Blackstock – TRC and ECE

The power of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is it pulled back the drape a little bit on Canada’s colonial history and allowed Canadians to take a peek behind that colonial curtain. Many for the first time to see what was Canada’s role in residential schools? What happened to the children in those residential schools? And how can we fix this collectively as a nation? 

So, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission released its final report in 2015. It has 94 calls to action. The top ones are all to do with children including remedying inequalities and child welfare care for First Nations, Métis and Inuit children. Also, implementing Jordan’s Principle, making sure that they have adequate education, making sure teachers are trained about First Nations, Métis and Inuit people so they can support their students in learning and also understand their student’s liberalities in a better way.  

So all those calls to action are there and you should really take a look at them as an early childhood educator to see which ones you can activate not only as a professional in your professional and as a citizen in your personal life but also to engage the children in your centres with.  Which is where Spirit Bear comes in. And you can see here, he’s actually got an official TRC pin. And that was given to him by the chairperson of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Murray Sinclair.  

So, Spirit Bear and the TRC commissioners know each other very well and Spirit Bear has all kinds of free activities you can do in your early childhood centre and with the families if you’d like to implement the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions calls to action. And we’ve made it super easy for you. Spirit Bear has a calendar that you can access free of charge on our website and every month has a free activity that children can do. So right now, we’re in Honouring Memories, Planting Dreams season.  

So, what we do is we ask children and adults and community members, they can do it as one child or as a group, to plant a garden in memory of the children who were in residential school. And then the act of planting is to learn about one of the calls to action and say, “Yes, I’m going to help out with that.”  

So, it’s a very simple thing. We also have what we call Bear Witness Day for Jordan’s Principle where we invite children who are attending daycare, school  or an adult in the workplace to bring their teddy bear to work or to the daycare or to school to honour Jordan River Anderson because that was his favourite toy. He’s the founder of Jordan’s Principle. And then to use that to educate other children, other people in your life about Jordan’s Principle so that First Nations children can access those services.  

And to make it even easier on our website, we’ve had children do an educational video for other children in French, English and American Sign Language so that they can learn about Jordan’s Principle and be good ambassadors or like Spirit Bear is, an ambearrister for Jordan’s Principle. We also have Have a Heart Day at Valentine’s Day where children, even very young children, can write or draw a Valentine about what makes them happy as a child and wish that for other children and then send those off to the Prime Minister so that every child is treated fairly.  

We get bubble blowers and then we put the bubbles in the air when we’re planting the gardens for Honouring Memories, Planting Dreams and each bubble is a dream of a child that we’re all going to launch into and respect throughout our entire lifespan. So, there’s all kinds of fun and free ways and Spirit Bear has books. He’s going to have animations that we’re just working on right now. And you can, in your early childhood centre, even get one of Spirit Bear’s relatives. So, we have ambearristers.  

So to make this easy for early childhood educators, we have a program where you can write to us and say, you know what, we would like to teach our children and adults and ourselves as early childhood professionals about reconciliation in our community. So, we’d like to have an ambearrister. So, what will happen is you have to agree, there’s terms to the program. So, an ambearrister, like this one, this is Cedar Bear, that’s Spirit Bear’s sister, will arrive in the mail along with a calendar. You must have the children read stories to the bear about the local First Nation, Métis or Inuit Communities. And then maybe even have an elder in who can teach the children some of the words in the language so that they can learn it.  

Then you have to have a naming ceremony for your bear and also, you need to get down to work at getting regalia for your bear. And every month, you and your bear are going to be doing those activities in Spirit Bear’s calendar on Truth and Reconciliation. And then you’re going to post pictures of your bear doing all these things with kids, going to community events and you’re going to tag Spirit Bear who’s got his own Twitter feed @Spirit Bear.  

So that Spirit Bear knows what his family members are doing because he’s kind of the boss. He supervises all the rest of the bears and he wants to make sure they’re doing good work. So that’s something else you can do.