So, I'll begin with some of the themes in the pre-contact period. So, what was aboriginal learning like? And the first thing we need to consider is, who were the people doing the learning, the teaching, and what was the knowledge that was being transferred? It's safe to say, before we encountered others, that it was all indigenous. So it was , it was indigenous teachers, indigenous knowledge, and indigenous learners. That seems kind of obvious, right? But we'll see how that shifts as we go. And what were they learning about and where were they learning it? Well, first of all, the community and the environment were the classroom. So the learning could be taking place in the community. Just about anyone in the community was a potential teacher. Also a potential learner. So it was happening in families. It was happening in the extended family, in kinship relations. It was happening from other knowledgeable people in the community. So people had different things that they were knowledge keepers about. And, and this could be shared with people when the time was right. So that's another theme to think about, too, is the time had to be right. And it was very highly context-dependent learning. So the teacher often knew who it was they were teaching quite intimately. And they knew what they were prepared for. And what they were, you know importantly enough, not prepared for. So there was certainly a sense that you could put something in someone's path for them to learn about at an appropriate time, and give them every opportunity to pick that up at their own pace. And that's another characterization of pre-contact learning is people learn when they're ready to learn. People weren't differentiated into different, like segregated levels of learning or anything like that at least in the in most learning. There's an important distinction between some of the formal learning practices. So I'll probably talk about that now actually. So like one exception would be something like learning about using medicines. So a more formal apprenticeship might take place, where someone who is an acknowledged kind of elder, or knowledge keeper about a certain area, would form apprenticeships with certain people identified maybe quite young as having aptitude for it, or in some cases it would be something that was clan knowledge. So, if you were someone from the, the right clan, and you were identified as someone who would be picking up this knowledge, and being the one who carried it for the rest of the community, then you might enter into that formal relationship of learning with those elders. Elders is a, is a word I've been using a few times now. And I, it's important to acknowledge the centrality of, of elders to the community knowledge to indigenous knowledge transfer. And, so that concept of elder perhaps wasn't used in that way. But certainly, you know, there's a, there's a difference between, like, being a, living a long time, being a senior and being an elder. Um,often someone who has great knowledge, it's because they have had many years to acquire and, and learn that knowledge and become adept at transferring that knowledge. So often they are older, but there, there certainly are people who would be recognized as having certain spiritual gifts or connections who might be treated as leaders and, and essentially be like elders because they have a special gift to share. What else can I say about, about the elders? There's also a notion, too, of people who had skill would then be followed. So in a, in a sense, communities choose who are the elders and who are the knowledgeable people by following them, by going to them when they need something. And so, it was a process where you weren't necessarily kind of elected to the position or just claimed you were, and that made it so. But that people, by going to you for guidance or help, or going to you for your knowledge about medicine, or going to you for your knowledge about food gathering or hunting skills, that made you a leader in that particular area of knowledge. And that, that would then be the way that your eldership would kind of be recognized, the way that your knowledge about a certain thing and, would, would happen. And if you kind of started to lose that ability, people went with someone else. And that, that matters for governance, too, for understanding governance. People chose their leaders by choosing to follow them. And if, if there was no need to or if they were losing kind of support in those people then you were free to go somewhere else. So it's really kind of like the community decided these things. How are, what were some of the methods of learning, in the pre-contact period? It's important to acknowledge that play was an important part of learning, as, as children. So, the kinds of games and the kinds of toys or dolls or activities that children were encouraged to use or to engage in often had very important skills underlying this play that, that would serve them well when they needed to feed their families or serve the community in other ways when they were much older. There was gender differentiation amongst these toys and games. And there was a sense of, of gender distribution of labor, labor, certainly. So women had certain roles. Men had certain roles. This is probably not the space to get into it, but there was definitely more genders than male and female which kind of complicate this notion. But for the purposes of learning and education, it's enough to know that for the majority of people, they kind of learned what it was to be a man, what it was to be a woman. And it's, there were some important moments in one's life where these teachings would be bestowed upon, upon young men and young women. So often these were again, kind of over generalizing for all indigenous peoples across North America, but there's usually coming of age rituals or ceremonies, which could last for a very long time. For the strawberry ceremony among[UNKNOWN] women or young girls we're talking, like, about a year of teachings about the changes happening in your body and what it means to be a woman. And there'd be a huge celebration after that year of receiving those teachings. And it, coincided with a girl's first menstruation. So that, the teachings would start and then there'd be like a cycle of a year where she was not engaging in the same way with the community, but, but had access to the women who were teaching her about, about the changes. And then when a year passed there'd be a huge celebration, and this is when the strawberries would come out and there'd be a feast to acknowledge that learning. For the boys, fasts which would indicate, purpose, meaning which wasn't always obvious from the teachings recieved during that fast, but there would perhaps be some really important images and symbols and visitation and revealed knowledge, which would, the significance of which might not always be apparent for many years. So, for some, they carry those visions and it would only become apparent much later in time what it meant about what their purpose and role is to be. Often names went along with this too, so different naming ceremonies and traditions would also characterize learning. I mentioned earlier about how you might learn certain clan knowledge and responsibilities. This is certainly for the indigenous peoples who had a, a clan tradition. Then there would be responsibilities with, that went with membership in a clan, which would be taught to you as you were growing up, and which you would then carry with you going through life. An example, I, guess being like Enish Nave clan structures, there's basically, kind of depends where you are and who you're talking to, but it's anywhere from kind of five major clans to seven, and different clan totems or identities within those major ones. And they had implications for things like governance, so who was poliitcal leaders, who made decisions for community. There's three, kind of main plans that deal with that, one of the being more kind of philosophical and intellectual, and the other two balancing each other out day to, like, day to day decision making and also larger decision making. Then there were clans that had a kind of a protection role to play, so they would be we talk about the kind of moving out in sort of concentric circles. So there is that circle that was very core to the community in the village and the, the clans then that were sort of around. They, they were kind of patrolling and making sure that the village was safe, that the men and the women and the children, and the elders, sorry, elders, women and children were safe within that village. And it's interesting that one of the reasons that the Bear Clan in the[INAUDIBLE] culture became associated with medicines is because the Bears were actually, kind of initially the, the police force and the ones who were kind of patrolling the external boundaries, and in doing so they spent a lot of time in the forest. And so they learned about the different uses of plants in the, in the forest. And their knowledge of the plants then made the medicine keeper. So now we talk about Bear people being medicine people, and it sort of grew and developed with that other role they had. And we get out, and we have the Martin clan who had a role of intermediary between neighboring cultures, and, and peoples. And, so now, as we're picking up pieces from the, the colonial period, if someone comes back into[UNKNOWN] culture without knowledge sometimes, and if they're mixed blood too, sometimes they're put in that Martin clan, because they are an intermediary between other cultures. Anyway, so you can see that there's a, there's a whole set of teachings, responsibilities that kind of go with membership in a clan. And if we go to the West Coast, especially, there's also Moyatees. And so you would have Moyatee responsibilities that would dictate the kind of learning you would have you know, certain instructions about how to carry out ceremonies at a time of, of a death or a loss, and how to how to prepare and engage in those ceremonies.
