“For me, becoming a teacher was all for my language, for the Haida language, for the Indigenous language. And now here I am,” says Erica Jean Reid (Gidin Jaad). She is Haida on her mothers’s side and Tsimshian on her father’s side. She started her life in her father’s territory, moved to Prince Rupert in third grade and then finished high school on Haida Gwaii in Skidegate. She moved away to the Okanagan then returned to Haida Gwaii as an adult to start her family and went back to school. Now her roots are firmly planted on Haida Gwaii. 

Professionally, Reid is a learning resource teacher in an elementary school. She works with students who speak English as a second language, who are on the autism spectrum and with learning disabilities. This role is the last place she saw herself given it’s somewhat of a colonial position, but she’s settled in.

Reid became a teacher through a unique partnership between the University of British Columbia, the Skidegate Band Council, the Gwaii Trust Society, and Tricorp, creating a program that produced certified language teachers. For the first four years, Reid learned part time on reserve, evenings and weekends so she could juggle work and kids and she became certified to teach language and culture kindergarten through grade 12. She wanted to be able to teach anything so she moved her family to Terrace for two years so she could complete her Bachelor of Education at the University of Northern British Columbia. 

For the seven years of her schooling there was a lot of boundary pushing for indigenizing spaces and looking back she’s full of pride. “Now that I'm in my career and with the kids and teaching, it's very, very worth it, and I'm the first university graduate of my siblings,” Reid beams, thinking of her Indian day school survivor parents and residential school survivor grandparents. “I feel like my generation, there was that push for focus on your education, focus on college and university and finding your way and finding your gifts, and then coming home and using it to better our people, to better our systems and to challenge our systems. That's the language that brought me to teaching,” she explains. 

When it comes to obstacles, Reid had two university experiences and her first attempt at university she lacked focus and dropped out to work in the service industry until she was ready to come home. She was able to use the credits later on when she went to university the next time, fortunately. 

Her second round of university was different. Reid was unstoppable, even as a mother of five, running a small business, working at a credit union, going through a pandemic, and getting divorced. “Discovering of my gift and then my responsibility to share that gift was really a motivator for me, and just that sheer stubbornness when I think about my grandparents experience of residential schools, and my parents experience of Indian day schools and just how from the generation that changes and the opportunity that my children have in school now, how it's different, and it's even way different than my experience was,” she shares. 

“If you don't like something, then you’ve got to change it. You’ve got to be that change. You’ve got to just show up and challenge those things that feel unfair or don't feel right, or don't sit right with your spirit…. It's really eye opening to get to discover your gift and share it in a different way than our parents and our grandparents,” Reid continues. 

Thinking about the cycles she broke, Reid says, “when I think about my mental health and I think about what supported me, I think, spirit and stubbornness and just wanting to not be defined by what could have broke me but just that spirit and that stubbornness, but also just that drive to challenge those stereotypes of our people.. That I can finish university and I can have a career, and I can get this certification to be able to teach all children...so my cultural teaching…. my presence and my light, our ways, are going to benefit everybody, and our world needs it. In so many ways, we need grounding, and we need Indigenous language and ceremonies, and we need culture. We need that connection and that relationship with ourselves and the land and the ocean and the trees and each other and our teachers and our children.” Guiding her mental wellness is her connection to language, culture and ceremony. 

“As long as I let the language and culture and ceremony guide me, I'm in good hands, and I'm going to be walking in a good way.”

In closing, Reid shares the value of presence, stating, “when you're present and you're in the moment and you're focusing on what you're doing in the moment, that continuous exercise of just always being present will benefit you as a person and your spirit and your mental health, and just your heart and your body,... your mind, just that Exercise of simply being present will go a long way for you.” It’s something she says students can sense, too, and has even more value when you’re a teacher.

Reid also shares, “We all have gifts, and we all have a responsibility to share them and to live them, and to shine and for people to see us. And when we do what we love, and when we're living our gift, it's sort of contagious. It gives permission to people to say, ‘hey, what's that thing for me? What am I stoked about? What's my gift?’ And then it gives them permission to just shine and to live their gift…. The more we share, and the more we shine, the more we spread that.. Don't dim yourself or make yourself small or keep it away from the world…. Just own it and live it and be proud of it, because it helps you, and it helps your family, and it helps your community, and it helps everybody around you, and when each of us have success and then share that, that energy, it just gives us all permission to come back to our gifts, which is healing. Coming back to our gifts, coming back to our ways, coming back to our ceremony, coming back to our languages and our cultures, is healing.”

She became a teacher to share her language and now Erica Jean Reid is also helping students with disabilities in her home community, too. It took her time to find her gift but once she figured out what it was she became unstoppable. Grounded in language, culture and ceremony, she’s been able to break cycles and help others along the way.

Thanks to Alison Tedford Seaweed for authoring this article.