Bonjour. [Witness speaks in her native language.]
I think I need another PhD to figure out the technical system.
I say meegwetch for inviting me to come and speak this morning.
I have been at the university for 22 years, so I think I might know what I'm going to talk about today. One of the major things that needs to change with post-secondary education is the money the students get. They still get $675 a month to live on. I tried to live on that in 1973. Métis students have absolutely no funding. Many of them just get student loans, and you know what that means, how much they owe when they leave.
Accessing post-secondary education is a major feat. It begins much earlier. How many aboriginal students graduate from high school? If you don't graduate from high school, you can't access post-secondary education. We have trouble with turnover of teachers in first nations communities. We are still asked to give up our identity. We are still asked to be assimilated into mainstream society. Language, place, culture are the most important gifts that we were given by the Great Spirit, and we need those to be able to get through high school and post-secondary education.
When students come to the cities, they can't get appropriate housing. They have to rent apartments in areas where it's not safe to live or study. I haven't seen much change in terms of when I applied for an apartment and I was told to my face that I wouldn't be rented that room because I was aboriginal. I worked by myself advising, counselling, recruiting, liaising with communities for 16 years at the University of Winnipeg. When I went away, there was no one in my office. How could I go out and recruit other students and say to them, “These are the services available for aboriginal students”, when nobody was there?
Today we have a beautiful centre. That centre is a home away from home for many students. If we didn't have that centre we would lose many aboriginal students, because they don't stay. They have to have a connection to the university; they have to have a connection with the staff and faculty. We still struggle with alienation. We still struggle with a sense of belonging. We still struggle with fear of failure. Those were the feelings of separation that I talked about in my master's thesis. Those are very real issues. If we can't handle those things, we will not graduate from university.
I come before you as Anishinabekwe. I come before you as the daughter of my mother, Isabelle, and my father, Charlie. I also sit here representing the University of Winnipeg. I have learned to balance those two kinds of education. If I do not respect my father's teachings and my mother's teachings, and her personality and who she was, then I shouldn't be sitting here. When we talk about students in post-secondary education, we need to remember who they are.
With that, I say meegwetch for inviting me this morning.