In All the Chaos, Where to Look?
Vanessa Sherwood
Darfur: A Genocide in the Making As the World Watches...
Ledah McKellar
Native Studies: Finding a Place in History
Morgan Teeple-Hopkins
Where is the Rest of the World?
A Hunt For The Rest Of The World...
Brendan McMurtry-Howlett
In All the Chaos, Where to Look?
Vanessa Sherwood
No one would disagree that the tsunami disaster in South-East Asia was a horrible tragedy. The victims have received a colossal outpouring of money and relief from people all around the world; people who have opened their hearts and wallets to lend a helping hand in any way that they can.
But a question comes to mind when thinking about the generosity shown for this disaster: what was special about this tragedy that made so many people want to help? Was the tsunami that struck on December 26, 2004 really the worst disaster that has befallen the human race? Of course not.
According to UNICEF, 1.4 million children die every year simply because they do not have access to clean drinking water. As well, 1 million people die annually due to malaria, a treatable disease. These are continuing human catastrophes that could easily be lessened with Western intervention.
Similarly, the AIDS crisis in Africa has claimed the lives of approximately 25 million people since the pandemic began over ten years ago. That's more than 150 AIDS deaths for every person killed in the Tsunami. Furthermore, there are about 4 million people living with the advanced-stage of AIDS and only about 100,000 of those receive the drugs and treatment necessary for that stage of the disease.
Does this not qualify as a worthy disaster? Why are donations so much more extensive for the tsunami catastrophe? "It's just the fact that there seemed to be so much attention paid to it in the media and that there were vacationers there from all over the world," Iliya Zarembovski, Grade 12, says.
It's true that the media plays a large role in people's awareness of and focus on world issues. After the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in response to the September 11th attacks, mainstream media reported on almost nothing else. Yet the moment major combat subsided, people stopped caring, even though there was still a country that needed to be rebuilt. The focus switched to the invasion of Iraq, where the bombs were being dropped, where the action' was.
A parallel can be drawn to the tsunami situation: the more spectacular the disaster, the more coverage it gets. The media seems to feel that a pandemic that is spread by people who are unable to protect themselves isn't as interesting' as a bunch of people getting swept away by an enormous wall of water.
Grace Carroll, Grade 12, says, "The problem with AIDS is that people are afraid of the subject. It is often associated with homosexuality and sex, and people just don't want to hear about or deal with it." But those dying in Africa are human beings, and every single person has the right to life no matter how they choose to live.
Pamela Kovacs, Grade 12, says, "I think [the difference in donation levels] has to do in part with the fact that AIDS has been around for over 10 years, and it can be managed, so to speak. However, the tsunami came so quickly, there was no time to think."
Perhaps the sudden shock and the enormity of the disaster that was completely out of our control was what caused such an overwhelming outpouring of generosity. Maybe, as many erroneously believe, people caused their own disaster in Africa, however unintentionally, while the tsunami was a natural occurrance over which humans had no control.
Also, a sense of what if it happened here?' was prevalent amongst North Americans, since there were many tourists in the region at the time of the tsunami.
Stephanie Zufelt, Grade 12, says, "The tsunami hits home harder than AIDS does. There were potentially people we could have known there, but there are few people we know (openly) with AIDS. So I think the tsunami is looked at as a more worldly issue even though AIDS has affected millions of people worldwide."
Yet there are so many countries that could easily give assistance to ailing African nations. Industrialized nations could forgive African debt, a plan that Britain is pushing for. They are considering forgiving US $40 billion worth of debt in Third World nations all around the world, many of which are in Africa and are greatly affected by AIDS. But without the U.S. on board, the effort seems fairly useless.
The crisis in Africa is not improving and yet aid to the area is decreasing. From 1995-2000, aid to African countries dropped by about a third, even though an additional 3.2 million people contract the disease every year.
Stephen Lewis, a Canadian politician turned AIDS activist, said in a statement released on his website, "If we could mobilize governments the way the public seems to be mobilized, we could defeat some of the most intractable international tragedies associated with poverty, disease, conflict and environmental devastation."
And he's right. It's not as if Western nations can't afford to help AIDS victims. For the amount of money spent on their invasion of Iraq, the U.S. could have funded worldwide AIDS programs for 15 years. They have $300 billion to spend on an unjustified war, but they can't help people who are dying of a disease that can be treated. Think of how many lives could have been saved had that money been put to better use.
So, what's the worse tragedy? The truth is that neither disaster outweighs the other. The loss of human life, no matter how large or small the death toll, is a terrible tragedy, and what matters is how we as a global society decide to react.
Darfur: A Genocide in the Making
As the World Watches...
Ledah McKellar
They shoot at anything that moves, loot property and set fire to buildings and crops. The rape of girls and women is used extensively as a weapon of war.
Jarvis student Rani Osman, a Sudanese Canadian, has good reason to be concerned about Sudan, the birthplace of his parents. His mother's cousin lives and works in Darfur, a province in western Sudan that human rights groups say is the site of an unfolding genocide. Osman says his parents are worried their relative will become another victim of the violence that has convulsed a region the size of France.
The UN says more than 70,000 people have died in Darfur since civil war broke out in February 2003. Independent experts say the number of dead is more like 300,000. Some two million people have been displaced. Two hundred thousand now live as refugees in neighbouring Chad. The rest languish in camps for the internally displaced within Darfur, where conditions can be squalid and lack adequate shelter, food and clean drinking water; disease is a constant threat.
The roots of civil conflict in Darfur are a tangled, complex knot. There is a long history of tension between the region's nomadic Arab herding communities and sedentary non-Arab farmers over access to land. Those strains have been aggravated in recent decades.
Successive central governments in Khartoum, Sudan's capital city, also have also contributed to the conflict. Policies were established to exploit the Darfuri for their labour, keep them in a perpetual state of poverty, and deny them any meaningful say in the affairs of state.
When the current government of Omar al-Bashir came to power in a coup in 1989, the low-level conflicts intensified. The new regime began arming some of the herding communities as a means of quelling political dissent among Darfuri farmers.
In February 2003, full-blown civil war erupted when Darfuri, tired of being marginalized, formed two armed rebel groups. According to Human Rights Watch, the Khartoum regime implemented a brutal strategy to suppress the rebellion. It armed and incited Arab herders, called Janjawid, to eliminate the rebels' source of support, which lay among the civilian population. In a grave breach of international humanitarian law hundreds of villages have been attacked and burned as a result.
Human rights agencies such as Amnesty International have been documenting the heart-wrenching stories of Darfur's displaced. Typically, Janjawid militia attack mounted on horses and camels, sometimes backed up by government helicopter gunships and soldiers. They shoot at anything that moves, loot property and set fire to buildings and crops. The rape of girls and women is used extensively as a weapon of war.
In the town of Tawila, for example, at least 41 schoolgirls and female teachers were raped in the local school. Some of them were gang-raped by at least fourteen Janjawid members, according to the testimonies of survivors to the UN.
Amnesty Inter-national met one of the survivors of the Tawila attack, who now has a baby born of rape, who said, "I was living with my family in Tawila and going to school when one day the Janjawid entered the town and attacked the school...The Janjawid entered the school and caught some girls and raped them in the class-rooms. I was raped by four men inside the school. When they left they told us they would take care of all of us black people and clean Darfur for good." Despite extensive media coverage, few Jarvis students seem aware of the conflict. In a survey conducted of 100 Jarvis students across all four grades, 93 per cent said they knew little or nothing about Darfur. The survey results beg several questions. Is Jarvis Collegiate doing enough to make its students aware of current global events? Does the curriculum provide enough opportunities to expose students to contemporary situations of conflict in the world? Does Jarvis, the Toronto District School Board and the Government of Ontario not have a responsibility to ensure such exposure?
The lack of knowledge about Darfur among Canadians of all ages is an urgent concern for retired Canadian lieutenant-general, Romeo Dallaire. Best known to Canadians for leading a UN peacekeeping force in Rwanda in 1994. Dallaire has made raising awareness about Darfur a personal mission.
“I am just disgusted with the lame and obtuse responses coming from Canada and the western world.”
Despite his efforts to persuade the UN to stop what he said in 1994 was an impending genocide in Rwanda, no action was taken. Eight-hundred thousand Rwandans died at the hands of other Rwandans in a horrific spree of violence. Dallaire, of course, had been right. It is now universally acknowledged that what occurred in Rwanda was genocide.
"It makes me sick," Dallaire said in an interview with The Canadian Press. "It burns inside and the sentiments or the feelings that I had of abandonment in Rwanda are exactly the same that I feel today in regards to the Sudan."
Some of Dallaire's disgust is over the reluctance of the international community to acknowledge that genocide is occurring in Darfur. Genocide is often defined as one distinct ethnic group trying to execute a sinister plan to totally annihilate another. In Rwanda, for example, the Hutu majority attempted to eliminate the Tutsi minority.
But in the 1948 UN Genocide Convention, the definition of genocide is actually much broader. Genocide, it says, can mean any of several acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. Among those acts are "killing members of the group" and "deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part."
In Darfur, millions of non-Arab Darfuri have been systematically and forcibly displaced and now live at risk of death by starvation and disease. Does this not constitute premeditated acts designed to physically destroy a large group? Is this not genocide?
Some say the element of "genocidal intent" is missing in Darfur. Foreign Affairs Canada takes this point of view as does the UN. In early February 2005 a UN-appointed commission of inquiry concluded that violence in Darfur did not amount to genocide but that mass killings of civilians has occurred. "The crucial element of genocidal intent appears to be missing, at least as far as the central government authorities are concerned," the five member commission said. "There may be genocidal acts in Darfur and some individuals may be found guilty of genocidal intent," the commission admitted.
For people like Dallaire, this is reprehensible wordplay. "I am just disgusted with the lame and obtuse responses coming from Canada and the western world," he said.
Janice Fricker, Curriculum Leader of Student Services at Jarvis, and head of the Jarvis Humanitarian Project agrees it is a waste of time to argue over genocide.
"I think that terms are a little irrelevant if you have 70,000 people... murdered, executed, slaughtered and you have two million people pushed from their homes solely and simply because of their skin colour or their language or their ethnic background," Fricker says. "I mean, at some point what does it matter what term you put on it? The facts speak for themselves," she adds.
Fricker believes the international community ought to intervene in Darfur as it did in Kosovo in the mid 1990's to stop ethnic cleansing. "We should have done that in Rwanda as well," she says. "We were being warned, we were being told, but we didn't intervene."
In a survey conducted of 100 Jarvis students across all four grades, 93 per cent said they knew little or nothing about Darfur.
Gary Kenny, who works on the Africa Desk for the United Church of Canada, visited Darfur in July. He was part of a relief assessment mission organized by the Winnipeg-based Canadian Foodgrains Bank. Kenny argues for a three-fold strategy to stop the killing and suffering in Darfur: sufficient humanitarian aid, an international military presence to end the attacks on civilians, and pressure on all parties in the conflict to negotiate peace. "It is essential that each of these three strategies be undertaken simultaneously to save lives in Darfur," Kenny adds.
Like Dallaire, Kenny thinks Canada, with its reputation as a peacekeeper and proponent of human rights, ought to be taking strong international leadership to protect vulnerable civilians in Darfur. "Prime Minister Paul Martin has talked about human security, the protection of civilians in situations of conflict, and the need for international military intervention to stop the killing in Darfur, but he hasn't yet backed up his words with concrete action," Kenny says. "Martin needs to make Canada a catalyst for protective action in Darfur." Also like Dallaire, Kenny says Canadians, particularly young people, need to become more aware of what's happening in the world. "There are also young people in Darfur and other parts of the world where conflict is occurring," he says. "Young Canadians need to think more about their brothers and sisters who are vulnerable to violence and persecution. They can become their voices here in Canada."
He concludes, "It is also silence that is killing the people of Darfur."
Break The Silence
Save Darfur Coalition
www.savedarfur.org
(click on "Take Action Now")
Native Studies: Finding a Place in History
Morgan Teeple-Hopkins
More than 10,000 years of Native history on this continent leaves us with endless possibilities for curriculum enhancement, Canadian perspective and cultural richness.
The courses in Ontario high schools that do incorporate First Nations peoples are optional, and often not offered in all schools. Furthermore, it is not so much a study of Native culture itself, but rather an examination of the interactions between Natives and Europeans.
When asked if the Grade 10 history course covered enough about First Nations peoples, Ms. Roti, who teaches the course, said, "We teach what the curriculum asks by examining the contributions, issues, and problems the First Nations people face in the twentieth century. For further insights on Native history and culture, students can take other senior history and social sciences courses." Fortunately, this just may be the case at Jarvis next year. Ms. Lanteigne, who teaches art and science part-time at Jarvis, as well as Ojibwe and science at the Native Learning Centre, said, "I wasn't very happy or satisfied with what the Ontario curriculum was offering. I felt that it wasn't recognizing contemporary issues in general and I wanted to let people know about art, language and aboriginal science."
Ms. Lanteigne's goal is to start a Grade 11 "First Nations Identity" course at Jarvis next year that would cover Native art, music, language, science, stereotypes and contemporary issues. "It [the First Nations Identity course] is not going to be about pointing the finger at anyone or being hostile or being angry. It's more about creating an understanding of First Nations people."
Native peoples have been in North America for over 10,000 years, while the first Europeans arrived here only 400 years ago. If one were to do the math, 96% of human history on this continent belongs to Native peoples. Why is it then that most of our historical knowledge encompasses only that recent 4% of Canadian history?
Perhaps one answer to this question has to do with how history has been recorded by two different cultures. In Western history there has been a long practice of written language. Since the ancient times of Mesopotamia, there has always been some literary demographic, whether it be priests or scribes, who wrote about their surroundings and ideologies.
However, the Aboriginal peoples of North America placed far more emphasis on the importance of oral tradition. Over time this became an aspect of First Nations' culture that was not given much credit or validity by non-First Nations peoples.
Oral tradition is an opportunity for the listener to learn from the stories and experiences of the elders. The listener learns for his or herself how the world works, instilling a sense of independence and self-growth.
This kind of learning style has a lot to offer the traditional form of school lessons, where entire periods are spent copying notes off the blackboard.
Native Studies does exist in the provincial curriculum. However, Ms. Lanteigne commented, "There are documents out there. There is a whole curriculum that is written up. However, I find it's really limited and narrowly focused; it does not incorporate a holistic approach."
Although a Native Studies curriculum does exist, the courses that are offered are all optional, and even then they are not taught at many schools. So the question must be asked, are students interested in learning about First Nations issues?
Of 100 Jarvis students that were questioned, a survey indicated that 38% were interested in learning about First Nations peoples in school. The same survey showed that 27% of the respondents would take a course that focused solely on First Nations peoples. So if over one quarter of the Jarvis population were interested in taking a course of this nature, why has it taken so long for one single course to materialize at Jarvis?
Ms. Lanteigne points out that not many teachers consider themselves qualified to teach Native Studies. For those who are qualified, like Ms. Lanteigne, who has Mi'kmaq background, they often find the existing curriculum inadequate.
Unfortunately, a lot of work is involved in modifying or creating new courses. Plus, there is a limit to how many interdisciplinary courses one school may offer, so frequently teachers who want to be innovative with new courses are forced to accommodate constraining Ministry guidelines.
"The History Department delivers an inclusive curriculum where it tries to address the issues facing many of our people including Natives, French, English and all immigrant groups," explains Ms. Gotsis, who is the Curriculum Leader of the Social Sciences Department.
Already existing at Jarvis, there are two optional courses in the History Department that have First Nations components. The Grade 11 "World Religions" course takes a broad look at "primal religions" throughout the world in the first unit of the course.
"Canada: History, Culture and Identity" is a Grade 12 course that incorporates First Nations history throughout the year. "There is a whole section on pre-contact [with the Europeans]," explains Ms. Beaudry who teaches the course. "Then throughout the course, we look at how Native peoples have been affected by different developments in Canadian history."
Although this course does a decent job in terms of incorporating First Nations history, and using primary and secondary sources from the Native perspective, there is only one class of 26 students enrolled in this optional course at Jarvis.
Furthermore, as is the nature of many history courses, "Canada: History, Culture and Identity" addresses First Nations people from a somewhat Eurocentric point of view, using contact with Europeans as a reference point.
So the problem remains: are optional courses enough to cover First Nations history as well as contemporary issues, or does there need to be a re-evaluation of how First Nations peoples are incorporated in the mandatory Ontario curriculum?
The answer is not a simple one. Other minority groups have also expressed a need for a more diverse curriculum (African Studies, for example). So should the Ontario curriculum cater to all the nationalities it serves, or is it enough to simply teach the history of the geographical region?
Either way you look at it, First Nations studies should have a far more significant role in the core curriculum than what presently stands.
It is not enough to simply learn about Native history once every two years for a few weeks. "For too long the study of Native people has been the study of dead Native people," Ms. Lanteigne points out.
More than 10,000 years of Native history on this continent leaves us with endless possibilities for curriculum enhancement, Canadian perspective and cultural richness.
Where is the Rest of the World?
A Hunt For The Rest Of The World...
Brendan McMurtry-Howlett
It is crucial that the Ministry of Education promotes diverse learning.
Have you ever noticed, while looking at the option sheet, that the only modern history courses offered at Jarvis are about Europe, Canada, and the U.S.? Where is the rest of the world? It seems that in a school - not to mention a city - as multicultural as ours, we should be able to offer courses that teach the history of the rest of the world.
Our society is based upon European models. The Europeans colonized Canada and established their own system of governance, language, and land ownership. European philosophies became the dominant way of thinking. But there is a different reality now, as people move to Canada from all over the world, bringing with them alternative world views. This is re-shaping what being “Canadian” means, and the school curriculum needs to reflect this. There is no course offered at Jarvis about modern world history anymore.
There used to be a course available here called “20th Century World History”. It dealt with modern issues and their impact on the entire world - not just an isolated section of a few countries. Topics like the revolutions of Central and South America, the civil wars in Africa, the origins of the Israeli and Palestinian conflict, and the global effects of WWII were all part of this course.
So, with all this relevant material, why is it no longer offered at Jarvis?
The answer to this can be traced back to the Ministry of Education. When the new curriculum was written, it was decided that the “20th Century World History” course would only be offered at the “Open” or “Workplace” level, as opposed to “University” or “Mixed.”
The difference between University courses and Open/Workplace courses according to Ms. Roti, the Grade 12 “West and the World” teacher, is “the difficulty of content and the way the course is dealt with. If you were to take [a course] at the workplace level, you’re not going to worry so much about all the analytical aspects that we worry about. We’re not going to emphasize the massive writing that we do. At the college [or mixed] level it might be just a little.”
The only problem is that when a student takes an Open course in Grade 11, that course does not count as a prerequisite for Grade 12 courses; and in Grade 12, the marks from that course cannot be submitted to university. The result is that many students decide not to take courses that are designated as Open.
One hundred Jarvis students, when asked if they would be interested in taking a modern history course about nations outside of Europe, responded with 61% saying that they would. But when asked if they would still be interested in the course if it was only offered as Open, of those who were interested, only 31% still said yes.
Ms. Gotsis, the Curriculum Leader of the Social Science department, broke down the numbers. “15 is the magic number,” she said. When the enrolment into a specific course drops below 15 it no longer makes sense for the school to offer that course. While one class enjoys the comfortable size of 15, another class has around 35 students.
Another factor is the teacher workload. Each course for which a teacher has to prepare a lesson is called a “prep.” Within each “prep” a teacher may have two or three classes that use the same lesson plan. “We try to keep the number of preps at around three, “ said Ms. Gotsis. When there is only one class for one course, which is referred to as a singleton, a teacher is forced to take on a greater workload. The number of staff at Jarvis cannot accommodate a large number of courses and so the small singleton courses must be dropped.
...the Ministry is refusing to make any changes to course designation.
That is exactly what happened to the “20th Century World History” course. The enrolment of the course was steadily declining until it reached 11 and there was no other option but to drop the course. Ms. Roti said, “If we could just change the course type, I think more kids would probably take it.” Who determines that?
“The Ministry makes that decision,” said Allan Hux, the District-wide co-ordinator of Social, Canadian, and World Studies. He said that it was the Ministry’s attempt at creating a balanced range of options for students. He had no explanation for why the “20th Century History” course was designated Open.
Although the Grade 12 course “The West and the World” is only offered at a University level in Jarvis, the curriculum guide book also offers it at the mixed level and the Open level. The same is not offered for the “20th Century World History” course. For some reason the Board of Education did not deem it necessary to treat the modern world history course, “20th Century History: Gobal and Regional Perspective”, the same as the modern European history course, “World History: The West and the World”.
Any change to the course code is not possible. Hux said that the curriculum is under review right now and one of the first things being looked at is the social sciences. But the Ministry is refusing to make any changes to course designation. In fact the Ministry is not even accepting discussion over the issue. Hux believes the reason for this is because the Ministry of Education does not want to pay for the new textbooks that may be needed. Even making a change within a specific school, such as Jarvis, becomes an administrative issue.
The problem is that the curriculum established by the government is for the entire province of Ontario. Toronto and Jarvis may have a culturally diverse population, “but if you go up to North Bay, you will see that the population is far different in the make-up of that particular area,” said Ms. Roti. What is relevant to the Jarvis population may not be relevant to the rest of Ontario.
Ms. Beaudry, a teacher in the Social Science Department and guidance counsellor, says that the decision to only offer the “20th Century History” course as Open, “shows what [the Ministry] thinks is important for students to learn.” It is ironic that a large portion of Jarvis’s population does not have an opportunity to learn their own people’s history in the public school system.
It is crucial that the Ministry of Education promotes diverse learning. It is important for people to study their own culture and history, but it is almost more important for Canadian-born students to understand different worldviews. The fact that European history courses are more accessible shows undue support for Eurocentric attitudes.
Students need to be the ones demanding change and accessibility to more diverse history courses. If the students want to be able to learn about a variety of cultures and histories, they must be willing to contact the Ministry of Education through petitions and letters.
***If this article has moved you to act, then you can contact the Ministry of Education:
Ministry of Education
(416) 325-2929
Ontario Curriculum Centre
439 University Ave.
18th Floor
Toronto, ON
M5G 1Y8
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