There is a popular phrase among Indigenous people, and it has everything to do with learning and the sharing of knowledge.
It is said “Education is the new buffalo,” alluding to the fact that the buffalo allowed the ancestors to survive, and education will do the same.
It is something that Audrey Dreaver, a teacher of Indigenous Art History at the First Nations University in Regina, has seen.
“I get students from all over the world, including settler students, and they are all wanting to know,” she said. “They want to learn.”
The majority of Dreaver’s students are Indigenous and – unknowingly – part of a generation prophesized to change the world, at least for Indigenous people.
In the late 1800s and earlier, spiritual leaders predicted what is known as the seventh generation prophecy. The prediction can be interpreted in many ways, but Dreaver favours one particular prophecy, where all past and current generations work towards bettering the lives of those seven generations ahead.
Dreaver says she is seeing proof of the prophecy around her.
“In a sense that the prophecy is coming true now, and now they’ve got their degrees and are taking their place in communities and government buildings and educational institutions and businesses and all these different sectors.
Students like Judy Missens will soon be among them. She is still in high school, but as she and her mom walk the hallways of the university, the faces of the graduates on the wall has her thinking about her own future.
“I want to expand all of my interests and learn more about everything, about other cultures and other people,” she said.
Dreaver says it was never easy for those who helped pave the way for today’s youth, and today’s youth don’t have it easy either.
Social issues from intergenerational trauma still exist, but there is a common goal and that is to get back to a pre-contact way of thinking and living.
“Our people were amazing. They were so knowledgeable and our young people are taking us back to that place,” she said.
