‘You were chosen for this room’: Words of advice from an OISE doctoral student to begin the school year

During OISE’s orientation reception held at the Library on Sept. 2, Heather Watts, a doctoral student in the institute’s Department of Social Justice Education, shared powerful words of advice to an audience of OISE’s newest students.

Watts, who is Mohawk of Six Nations of the Grand River Territory, is an educator, storyteller and policy strategist whose work bridges Indigenous knowledge systems, education, and institutional transformation. She holds a Bachelor of Science from Syracuse University, a Master of Education from Columbia University, and a second Master of Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

She is Principal & Partner at First Peoples Group, where she leads national initiatives in reconciliation action planning, cultural competency training, and Indigenous engagement.

We asked Watts to share those words here and below is a condensed version of the keynote. 

In my first year as a doctoral student at OISE, I could not settle on a research topic. My supervisor kept pointing me toward gaps he saw in the Indigenous education literature, the kind that make for a clean, defensible study. Every time, I heard myself say some version of the same thing: that's not really me.

A gap in the literature was not, by itself, enough reason to give a decade of my life to something. I wanted a question my community had asked of me, not one that was merely unanswered.

My supervisor did not change what I chose to study. He changed how honestly I had to answer why, and I had to go backward to find that answer.

Some of you cannot yet name the thing underneath your interest; plenty already know your why. Either way, the why is worth protecting. That is what I want to talk about today.

I am a Mohawk woman from Six Nations of the Grand River, a doctoral candidate in Social Justice Education, going into my eighth year of that same question. My dissertation is not finished. I am still in it, and that is the most honest thing I can offer you.

The Journey

The résumé version of my path is easy: Six Nations, Syracuse, Columbia, Harvard, and now OISE. Along the way I taught elementary school, worked as an education manager, became a Partner at First Peoples Group, an Indigenous-owned consulting firm, and now teach at Humber Polytechnic. Most importantly, I am a mother of two.

That version is tidy. It is not the useful part. The useful part is the three moments that never made it onto any application I have submitted.

The first was in the year 2000, when I was 10 years old. My family was on a camping trip, and my twin nephews had just failed Grade 3. For two weeks, I set aside an hour every day and played school with them at a picnic table in the middle of nowhere. Nobody asked me to. I have been circling that instinct ever since.

Four years later, on my first day of academic-track math in a new city high school, I could not answer many of the review questions. My teacher would not sign the form to move me down into applied. She told me the reason I was behind was the underfunding of the school I'd just come from, not my ability. Twenty years later, that is my dissertation.

The third moment came in 2014, at Columbia, when I was pregnant with my first son during my first year of teaching. Suddenly, I understood school as a parent and it changed what I noticed.

None of those moments look like a research agenda. But lined up, they were an argument I had been making my whole life without noticing: the gap is usually in the system, not the child, and the people closest to a problem should get to name it.

Practical Advice

Find your people early. Graduate school can feel solitary, but it does not have to be. The people near you now may end up being the ones you call when you are stuck fifteen years from now, and that network builds itself in the unremarkable conversations before class, not the last-week crunch.

Learn to read critically before you learn to write persuasively. The first time a professor pushed back on an assumption I did not realize I was carrying, my instinct was defensiveness. It took me too long to recognize that discomfort as useful, not a threat to my competence.

Protect your time, but not so tightly that you miss the value of being here and start thinking now about how your degree translates into practice.

Be patient with the parts of this that feel slow. I requested an extension on my own doctoral program. That was not a failure, but an honest acknowledgment that some ideas need more time.

Classrooms beyond these Walls

Some of the most important lessons I learned were not taught in a classroom. In a 2012 South Bronx placement, two second graders had been flagged for struggling with reading comprehension. Both spoke Spanish at home, and nobody had asked what that meant for how they read in English. We read the same book twice, once in each language, with the same questions. In English, those children looked like the file said. In Spanish, they understood everything. The barrier was language, not ability. Toronto itself is a curriculum, if you treat it like one.

On representation and Belonging

In 2018, I went to Harvard, a place with a genuine reputation for equity work, and Indigenous histories were, for the most part, simply absent from the conversation. Not opposed. Not debated. Absent. So I raised it, in seminars and papers. Being the voice is exhausting in a way that's hard to explain to people who have never had to be it. Some of you will spend this year as the only one, and you are allowed to make mistakes here without those mistakes belonging to your entire community.

My first day here, I had my notebook open to a blank page and one thought on a loop: someone is going to figure out that I do not belong here. Nobody in that room had it figured out either. You were not a mistake. You were chosen.

A dean at Harvard once asked us: if all your dreams came true, would they just change you, or would they change the world? If some part of you is here because you want your dreams to reach beyond you, you are not an imposter here. You are exactly who this room was built for.

What is this degree for?

In Haudenosaunee thinking, we look seven generations ahead, understanding that what we do today is inherited from the past and will be inherited by the future. My dissertation sits inside that idea. Whatever field you are entering, ask what you are inheriting, and what you intend to leave behind.

Twenty-six years ago, I was 10, sitting at a picnic table and teaching two boys who had just failed Grade 3 because I could not stand that they had been told it was about them. Everything since has been insistence those boys were never the problem. The system around them was.

You already have your picnic table. Some of you can name it tonight. Some of you will not  recognize it for another decade. When the hard weeks come, go back to it. Ask yourself what brought you to that chair.

You were chosen for this room. Bring your whole life into it. Welcome to OISE.

Nia:wen. Thank you.