What Are Rights? In The Lumber Primes (K/1)
Last week a student brought in a book to share with the class called Learning My Rights with Mousewoman, written by Indigenous author/illustrator Morgan Asoyuf of the Ts'msyen nation in British Columbia. Mousewoman is a grandmother figure in Northwest Coast Indigenous cultures who "sits on young people's shoulders in crucial times, whispering advice and knowledge". This book provided a great springboard for some conversations and activities focused on the idea of rights.
Before reading, we checked in on the Lumber Primes' understanding of the word rights (after first clarifying that we were not talking about right like your right hand or turning right, or right like making the right choice in a situation). Here are some of their thoughts:
R A right means something that you feel. A right is about something you need to be able to do. Like saying, "it's my right."
T What you are allowed and not allowed to do. You can have the right to do something or not do something.
Ro Something that you believe you should be able to do.
Ri Rights means like if you and me were allowed to do something, and you said that somebody else couldn't do it, that wouldn't be fair because it's a right.
E My mom is a lawyer and sometimes she fights for women's rights. My dad wasn't against women's rights. He was with them, even though he's a boy. He wanted to fight for women's rights, too.
L Rights is something you need to do to help yourself. I also know that "equal rights" is a saying.
I You have the right to agree or disagree with what people are saying.
D The meaning is like, Black people have the right to have the same things as white people.
A Rights means somebody has the right to do what they want to do.
The following day, we asked students to help create a list of rights. We talked about how a right is different that just having what you need to survive, it's about what you should have and be able to do in order to have a good life. We also talked about how a right is different than just something that you want (like eating candy).
Here's the Lumber Primes' List of the Rights All People Should Have:
S People have the right to have money for food.
I The right to have clean food and fresh water.
L The right to fight for a good world, and to say "yes we can."
RF The right to have warm clothes on a cold day.
F The right to say we don't want war.
T For there to be no wars.
D The right to have friends.
A To be happy and loved.
Ru To have shelter in the winter.
E The right to be cared for.
M To have good food.
H The right to not be killed..
J People have the right to be safe and to say "no."
R To have a house or a place to live.
Ro To have a place you feel like you belong.
Ra To be treated respectfully (even Mother Earth).
Amy The right to make mistakes and learn from them.
E The right to be treated equally, to have what they need, and the Earth has the right to be treated with respect, too.
Listen to the children!
On Friday we revisited the idea of rights using a process called Think and Paint. We chose four subsets of rights on which to focus:
The right to healthy food and clean water
The right to have a home/shelter/place to live
The right to feel loved, cared for, and like you belong
The right to be safe and to not have war
We divided the students into four small groups, one for each subset of rights. Children who felt strongly chose which idea they wanted to paint about; other students said that a teacher could pick for them.
During our small group meetings we talked more in depth about each right, why the children felt it was a right, and how they might represent the idea of that right in a painting. Children shared their initial plans, drew outlines using permanent marker, and then added paint to their drawings. Not everyone had a chance to finish, and we will repeat this process at least once more in the coming weeks, focusing on the other rights and returning to the rights that the children feel most drawn to. We are hoping to have another group focus on the safety/no war idea, but encourage students to think about what a world that was safe and peaceful might look like. We plan to snag some hallway space to display the Lumber Primes' work!
Below are some ideas shared during our think and paint process:
RF I think everyone has the right to warm clothes on a cold day. Maybe I could draw someone handing someone a warm sweater, because people have the right to survive. I’m feeling inspired by Sankara, I’m going to draw someone having a house because shelter keeps you warm too.
Ri I’m going to draw someone moving into a house because they finally got enough money from someone to buy a house.
S I wanna draw two people building someone a house, because people have the right to have a place to live… This is Grasshopper Hill and these people are finding a house near the Center School. The baby in my picture is nice and warm because she's by the fire.
H People have the right to no war. My idea is people near a house in a war being sad… I’m using all the colors to cover the marker. I’m making it look like he lost an arm in the war.
L I know my idea already. I am going to draw people having a war, then I’m going to draw a big X over it because war isn’t good and people have the right to peace.
Ro I said people have the right to feel like they belong, but I also want to draw people having peace, but I don’t know what I really want to draw…I need more think time… I’m drawing people having a war and people holding signs to say stop fighting.
F People have the right to no war, that’s what I want to draw. I’m going to draw a war like Liam, and people being sad in a war… In the background I put a bunch of broken hearts because I learned how to make hearts when I made Owen’s name tag thing the other day. I just made zig zags [on the hearts] to make them broken.
I People have the right to food and water because if they didn't have it they would die. I'm thinking about how I can paint a river and make the water look really clean.
T It would not be a good life if you were feeling hungry all the time. I'm going to make someone with chicken soup and the person is really smiling because they haven't had food in a long time.
R Some people are poor and if you don't have a place to live you can't carry enough food and water around with you all the time and you don't have a place to put it. I'm thinking about farmers markets and a basket of vegetables and an apple. I like Tuli's idea about soup, maybe I will put soup, too.
M I made someone eating and there's apples and peppers in a bowl.
R It's good to be loved and you have to be cared for. I'm going to draw someone getting their hair braided and other people holding hands.
D I'm going to draw me in a place where I feel like I belong: any forest.
E I painted a bit of fog over this part of my drawing to show the story of love of people who passed away.
The Lumber Primes' reflections about rights reminded me of Dr. King's speech "Where do we go from here: Chaos to Community". You can listen to the speech in its entirety here (with subtitles), but if you don't have an hour to spare, I highly recommend the four minutes of the speech that include the following snippets (from roughly 54:10-58:00):
"And one day we must ask the question, 'Why are there forty million poor people in America?' And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy... Now, when I say question the whole society, it means ultimately coming to see that the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together. These are the triple evils that are interrelated."
-Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr