It’s May 26th. I’ve been home with my kids for 74 days.
It’s been 57 days since emergency remote learning started.
That’s 57 days of learning how to use google classroom and zoom meetings.
It’s 57 days of still having to do my job, but from home.
And 57 days of figuring out how to be a teacher and a mother and an archaeologist all at once. It’s been a ride.
Like so many parents right now, our two-archaeologist household is struggling to balance the need to keep working under these circumstances with the need to keep kids on track, to try to build a little structure and feeling of normalcy into each day, and to keep everyone safe while doing so.
Like so many parents, self-doubt (“I’m not a teacher!”) and frustration (“I don’t have time for this!) had to be actively shoved aside to make room for a new normal, like it or not.
For me, that began by admitting I wasn’t going to replace my kids’ dynamic and capable teachers, and looking for different opportunities: what can I teach my 10 and 12 year old that they weren’t getting at school? How can I use what’s around me to do it? And the answer, no surprise, has been archaeology.
I’m incredibly lucky to have access to the rich archaeological landscape that’s all around us, but remains invisible to most people. So we’ve visited mountain sides and riverbanks, forests and lakeshores, even downtown streets, to show and tell about the layers of Secwepemc history laid down before British Columbia was even an idea.
Since April, I’ve shown my kids salmon fishing infrastructure that fed Secwepemc families for more than a thousand years, campsites that marked stopping places for generations of hunters journeying up the mountain, and the gentle dips and swells of ancient pithomes built before Christianity was even a thing.
On beaches and knolls, my kids have helped me find, and record, “new” archaeological sites that will contribute to our collective knowledge of pre-colonial life here.
In town and beyond, we’ve read about and visited the places where the fur trade here was born, where pack trains run by Secwepemc, Nlaka’pamux and st’at’imc merchants brought tens of thousands of pounds of dried salmon to market to sustain the traders, miners and farmers of early BC.
But it’s not been one glorious long fieldtrip—they’ve also stood in the mud and the rain waiting for field meetings to end, spent hours in the car just getting to place they didn’t want to go anyway (AND has no wifi), and waited patiently, endlessly, outside my office door for calls to end.
But we’re doing our best. Like all the parents making due with what we have, and making things work however we can, our best is all we can do.
For me, finding a teaching niche during this stretch of home learning has made me more convinced than ever that the special knowledge I have because of my job shouldn’t be that special. Doing and learning from archaeology is a privilege, yes, and it only matters if we can share it.
It’s not enough to teach my own kids—how can we teach other kids this too? Archaeology and Indigenous histories have immense value in our kids’ education, in their view of this place, its history, and our place in it.
Now, in the time of COVID, we’re seeing more opportunities to do this than ever: digital solutions that let us visit remote locations and showcase unique materials and that can bring living experts into our classrooms with a click of the mouse. It’s the perfect time to bring the past to life in the classroom.