By Nancy Knickerbocker, BCTF staff
At age 22, Niigaan Sinclair began his career teaching drama at Kelvin High School in a mainly Jewish neighbourhood of Winnipeg. As a young Anishinaabe, he knew next to nothing about Jewish culture and so was nervous to learn that the musical he was expected to direct was Fiddler on the Roof.
His first step was to desperately seek help from the rabbi at the nearby synagogue. His fears soon diminished as students began bringing ideas and props from home, parents offered coaching in Yiddish pronunciation and proper conduct of ceremony, and the cast heard from a grandfather who had escaped from Auschwitz.
That play proved to be a pivotal event in Niigaan’s career and his first step into community with his Jewish neighbours. Today he serves as a Holocaust memorial reader at Schara Tzedeck Synagogue and when his daughter Sarah graduated, “a bunch of Jewish kids voted for an Anishinaabe-Cree girl to be their valedictorian.” Today she is an emerging classical flautist who dreams of one day forming an all-Indigenous orchestra.
“The lesson is this: If I can become part of a culture and a community to teach about Jewish culture, you can do that too—learn our history, reach out to our communities, and teach Indigenous education. That’s what reconciliation looks like.”
Now a columnist with the Winnipeg Free Press and professor of Indigenous studies at the University of Manitoba, Niigaan told this story to open his keynote address at the BCTF Annual General Meeting.
In his hopeful and wide-ranging speech, he challenged teachers to see that many of the values we define as uniquely Canadian—such as democracy, health care, multiculturalism, and free speech—come not from European heritage, but from Indigenous cultures.
He contrasted the traditional colonial map of North America with its hard borders versus a map of the thousands of overlapping First Nations territories across Turtle Island. “Colonial nation states can’t share, but First Nations can,” he said. “If we teach this [Indigenous] map, we might actually be able to change the world.”
Niigaan is son of the late Honourable Murray Sinclair, chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada and the first Indigenous judge in Manitoba. He noted that “my generation can make change my father’s generation couldn’t.” With First Nations populations showing the most rapid growth of any demographic in Canada, the upcoming generation will bring about transformative change, he said.
He pointed to his daughter and her cohort of fellow winners of the Manitoba Indigenous Youth Awards, who came of voting age in 2023, the year of “the most racist election in Manitoba history.” The provincial Conservatives aggressively campaigned against searching a local landfill for the remains of two Indigenous women who had been murdered by a serial killer. And that’s when the NDP’s Wab Kinew, the first Indigenous Premier in Canada, was elected.
“When young Indigenous people who are proud of themselves work with young Canadians who are informed and capable, they can do things you never imagined—maybe even create an Indigenous orchestra!”
