Saskatoon StarPhoenix and Regina Leader-Post Indigenous affairs columnist Doug Cuthand was bestowed a degree from the University of Saskatchewan.
This week I received an honorary doctorate from the University of Saskatchewan at the fall convocation.
We are all products of our past and the pain, suffering, strength and beauty of our ancestors live within us and serve as the complicated fusion that creates us as individuals on one hand, but descendants on the other.
Our grandfather Joseph Cuthand was about 10 years old at the battle of Cutknife Hill and his lifetime served as a bridge between the unrestricted life on the plains and the repressive existence under the reserve system and Indian agents.
My great-grandfather was charged with treason for his part in the battle and sent to Stony Mountain Penitentiary for a six-year sentence. He served three years and was released.
Meanwhile, my grandfather and his mother joined the Cree diaspora that sought refuge in Montana. They lived in a large encampment on the east side of Great Falls.
He travelled widely, learned to speak Blackfoot, lived among the Crow Indians and disguised himself as a Bannock Indian and rode the rails on top of box cars. During his travels he met an Indigenous man from the east who told him that the future of our people lay in education.
He took it to heart, and after he was deported around the turn of the century he returned to the Little Pine reserve.
He worked with the chief and council to establish a day school on the reserve. Back then, the chief received a lifetime appointment, and the council consisted of the family heads. Chief Blackman led our First Nation from the early 1920s to the early 1950s.
Eventually, they got their day school, and it was staffed by a teacher who previously taught at Onion Lake. Miss Cunningham was a Scots Metis, or “country born,” to use my father’s obsolete term. Country born was the defining name given to someone who was born of a Scottish fur trader and an Indigenous woman.
Since she was part Cree herself, Miss Cunningham saw the potential in her students. At a time when the boarding schools were a dead end for education, she wanted the students to excel.
When they graduated from Grade 8, four of the students, including my father, my uncle Adam and uncle Smith Atimoyo and aunt Lizette Atimoyo went to Prince Albert, where they attended high school and graduated with their Grade 12.
Later, they would go to teachers’ college and also study theology at Emmanuel College at the University of Saskatchewan. Over the years, the little schoolhouse would turn out a string of graduates; some would go on to high school and post-secondary education.
This was possible because Miss Cunningham demanded that her students succeed. She was unfettered by the racism of the time that saw Indigenous futures as domestics for the girls and farm hands for the boys.
Later my dad and uncle would be joined by their sister Jean, who went on to become Saskatchewan’s first Indigenous registered nurse.
My mother made a career of education. She grew up on a farm in the Saint John River valley of New Brunswick. She worked as a domestic while attending teachers’ college in Fredericton and upon graduation returned to the little one-room schoolhouse across the road from her parents’ farm.
That arrangement didn’t last, and she took on a one-year contract at a residential school in Moose Factory, Ontario.
The conditions and operation of the boarding school were such that she didn’t renew her contract and found another job teaching at the one-room schoolhouse in La Ronge, where she met my father.
As I sat on the stage watching the eager young graduates receive their degrees on Wednesday, I thought of my parents, who cherished education and worked hard to make their dreams come true.
Both came from one-room schoolhouses and families where post-secondary education was a distant goal, and both dedicated their lives to the education of others. To paraphrase Tennyson, I am a part of those that came before me.
Doug Cuthand is the Indigenous affairs columnist for the Saskatoon StarPhoenix and the Regina Leader-Post. He is a member of the Little Pine First Nation.
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