By Sara Miller Llana, Photo: Melanie Stetson Freeman/The Christian Science Monitor, The Christian Science Monitor, July 25, 2022
Christine M’Lot grew up feeling her culture was invisible.
Throughout most of her public education in Winnipeg, the Anishinaabe educator says she saw almost no representation of Indigenous voices, save for a single book assignment her senior year. It wasn’t until university that she had her first Indigenous teacher and was introduced to modern Indigenous culture – beyond the tepees and nomadic lifestyles of centuries ago, where her early social studies had stopped.
Finally seeing contemporary Indigenous culture reflected back unlocked questions she didn’t know she had, even within her own family – “because you don’t know what you don’t know,” she says. It set her on a career path that would put her on the front lines of “Indigenizing education” in Canada.
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