Evidence of meeting #137 for Indigenous and Northern Affairs in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was research.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Liberal
Liberal
The Chair Liberal MaryAnn Mihychuk
Saw it off in the middle. We're so compromising today. Okay, we have co-operation. We'll have five-minute rounds.
Georgina, you have a three-minute round.
Liberal
NDP
Georgina Jolibois NDP Desnethé—Missinippi—Churchill River, SK
Thank you. I appreciate that, Madam Chair.
I want to go back to the education question. On the ground where I come from, the people who I have contact with are these very students and these very organizations that provide support. Yet when I hear that the tracking number isn't there.... To answer the question about wanting our young people to return, they aren't returning because there are so many barriers.
How can we improve that to bring them back to our communities, to look after our services and programs and to run our reserves? Who can answer that question?
Acting Director General, Education, Education and Social Development Programs and Partnerships Sector, Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development
I think the crux of the answer is that it's not going to be up to us as Government of Canada officials to determine what the answer is. First nation communities, indigenous communities will have their own strategies and their own ground truth solutions to practical problems like those you are articulating. Our job is to support them financially—
NDP
Georgina Jolibois NDP Desnethé—Missinippi—Churchill River, SK
INAC can support them when those discussions occur, don't you think?
Acting Director General, Education, Education and Social Development Programs and Partnerships Sector, Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development
We are financially enabling those types of education discussions on the ground. Through a new co-developed approach to education, we are now moving into implementation for elementary and secondary, and we're in the midst of finalizing a new policy framework for post-secondary. When you couple that with what is going on with the indigenous early learning and child care framework across the whole lifelong learning spectrum, we are trying to properly support integrated solutions-oriented conversations that are community-led, first nations-led, which I think will ultimately be the decisive factor in figuring out solutions to the issue that this committee is talking about.
NDP
Georgina Jolibois NDP Desnethé—Missinippi—Churchill River, SK
Thank you.
Back to SSHRC, regarding indigenous traditional knowledge, throughout the years, I've had numerous discussions with educators, politicians, government officials, researchers themselves and elders. Can you describe the traditional knowledge as you see fit? Because there's the copyright, and there's me as an indigenous person. If I'm a researcher, this is my information. Can you help me figure that out?
President, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
I'm going to try.
First of all, what we said is that when researchers or students, typically graduate students, apply to us for funding, in the projects they design and in the projects they elaborate, they can certainly—and we encourage them to—go well beyond traditional western bases of knowledge, such as published reports, evidence that's provided through observation and experimentation, etc. If they say they want to use oral history or any other indigenous way of knowing that they believe is valid, that their community believes is valid, we will accept that. It goes through peer review, but the peer review is managed with indigenous people involved. We've been pioneering on that at SSHRC for many years, and it has been a very ensconced principle. Traditional knowledge is what our researchers and students tell us it is.
Second, the intellectual property element of this has become a really hot topic because, I think, for indigenous researchers who work in their communities and gather information and knowledge, they do own that information. They can use it as they see fit. The problem, as I see it, and the challenge that we hear about frequently is when researchers from universities, colleges or elsewhere who are non-indigenous go into the communities, gather significant data, draw conclusions, and then don't share that information back with the community. Then the claim becomes “That's our information because we gave it to you”, and the researcher says, “Well, I own the intellectual property.”
We're trying to deal with that as well. It's a frequent topic at the various events we're organizing and in the feedback we're getting, but we understand that 100%.
NDP
NDP
Georgina Jolibois NDP Desnethé—Missinippi—Churchill River, SK
Thank you.
Let's go back to education. Again, what can we do better to continue to track or to get into tracking the graduation rate to improve?
Acting Director General, Education, Education and Social Development Programs and Partnerships Sector, Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development
I think it starts with our effort to try to develop what our first nations partners see as meaningful results. Certainly, measuring the outcome of an education period like graduation is important. However, there are also other things that we are hearing from our first nations partners that they would like to prioritize, that tell the story of how things are getting better. We have to build that into our ongoing, consistent, co-developed efforts to pave a better way forward.
Liberal
Liberal
Liberal
The Chair Liberal MaryAnn Mihychuk
Good.
No, it's not for NRCan this time. It's for education.
Does the department have statistics on teacher turnover? On many reserves, you have a very high turnover of educators, and we know that having consistent, strong teachers is the key to success. Can you provide us with statistics on turnover and how that's disrupting educational life? It could be one of the factors for why we're seeing such low completion rates.
Acting Director General, Education, Education and Social Development Programs and Partnerships Sector, Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development
We will have to come back to you with the exact answer of whether or not our administrative data has that information. However, what I can tell you is that the anecdotal information we hear from communities and from our partners is overwhelming in that area. There are concerns across the board that we work with and discuss at the local level, particularly in northern and isolated communities, about how teacher rotation impacts the student experience, which then impacts outcomes. It's something that we have to work on. I'm not 100% sure at this moment if we have a specific dataset on that issue.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal MaryAnn Mihychuk
All right. That's reasonable. Please get back to us with the information and with how many teachers are fully qualified. I think there's a provision in some places to accredit teachers to come in. That just means that those students don't have the same quality of educators as other locations.
Whatever information you could pull, I think, would be valuable for the committee.
Acting Director General, Education, Education and Social Development Programs and Partnerships Sector, Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development
Again, I would offer a precise answer as a follow-up, but our program in working with first nations partners does require that we have certified teachers in the classroom. Although I think anecdotally there might be some case examples where either elders or other community leaders participate in the education experience, the overwhelming data I am familiar with—but I think we need to be precise on this our follow-up—shows that we have a majority of certified teachers in first nations classrooms on reserve.
