Opinion: My First-Nations Identity Feels More Like An Absence
Indigenous stories are ongoing, not simply legends from the past. I don't want my students to have the distorted idea that First Nations people have vanished or are not "modern."
As a child in elementary school, I hoped that my First-Nations heritage would give me supernatural abilities like uncommon tracking skills. Many Native sidekicks in movies and TV seemed to have the power to discern in the smallest detail what had passed their way. I remember sitting on a large yellow carpet with my classmates, convinced that I could sense when our teacher was about to return from the bathroom.
It has taken a lot of growth to free myself from the superficial fantasies and deep-rooted anxieties about what it means to be First Nations. For too long, those fantasies ensnared me thanks to the images of Native peoples belonging only in the past
