A Discussion with Craig Abotassaway, Social Worker at Native Alcohol and Drug Abuse Program, and Gloria Oshkabewisens-McGregor, Teacher, Shawanosowe School, Whitefish River First Nation, Ontario, Canada

With: Craig Abotassaway Berkley Center Profile Gloria Oshkabewisens-McGregor Berkley Center Profile

June 11, 2015

Background: As part of the Education and Social Justice Fellowship, in June 2015 student Caitlin Snell interviewed Craig Abotassaway, who works with Native Alcohol and Drug Abuse Program, and Gloria Oshkabewisens-McGregor, a teacher at Shawanosowe School at Whitefish River First Nation in Ontario. In this interview Abotassaway and Oshkabewisens-McGregor discuss the unexpected trajectories of their careers, what they enjoy most about working in Indigenous communities, and the significant role of culture in education.
Would you like to begin by introducing yourselves?

Craig Abotassaway
: Craig Abotassaway, and my background is in social work. I have a master’s degree in Social Work, so I do clinical work for the schools in the area, so that's for kids 18 and under for clinical counseling. And of course with my background in the culture, I bring to that position a combination of both Western and Indigenous practices to the social work that I do. So I do a lot of the cultural teachings and ceremonies that involve the medicines and the healing of the plants, and then also the Western clinical approaches to kids that I see, so I'm in the schools for those purposes.

Gloria Oshkabewisens-McGregor
: My name is Gloria—my English name is Gloria, and I always honor my father with the names I carry, because you know you have spirit names, you have your English names, and then your last name…I'm originally from Wikwemikong on the island, Manitoulin Island, and I've been living here for a lot of years now. My daughter turned 38 yesterday, so for about 38 years I've been living here, and this is my home now. So I taught for 19 years at the Shawanosowe School. I was elected by elder teachers to come in. It's interesting when you say that because they recognize, elders used to recognize children and their gifts and they used to pull those children out. And they recognized something in me and they pulled me in the school, so that's how I started, and I went on to teach language and culture in the classroom. Right now I'm back again, coming here every Thursday teaching since September; I work in the health centers now in a different aspect of healing, spiritually, culturally, emotionally...that's the other aspect of your being.


How did you get involved in your current position?


Abotassaway:
For me I think I was led into this direction, I originally went into school for accounting. I went to college for that and it didn't work out, and I went into electrical engineering and I finished that and went back to my community, and there was a post in the community for a social worker, and at the time people knew me as a person who led a healthy lifestyle, was drug and alcohol-free and those things, so they kind of just offered me the job. Here I was out of college looking for a job in electrical engineering, and they were offering me a job with the same pay and they said they'd send me back to school, and that's how I got started in social work, so I don't say that it's something I chose. I was led into that, and I did that for a number of years as a drug, alcohol, and youth worker. Then I went back to school for my master’s degree and wanted to change and went into clinical counseling, just to maintain, just to take another step in the social work I was doing, just to work from a different perspective.

A lot of that process had a big impact on the work I was doing traditionally. So about 25 years ago I started walking this path I'm on now traditionally of regaining my culture with ceremonies, knowledge, and understanding about how I was as a Native man, and throughout that process and work that was going on at the same time I wanted to take both of those to the next level, which is the work I’m doing now. So a large part of the work I do now is a combination of what I practice personally as a Native man within my culture with the ceremonies and the healing and all of that work, and then bringing together the Western side of the education I got. Both are intertwined now at this point; I carry the duo role.

Oshkabewisens-McGregor
: Well, like I said before, when I was a young parent, the elder teachers of the old schools, they pursued me and kept asking me to come in and see if I can start working in the school and come be a supply, and I always said no, but they kept pursuing and finally I agreed and I said, “I'll come and watch what you do, then.” And I came in and watched, and observed all the classes, and then after a while they said, "Would you like to supply?" and I said, “No, I can't do that, I don't know how to do that,” and eventually they got me to supply, and I realized that I had a connection for some reason; like Craig is saying, we're just led into this position somehow, you know. You can have a plan of what you want to do, a settled plan, a long-term plan, but when I look at how this path led was that somebody else had a plan for me they'd already laid out for me, so I ended up doing supply. Then they asked me if I wanted to teach kindergarten, but I had no teacher's training, never graduated from teacher's college or anything. I did take summer courses with the other teachers, so they said, “No, you can teach kindergarten,” and I was so amazed that they would trust me like that, not having any Western academic education, but I went out to teach kindergarten, and it was such a beautiful time.

So I started to teach the medicine to the children, and I felt like I didn't know my language back then, so I practiced and practiced with some friends who could speak Ojibwe. So I practiced and practiced at home so I could teach the children three or four words the next day. So we learned the colors of the medicine wheel, then we went on to learn the four races of men. But what really pushed me in there, and I'd say it's a spirit that's pulling me in there, and when we looked at the four races of man, I asked the children, “Who are you here? Which one of these are you here?” and, like, you see their little energy, they all went up to the medicine wheel and they touched, and I say this with all due respect, the white part of the medicine wheel, the white man, the white person, and it just hit me, like, it hit me so hard. I felt the vibration like a drum that hit me, and I realized why I'm there, so then we relearned a lot of things to bring that out, bring that cultural awareness true to medicine way, but I was teaching myself at the same time…

So to this day I can carry a conversation with a fluent speaker, I can do ceremony in the language, it's innate, it's rebirth, so that's what I was told by the elder. You put the tobacco down, it's in you, you just nurture it, that's why you're at that school; the children are showing you what they need you to do so you can bring it back to them.

What do you enjoy most about your positions?

Abotassaway
: That one success; it's never about the masses as a whole because we can't fix everybody, but there's always just that one success that sticks with you through time. I was the drug and alcohol counselor in my community, and through that was assigned the youth role to take care of the youth population, and in all those years, five kids through 20 years of doing that, 18 years of doing that, there's probably five that I can count on one hand that stand out with success, and you never know that in the moment. When you work that long, it's to see them when they're young parents themselves, when they're 25 and they talk about what it was like for them and the work that they did, and they talk about that one moment, the one thing that they did that kept them away from the drugs or alcohol, and they just share that one story with you, so it's always the reflection back on that one success or one story.

Oshkabewisens-McGregor
: The feeling, it's the feeling and what you see. I love the feeling that I can see a person be their true self without having to dictate how they need to be, but yet in teaching I always say the children are the curriculum. The children are the long range; the children are the day-planner. Even though I know you need to follow this other plan, that's basically why we're there, but for me I love to see it. Everyone can have their own characteristics and their ways of dealing with something, their own this, their own that. One thing about why I love to do what I do, is teaching the children when they're dealing with issues, their explosive behaviors, they're not bad. It's just learning them and helping them understand that they have gifts and tools that can help them to do it. I remember I was working with children that had explosive behaviors, but when it was honored and addressed in every aspect of them, and it didn't have to be long-winded, they felt acknowledged and whatever they were carrying, they knew that they were acknowledged and that behavior didn't continue…

Basically, like Craig, you love to see the success, and it may not reach the textbook success, but it's a success in the individual.

What role should culture play in education?


Abotassaway:
For me, the medicine wheel talks about balance, and in the medicine wheel, the medicine wheel is what's called our university, and when you look at the medicine wheel; I was just sitting here reflecting on it, about all the different teachings that you can talk about, and this is just the starting point on the carpet here: the four directions, the colors, the animals that are present, the feathers, the dream catcher. So the medicine wheel, when you look at it, that's our university, and one of the things we need to be reminded of all the time is balance, and when you look at the center of the medicine wheel you're forced to look at the beginning point when the Creator sat with the four races of man at the beginning of time and they talked about that balance, and they talked about the importance of the physical side of our lives, the emotional side of our lives, the mental side of our lives, and the spiritual side of our lives. So if you always reflect back on what the Creator gave as instructions at the beginning of time, the education system is the opposite of that, the education system focused strictly on the mental side of knowledge, and there's teaching behind that of who carries that responsibility…

So with the teachings of the medicine wheel, you're constantly reminded of what the Creator gave at the beginning of time, which education in itself is not important, there needs to be a balance of what is taught and shared with a child as you're bringing them up, and I would say that parents can carry out the rest. But kids spend more of their time throughout a lifetime in school than they do with parents or in any other aspect of life, so it's a flawed system in itself that it only focuses on education so it needs to encompass what Gloria talks about, the day of school should not just be focused on math, science, and academics as a whole. It should encompass learning about themselves as an emotional being, as a physical being. In general in life, we focus on the mental and the physical too often; we rarely teach understanding about the emotional, the spiritual, so with that there needs to be balance in the education system, it needs to be a priority, not just about the academics for the Western world, but a holistic world view on what is it that each race brings to the world.
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