By Rick Garrick

ORILLIA — Beausoleil’s Vicki Monague highlighted some of the key Anishinabek teachings during her March 16 Anishinaabe Mino-Bimaadiziwin: From Status Indian to Anishinaabe Kwe virtual presentation for Lakehead University’s Graduate Student Speaker Series.

“My uncle Jim Dumont, also known as Onaubinisay, taught me a lot and I just wanted to go through this and really emphasize our conceptualization of Anishinabek intelligence and Anishinabek Mino-Bimaadiziwin and our really important need to get back to that,” says Monague, a Masters of Education student at Lakehead University. “What I’m really talking about today is how [the] western standardized education system is a threat to First Nations people and how I’m really calling upon the education systems to continue transforming that, and I don’t mean to disregard all of the wonderful work that is happening in education systems right now that is really showing promise in terms of inclusivity of Anishinabek ways of knowing and being.”

Monague says although the education systems are making a lot of progress, it is not fast enough.

“I say that because as somebody who is primarily researching in language and culture renewal, I know that we’re in a crisis in terms of language loss,” Monague says. “That crisis is something that is ongoing and it’s fuelled my educational journey and helped me to be able to be focused and determined in the work that I’m doing and not give up because the fact is, we need more people to work on linguistic and cultural renewal.”

Monague highlighted the Seven Fires Prophecies during her presentation, noting that seven prophets emerged from the water and warned the Anishinabek that there was going to be major change coming.

“The first prophet told of the fact that we would be moving, the second prophet told of the Midewiwin going silent and the start of basically cultural and linguistic erosion, the third prophet talked about the migration [to] a place where the food grows on water, the fourth prophet told of the coming of the new race, and the fifth prophet talked about how promises that were made would be broken, and in the Sixth Fire, that is really evident and we see the destruction and the disconnect between Elders and youth,” Monague says. “The seventh prophet talked about a time of renewal and the emergence of a new people.”

Monague says the first three Fires explain the Anishinabek migration prior to settler colonialism and the next four Fires explain the Anishinabek experience with colonialism.

“In the First Fire, we had over 35,000 years of language use and differentiation,” Monague says. “We know that over time, languages and cultures change and we are constantly responding to those changes.”

Monague says the Second and Third Fires were the first major disruption in culture and language, noting that displacement is a major trauma for people.

“When we were going through this process of migration is the time when the Midewiwin went silent,” Monague says. “This is where we started to lose a lot of cultural practices because of the fact they weren’t being reproduced organically.”

Monague says Anishinabek society organized their whole way of life around the four seasons and the cycles of the moon.

“We know there’s 13 moons in the Anishinabek calendar,” Monague says. “The months of the year actually tell us which ceremonies we’re supposed to be doing. For instance … this is our sugaring moon or our boiling down moon, and right there the directions of what we need to be doing as Anishinabek are actually in the name of the month of the year. That’s what the months teach us is that we are actually creation-based people, we’re really based on the reproduction of Mino-Bimaadiziwin.”

Monague says the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Fires talk about the beginning of linguistic and cultural hegemony.

“We started to engage with settler society and started to adapt to some of their ways of thinking, knowing and being, not necessarily in replacement of our own ways but trying to be able to take those first steps in walking in two worlds,” Monague says. “Assimilation polices in the United States and Canada throughout the Fifth and Sixth Fires really were at the height in the Sixth Fire, where we see the most signs of oppression.”

Monague says the nexus between the Sixth and Seventh Fires saw the establishment of civil rights movements, the red power movement and the increase of Indigenous political organizations.

“The Seventh Fire talks about the birth of a new people — it is talking about these ones that have a different colour of eyes, they had a different way of looking at the world essentially, that’s what that means,” Monague says. “And at this point in time non-Indigenous people would be faced with a choice of what path they wanted to go down.”