Lethbridge prof celebrates cultural diveristy

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Dolly, the cloned sheep who recently made headlines, is typical of the interests of white society, according to Tony Hall of the University of Lethbridge.

"We're always looking for someone's idea of the one best animal or the one best way of doing things, then trying to reproduce it," he said. "In Indian country, there is no one best way. Diversity is much more valued."

Trying to maintain such diversity in culture, language and ways of thinking is one of the goals of Hall and the Native American studies department in which he teaches.

"I don't see our department as just a place where Native people go to learn about themselves," he said. "Non-Natives have a need and a responsibility to learn about the Indigenous cultures that were here before Europeans came. As a society, we really know next to nothing about Native culture, history, land claims and language.

Hall said that there are now about 50 students majoring in Native American studies, more than half non-Natives. Opportunities for graduates are excellent, with government and many companies looking for people with a knowledge of Aboriginal cultures.

Because it's one of the few such departments in Canada, the program gets a lot of media attention. Unfortunately, Hall added, it wasn't enough to convince the university to establish a Blackfoot library and archives.

"A knowledge of Native culture should go beyond this department," Hall said. "Knowledge of the Indigenous people who lived here for many thousands of years before us should be a responsibility and requirement of everyone in the community. Blackfoot language and culture is an immense resource. It's an issue that goes beyond education.

"One of the problems in our society, especially in our education system, is we tend to think of Aboriginal culture as history, not as a living culture," Hall said. "I think you'd have to say that our schools reflect society's view that Aboriginal culture belongs to the past - that it has no relevance in the present or future.

"We don't view Indian country as a living society," he continued. "In a way, it's a kind of ethnocentrism. It's racism, and we see the results in our prisons, in abuse programs, institutions and unemployment lines. The costs of these ethnocentric attitudes are enormous, for Aboriginal peoples and society as a whole."

Hall said that these are assumptions we should be challenging through education, but our school systems also treat Indian cultures as history.

"The modern Hutterite culture in Alberta is much better known, and it's not even Indigenous to this continent," he added. "Almost all of the information in our standard textbooks deals with the history of Native people, not how they live today."

While critical of our society's treatment of Native cultures, Hall said that Canada was definitely on the right track during the constitutional discussions of the late 1980s and early '90s. A graduate of the University of Toronto, with a doctorate in Canadian history, he was involved in the constitutional conferences that led to Meech Lake.

"The first four years of meetings were historic," Hall said. "We were trying to re-invent Canada, beginning with the Indigenous people and focusing on the principle that Aboriginal self-government was an inherent right. Unfortunately, the fifth meeting was a betrayal of everything that went before it.

"If the issues that were discussed in the constitutional meetings had been resolved following the Charlottetown consensus, Canada would have contributed something vital to the world, instead of just being a satellite of the United States," he continued. "As Ovide Mercredi said recently, you can't build a decent country if its principles are founded on genocide.

"Our society tends to think of civilization only in Greco-Roman or Judeo-Christian terms," Hall said. "The Indigenous people of the Americas had thriving civilizations before the Europeans obliterated them. There were beautiful cities, good governmens, a well-developed agricultural economy and a rich, diverse horticulture - squash, corn, sweet potatoes, tomatoes."

Hall feels that the dominant non-Native society is uncomfortable with the idea of cultural diversity, and would prefer a North American mono-culture, with all people acting and thinking the same way.

"In a way, it's like saying it's useless to act in any other way than my way," he said. "It's an aggression denial of any other heritage and, as such, it legitimizes genocide."