticky.