Christine M’Lot

Finding lost narratives

Meet Christine M’Lot, an Anishinaabe woman and high school teacher in Winnipeg who is indigenizing education across Canada to connect students with lost narratives, while helping them reimagine Indigenous communities as agents of change.

Although her family is from Swan Lake First Nation, Christine and her sister were born and raised in the suburbs of inner-city Winnipeg. At five years old, Christine announced she was going to become a teacher and spent hours practicing in front of a chalkboard given to her by her father.

When Christine was in high school, her grandmother testified before a commission about her experience as an Indigenous student in a residential school. Christine’s family refused to discuss the matter, but the unspoken trauma of her grandmother’s school years had planted a seed.

Growing up in public school system, Christine realised her culture was invisible in the classroom. It wasn’t until she studied teaching at university that she encountered her first Indigenous teacher who unlocked questions Christine didn’t realise she had, and her search for answers set her on a path to transform education.

Over the last 12 years Christine has worked on teaching and creating curriculums for schools that introduce Indigenous culture via math, coding, architecture, and creative writing. Although Canadian education has taken strides since 2015 to include Indigenous histories, Christine noticed that most of the learning focused on the pain of the past. The missing link in the curriculum was hope, so she decided to do something about it.

This year Canadian students gained a new textbook called Resurgence. Co-edited by Christine, it features a collection of works by Indigenous artists to help expand classroom conversation from solely focusing on Indigenous trauma to celebrating the brilliance of Indigenous communities who overcame these hardships. Christine has also joined forces with Amazon to create Your Voice is Power, a national competition for middle and high school students combining coding and hip-hop music to drive action for social equality and to raise Indigenous voices.

I’d like this not to be Indigenous education, but just education. Learning about Indigenous topics in an Indigenous way can facilitate reconciliation, because when you gain empathy for people it’s really hard to discriminate against them.