Land of Shadows

To the First Nations of Canada Prelude When I decided to pursue a teaching career, I undertook teacher training in Western Canada.During the course of my studies, many hours were spent in discussions with colleagues on the issues and concerns of First Nations peoples within educational institutions.What particularly struck me were the good intentions and intense frustrations of these teachers and administrators, many from the northern areas of the prairie provinces, who were attempting to improve the conditions of children on the reserves.What I personally witnessed was considerable poverty and deprivation, and a clash of oral and literate cultural perspectives that manifested itself throughout most of my career as a music teacher, teacher educator and educational researcher.In the field of music education, traditional instruction emphasizes individual competition, ensemble discipline, music literacy, architectonic forms and singular idioms such as the concert band, choir or string orchestra.This approach is appropriate for those Canadians of English, French and later European backgrounds who are socialized into Western cultural patterns.However, for Aboriginal peoples or those recent Canadians of Asian or African ethnicity, concert bands and choirs are foreign entities.Their music emphasizes individual participation, group co-operation, oral transmission, improvisation and multi-levelled communication.Many times I experienced tension in my classroom when the culture-specific practices of oral and literate forms clashed in my classroom; for example, when my students preferred rap, reggae, drum or throat music, and I required them to learn a march, suite, overture or symphony.Conflicting patterns of oral and literate socialization are intensified by the effects of the modern media--the radio, telephone, television, computer and fax machine.The electronic field replays many of the traits of oral cultures, such as immediacy, spontaneity, a high level of participation, and visual imagery.Rock music, for example, is topical, improvisatory, group-composed and highly visual, and it is predominantly transmitted by oral means.Moreover, as both speech and tone are created simultaneously, the music is inseparable from the words.In literate societies, words and notes are conceived as objective things separate from their performance.In oral cultures, there is no such split of thought and action so that performer, composer and listener are combined in one entity.Where literate societies preserve their music in writing, oral cultures store theirs through the physical assimilation of movement; that is, the person is the tradition.I did not fully understand the notion of 'person as tradition' until several years later.When training and supervising Aboriginal music teachers in northern Ontario, I experienced once again the cultural clash between literate Western and oral Aboriginal patterns of thinking.The issue that raised anxiety was my institution's emphasis on lesson plans as a key determinant of effective teaching and success in teacher education, and the reluctance of First Nations teacher-candidates to produce them.They adopted a "watch then do" approach to teaching.They explained it best when they stated that life is not a question of "What's next?" which represents our Western predilection for planning, but rather one of "What's happening?"They were concerned with living in the 'now' and not in a pre-determined future that may or may not occur.

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