Today I want to feature a video clip from Nicole Tanguay and Mita Hans’ interview. In the clip, Nicole talks about an Indigenous dance her daughter’s class was doing at school. The dance was supposed to be a circle dance or a round dance but “it was awful how it turned out because … [the kids] were being pretty, like, racist … doing the war dance thing [they’d seen on television].”
In response to Nicole’s story, Mita Hans says, “And this is where you hope that the teacher would have stepped in and said, ‘Well, actually this is how people do what they do and it’s not appropriate for everybody to do what they do and sometimes it’s really inappropriate when somebody who’s not from that culture does that.’”
Recently, I listened to an episode of a podcast called Code Switch which speaks to Mita’s expectations of the teacher who was responsible for bringing the round dance into the classroom. The episode was called “Ask Code Switch: School Daze”. A white teacher asked Code Switch whether or not she should be teaching her black students a South African dance called the Gum Boot dance. The answers to her question pick up on Mita’s concern about who should teach the round dance. To listen to “School Daze” on Code Switch follow the link below. (Tara Goldstein)
In response to Nicole’s story, Mita Hans says, “And this is where you hope that the teacher would have stepped in and said, ‘Well, actually this is how people do what they do and it’s not appropriate for everybody to do what they do and sometimes it’s really inappropriate when somebody who’s not from that culture does that.’”
Recently, I listened to an episode of a podcast called Code Switch which speaks to Mita’s expectations of the teacher who was responsible for bringing the round dance into the classroom. The episode was called “Ask Code Switch: School Daze”. A white teacher asked Code Switch whether or not she should be teaching her black students a South African dance called the Gum Boot dance. The answers to her question pick up on Mita’s concern about who should teach the round dance. To listen to “School Daze” on Code Switch follow the link below. (Tara Goldstein)
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