Opening doors to higher learning
Schools taking action to support Indigenous students success
This birch-bark canoe was made with the participation of over 200 Indigenous and non-Indigenous people at Trent University in Ontario. Dr. Dawn Lavell-Harvard, Director of the First Peoples House of Learning described the community effort as providing a safe place for Indigenous and Non-Indigenous people while working together. (Courtesy of Trent University)
There’s many ways to address bringing more Indigenous students to higher learning and to share Indigenous learning with non-Indigenous people. Last February, Peterborough’s Trent University community used its Thomas Bata Library for learning with bark, not books.
“We built a birch-bark canoe right from scratch in the middle of the Bata library,” says Dr. Dawn Lavell-Harvard, Trent’s Director of the First Peoples House of Learning. “It was probably one of the most powerful experiences.” She described how the library’s soaring atrium, with over 200 people who participated in making the canoe, provided the setting for a safe place to talk.
“That is one of the most fundamental ways we can work towards reconciliation and build those really respectful and meaningful relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous in a way of being able to work together……in an Indigenous knowledge context,” says Lovell-Harvard.
"We built a birch-bark canoe right from scratch in the middle of the Bata Library," Dr. Dawn Lavell-Harvard (left) said. (Courtesy of Trent University)
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC), took testimony with survivors of residential schools and others who were impacted by residential schools. In 2015 the TRC made 94 recommendations including calling for “the federal government to develop with Aboriginal groups a joint strategy to eliminate educational and employment gaps between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Canadians.”
There are universities and colleges working to eliminate educational gaps with Indigenous students while incorporating Indigenous perspectives and ways of learning.
Barbara Wall, a Trent Ph.D. candidate devised the idea for creating the wiigwossi jiimaan (birch bark canoe). “I observed …touching interactions with observers,” Wall said. “The first was between the canoe builders and a small group of students who were Muslim. The students were quite interested in the jiimaanke (building a canoe) and had long conversations with the canoe builders, exchanging stories and cultural knowledge.
“A blind student stopped by to observe the jiimaan (canoe),” says Wall. “Both the builders and a participant sat with the student, guiding his hands over the length of the canoe while explaining the materials and the construction.”
The TRC, aims to address the impacts of 150,000 Indigenous children forced into residential schools, by the federal government. Starting in the 1870s, the last school closed in 1996.
“The responsibility (of reconciliation) sits fully, and perhaps heavily, on the shoulders of the federal, provincial and municipal governments and the non-Indigenous peoples,” says Wall.
After seeing a larger drop-out rate among than first-year Indigenous students than with the overall student population, the University of Regina (UR) looked at new ways to be supportive.
Cheyanne Desnomie started university after high-school in 2001. She dropped out. “I was very alone and didn’t know what my supports were on campus,” she says. Desnomie went back to UR to finish university in her late 20s.
Now she facilitates a unique program for first year Indigenous students through UR’s Aboriginal Student Centre. It’s meant to help them succeed in school, called “nitôncipâmin omâ" or OMA.
”It’s a first year program to get them here and keep them here,” Desnomie says.
She works with 25 students who take courses related to building community, academic and life skills to succeed at UR. “Definitely having a community, especially if you’re coming from a northern fly-in community where you don’t necessarily interact with a lot of non-Indigenous people, you come here and not so much of a brown space. There are culture shock issues,” Desnomie says.
“Many students come from rural communities, from reserves where education is not equally funded as off-reserve schools, so there’s a huge education gap at times,” she says. Desnomie sees many hurdles, such as intergenerational trauma of residential schools to many single parent students, that others may not realize.
Sarah Dennis is a single mother studying social-work student at Ryerson University in Toronto. She wants to see more full-time Indigenous professors. “Hiring more Indigenous professors who have tenured positions in order to balance out inequities and can influence thought….the university is not really doing enough in that sense,” Dennis says.
“If we’re really trying to do more work to create more Indigenous content in our schools and to alleviate issues of systemic racism, that’s where we need to start,” she says. “It’s hard to get through to institutions…founded on the colonial project.”
Dr. Jeffrey Ansloos, at the University of Victoria talks of some schools working to provide an Indigenous perspective in learning. He talks of “Indigenizing” learning, putting an Indigenous perspective in all aspects of learning. Ansloos talks of “decolonizing education, which is altering structures to be less violent, less oppressive or marginalizing.”
Post-secondary educational attainment
Joseph McQuabbie is Indigenous Outreach Co-ordinator at Toronto’s Centennial College. “I teach fishing (fishing for new objectives), hunting (getting work), gathering (going to school) and trapping (professional development),” he says.
There are expectations of seeing education more accessible to Indigenous students and with Indigenous content beyond Indigenous studies.
Joseph McQuabbie works as an Indigenous Outreach Co-ordinator at Toronto's Centennial College. He supports Indigenous students to succeed in the classroom but also to prepare for doing well in future work. (Neil Powers/First Stories)
Lavell-Harvard of Trent sees making post secondary education more relevant to Indigenous students, going beyond having Indigenous Studies programs. “It’s about incorporating and valuing Indigenous content in every department and every course content,” she says. “Real recognition of Indigenous knowledge, equal to western knowledge.”
Ryerson student Dennis invites non-Indigenous people to help saying,“I’m just hopeful that change happens and that people open up their eyes, their minds and their hearts to the fact that we have rights here and they have been removed and it’s not all on us to make sure that work is done. It’s not our job to open up the minds of people.”
University of Regina’s Desnomie sums up the importance of Indigenous students succeeding in post-secondary education and Indigenizing curriculum. “Education is our new buffalo,” she says. “It’s going to move us forward.”
