Joanne Reeves-Rood will be pulling double duty on National Indigenous Peoples Day when she travels across the country to attend Yorkville University’s graduation ceremony.
Not only will the 35-year-old full-time mom from Cochrane, Alberta act as valedictorian of her Master of Education in Educational Leadership class in Fredericton on June 21, but she’ll also take the opportunity to share a special prayer song with her fellow alumni and their guests at the post-graduation party.
Performed by Reeves-Rood’s grandfather Julian Ribbonleg – an elder of the Little Red River Cree Nation’s Fox Lake Reserve in northern Alberta – Reeves-Rood said she hopes the song-listening exercise will help unite all in a reflection upon Canada’s First Nations history.
“My grandfather has given me permission to share his music, The Ancestor Song, which is his healing song for the nation. He was one of the lucky ones who didn’t attend residential school, and because of that, he’s one of the only elders in the community who’s still very much in touch with his culture,” she said.
“I feel it’s important to acknowledge traditional Indigenous history, knowledge and culture and to share that culture, because that’s how we’ll gain an understanding of one another.”
Of her own upbringing, Reeves-Rood said being raised between her parents’ two cultures – at Fox Lake with her First Nations mother and in a rural area outside Calgary with her Caucasian father – helped reveal to her some of the disparities between the two.
And that, she said, is what inspired her to become an Alberta Permanent Certified Teacher, specializing in Indigenous education, early literacy, and child psychology.
“I wanted to find a way to improve Indigenous academics, because as an Indigenous student growing up myself, I saw the differences between the public schools and the band-run schools, because I went to both,” said Reeves-Rood, who also spent five years as a teacher in First Nations schools before deciding to pursue her Masters of Education at Yorkville.
“Having worked in schools on reserves, I know students are generally assessed two grades lower, so I wanted to get to the bottom of how we can improve First Nations education and help to create opportunities for Indigenous students.
“Throughout my experience of both attending and working within First Nation schools, I saw a lot of injustices that encouraged me to pursue higher education – so that’s why I started my degree at Yorkville.”
What Reeves-Rood did not anticipate upon entering into those post-graduate studies, however, was the life-altering metamorphosis the experience would bring about in her.
“I didn’t realize the transformation I would go through, and I think that’s because I didn’t know my own ancestral history. Residential schools weren’t something that my family talked about,” she said.
Reeves-Rood’s late maternal grandmother, Mary-Louise Ribbonleg, was a silent survivor of the government-sponsored religious school system, which was established to assimilate Indigenous children into Euro-Canadian culture.
“She never discussed it – ever. It wasn’t until I had to read a lot of reports from the Truth and Reconciliation