Indigenous and Northern Affairs Committee on March 22nd, 2023

[The Chair, Liberal, Jenica Atwin]

Thank you very much. That concludes our first round.

Thank you so much to Ms. Margaret Moss, professor and director of First Nations House of Learning, for joining us today, as well as Thomas Sierzycki from Saskatchewan's Ministry of Education.

As I mentioned, we will reschedule with the Native Women's Association.

Thank you so much for your time today.

We'll take a brief pause as we prepare for our second panel.

[The Chair, Liberal, Jenica Atwin]

We will begin our second panel this afternoon, entering the evening.

First, we have Suzanne Brant, president of First Nations Technical Institute, here with us in person. We have Michael DeGagné, president and CEO of Indspire. Online, we have Melanie Bennett, executive director of the Yukon First Nation Education Directorate.

You each have five minutes for opening remarks. I will begin with Ms. Brant.

Thank you very much.

[Suzanne Brant, President, First Nations Technical Institute]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you to the indigenous and northern affairs committee members.

[Witness spoke in Mohawk]

[English]

My name is Suzanne Brant. I'm the president of the First Nations Technical Institute, a member of the Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte and bear clan.

Since 1985 we have been meeting the educational needs of indigenous students. We have served 112 different indigenous communities in Ontario and 189 indigenous communities across Canada.

We are an indigenous-led and -governed post-secondary institute. We're recognized under the Indigenous Institutes Act of Ontario, which was passed in 2017. We provide post-secondary programming in the areas of social science, health sciences, governance and policy, humanities, research and innovation, and aviation technology.

Currently, we have enrolled in our programs over 450 students. Eighty-seven per cent of those students are women. The average age of our students is 36 years. This is due to the barriers that currently exist in education. We provide high-quality education that links directly to employment. We use traditional ways of knowing and learning. We use indigenous knowledge, culture and languages within all of our programs. Not only are our students gaining the skills and technology they need, but they also gain indigenous knowledge.

We braid our healing and learning together. We recognize that a lot of our students have experienced many traumas. We want to make sure that they have the opportunity to unburden those traumas while they're in our programs. We provide student success facilitators and cultural advisers in all of our programming. They're there to help support the students. This helps to build pride and confidence within our students as well. This has lead to a graduation rate of over 92% in the last three years.

We have grown our enrolment by 203% since 2015. Every one of the programs we are currently running is oversubscribed. I'll just give you an example. We opened our enrolment for our practical nurse program on March 9. Today I can tell you that we have 80 applicants, and we can only take 15 students.

There's more that needs to be done to support FNTI and indigenous institutes so we can continue to support our learners. We require resources to deliver our programs to meet the needs and demands coming from our communities. Without adequate funding, we cannot provide our students with appropriate infrastructure and fully culturally relevant curriculum and support. We cannot meet the increasing program, community and economic needs.

I want to give you another example. Bill C-92, An Act respecting First Nations, Inuit and Métis children, youth and families, was passed in June 2019. First nations are working very hard to set up their own child well-being agencies, and we've been asked to provide the training. We went ahead and developed a four-year degree program in a bachelor's of indigenous social work. We obtained regulatory accreditation across Canada, and now the program is accredited in Ontario. We're going to offer this program in January 2024. This morning, there were 677 expressions of interest. We can only accept 36 students.

This issue is beyond social work. Every program we currently offer, as I mentioned, is oversubscribed. We have wait-lists. We have eight other indigenous programs under development for which there has been expressed interest and community interest.

It is frustrating that we have so many interested learners who want to enrol in our programs, but because of funding constraints, we can't serve them.

Madam Chair, I want to thank you for this opportunity to talk. I welcome any questions.

[The Chair, Liberal, Jenica Atwin]

Thank you very much, Ms. Brant.

We'll now move to Mr. DeGagné for five minutes.

[Michael DeGagné, President and Chief Executive Officer, Indspire]

Thanks very much for the invitation to provide some input into this very critical report. It's long overdue. I'm glad you're examining this.

We provided a brief earlier today that outlines the contributions that Indspire makes to post-secondary education. Indspire is an indigenous organization that works with governments and many hundreds of donors across Canada to raise funds to provide scholarships and bursaries to indigenous post-secondary students. We would have given this year probably in excess of 7,000 scholarships and bursaries for in excess of $26 million. It's an organization that has become a critical resource for indigenous students.

My remarks won't focus on statistics as much as two historic contexts for this report that I hope you'll consider.

I'll first go to 1967, the year of Confederation. While many were supportive of and very positive about Confederation and Canada's 100th birthday, there was a famous speech put out by Chief Dan George called “A Lament for Confederation”, where he outlined some of his concerns with where Canada was going.

I will quote one of the things he said in that. He said, “I shall grab the instruments of the white man's success—his education, his skills—and with these new tools I shall build my race into the proudest segment of your society.”

At the time within the context of his speech, we know that the policy of enfranchisement was in force, which forced indigenous people to trade membership and registration in their home community for an opportunity to enter into university. This was a choice that very few people could make. This essentially kept us out of the university.

The most significant predictor of entry into university is whether or not your mom and dad went or someone very close to you in your family went. Without the backdrop of many generations of people attending post-secondary education, we were new to this. We are still new to this. If you consider this as an important part of your report, this is only the second generation of our people who have gone to university. We are embracing it.

The second important point occurred in 1972—this is the 50th anniversary and in my view it should be celebrated—which was the famous policy of Indian control of Indian education. It was created by an amalgam of reports and policies that had been produced by all the provinces and territories at the time from the indigenous quarter. They talked about lessons and the philosophy of survival in the 20th century. They said:

Pride encourages us to recognize and use our talents, as well as to master the skills needed to make a living.

Understanding our fellowmen will enable us to meet other Canadians on an equal footing, respecting cultural differences while pooling resources for the common good.

Also, they said we must live in harmony with nature, which “will insure preservation of the balance between man and his environment which is necessary for the future of our planet".

I think this, exactly 50 years later, is what is still guiding indigenous education. It's critical to our thinking today. Of the 30,000-plus indigenous post-secondary students, as I said before, we've embraced this.

Financial need remains the largest barriers to success—my colleague from FNTI has just outlined that in a very specific way—but we are still attending in record numbers. While many students require additional help, we are outstanding in many ways. Organizations like Indspire are supporting our academic excellence.

There is an urgency to indigenous post-secondary education. I can't say this enough. Our young population is not a future burden on society. Our young population represents an opportunity to make an outsized impact on Canadian society. We need to double down now. We are at the margins, but we are moving to the centre. In my view, that movement from the margins to the centre is what reconciliation is all about.

From my own perspective as a former university president in Canada and now with an indigenous education organization, I would say that our challenges are to encourage greater numbers, to inspire students to broaden their degree and career options—we tend to choose the same narrow fields of study—to help our students see graduation as a first step and not a terminal event, and to make academic life better reflect the growing indigenous reality in the post-secondary environment.

Thank you very much for your attention.

[The Chair, Liberal, Jenica Atwin]

Thank you so much, Mr. DeGagné.

We'll move to Ms. Bennett online for five minutes. Thank you very much.

[Melanie Bennett, Executive Director, Yukon First Nation Education Directorate]

Thank you very much.

I'd like to thank the committee for allowing me to speak and for listening to me.

My name is Melanie Bennett. I am from the Tr’ondёk Hwёch’in First Nation. I am the granddaughter of Alice and Alfred Titus, and the daughter of the late chief Hilda Titus.

I am a lifelong educator. I have been serving indigenous children for more than 30 years now as a teacher and an administrator, and I currently have the honour of the role of executive director of the newly formed Yukon First Nation Education Directorate. I am also a technician with the Yukon chiefs committee on education.

I'm joining you from Whitehorse, Yukon, where I'm currently sitting in a little room, because we are hosting our 4th annual education conference with hundreds of people participating in person and over Zoom for the next two exciting days.

I really appreciate this opportunity.

Here in Yukon, we are in the early years of implementing our first nations education strategy, which was determined by our chiefs committee on education in 2019, with regard to K-to-12 education and getting our students to post-secondary education. This was based on decades of work by the leaders who preceded us.

The CCOE brings together 10 self-governing first nations and non-self-governing Yukon first nations to transform the education system in Yukon in order to close the appalling education gap between indigenous and non-indigenous students by reclaiming authority over first nations education in the territory. Their work here is dire, and it's urgent.

The CCOE established the Yukon First Nation Education Directorate in 2020 to deliver programs and a Jordan's principle wraparound service to support first nations and indigenous students and families throughout Yukon. We were also integral to establishing the First Nation School Board, which has assumed authority through referenda for the operation of eight public schools in Yukon. Next year, they will operate 11 public schools in partnership with the Government of Yukon.

In only three years, YFNED and the First Nation School Board have begun to make deep and systemic changes to education in the territory. We are seeing first-hand indigenous students and their families receiving the cultural and education supports they need to thrive in a system that finally reflects their Yukon first nation world view. It's too early to present any data, but we know things are starting to turn around for our students. This is just the first step in the vision of the CCOE.

The final step is the creation of a Yukon first nations school system funded directly through an REA with the federal government so that those Yukon first nations that choose to can finally assume full responsibility over the education of their children, without the government's public school system and its restrictive and colonial policies and legislation further impacting our children.

For 20 years, many Yukon first nations have had jurisdiction over education through their self-governing agreements, with the ability to draw down on the program and services transfer agreements that were negotiated then. However, not a single first nation has fully drawn down their PSTA, because so many Yukon first nations have realized that it may not be in their best interest to do it in small numbers.

First nations understand that, rather, working as a unified whole under the CCOE, Yukon first nations now have the financial and the organizational capacity and strength to actualize their vision for first nations control of first nations education.

Right now, Yukon first nations remain decades behind first nations south of 60, which have significantly more control over their education. Since the 1960s, Yukon first nations have been abandoned by the Government of Canada in the area of education, when it transferred the responsibility for first nations education to the Government of Yukon without any notice or consultation with the first nations.

Our students have suffered, generation after generation, under the assimilative authority of the government in the Yukon public school system. It's clearly demonstrated in the Auditor General reports that have been repeatedly done in Yukon, showing the deplorable results.

Now the CCOE is entering into a formal partnership with the Government of Canada, through the negotiation of an MOU, firstly to address the issues around multi-year adequate funding for YFNED and the First Nations School Board, and secondly to provide the negotiation of an REA that addresses the unique needs of both self-governing and non-self-governing Yukon first nations. This would support the creation of a Yukon first nations education system that would truly be for first nations by first nations, including the construction of first nations schools within the territory.

I really appreciate, again, being able to come and speak to you about this, and I really look forward to your questions.

Thank you very much for inviting me to participate in this study. I look forward to elaborating and discussing the unique position of Yukon first nations education in Canada.

[The Chair, Liberal, Jenica Atwin]

Thank you very much, Ms. Bennett.

We will now proceed to our first round of questions, beginning with the Conservatives and Mr. Melillo for six minutes.

[Eric Melillo, Conservative, Kenora, ON]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

Thank you to our witnesses for joining us today to be a part of this important discussion. I appreciate all of your testimony so far. I know we will get a lot more great information from the questions.

I would like to start with Mr. DeGagné. I have done a little bit of reading about Indspire and learning more about the work you are doing. It is quite incredible work. I understand that the goal, or at least one of the goals of the organization, is that, within a generation, every indigenous student will graduate. I think that's an incredible goal and obviously one we should all be aiming for.

You mentioned off the hop that you weren't going to talk too much about data in your opening remarks, but unfortunately, I'm going to ask you about data. I know you are well equipped to handle that.

We have had some, I guess, conflicting information here at the committee in prior meetings that caused a bit of a stir. It highlighted to me a glaring issue in that, depending on where you're sourcing your information from, you can get drastically different information, particularly around things like the graduation rates of indigenous students.

I also understand that Indigenous Services Canada is not monitoring the graduation rates of students who are in the public school system off reserve, which I think is an issue as well, because obviously there are many indigenous students in that system who certainly should not be forgotten or neglected by any means.

Do you have any comments as to how the government can best ensure that they gather accurate information, perhaps more uniform information, so they can make the best decisions and have the most accurate information to do that?

[Michael DeGagné]

Yes, we have an inability to answer really fundamental questions and find fundamental data about indigenous education in Canada. For example, as we emerged from this whole idea of being kept out of the universities in the 1970s, etc., and you asked what our baseline was or how many students we had in university and colleges in 1980 and 1990, you would be hard-pressed to be able to find a number that everybody can agree on.

Those numbers were never kept in a uniform way, so they may reflect only first nations. They may reflect first nations and Inuit but not Métis. They may include trade schools, colleges or some universities. It depends on the reporting. I think there's a lot of wisdom in having a report like this drive the data gaps that exist and in establishing an organization that can give us the data we need in order to make good decisions.

We have a very good system of gathering the number of people who come in the front door of a college and university, but very little on gathering how many go out the back door when they graduate. This is simply because every organization and every government seems to collect their data in a different way.

There is a real need here to standardize data collection. I don't doubt that you will get 10 experts here who will give you 10 different answers. I don't doubt that a bit. I think they are all coming from their own place, and I think there's a real opportunity here for us to lead in this area, for us to have a uniform rubric for data collection.

[Eric Melillo, Conservative, Kenora, ON]

I appreciate that. Thank you.

You also mentioned something in your opening remarks that stood out quite a bit. You mentioned indigenous students, using your words, going into the “same narrow fields of study”. I believe that was the expression you used.

Could you contextualize that a little bit for us and speak to perhaps why that's happening and how we could address that?

[Michael DeGagné]

In spite of being in administration, as many administrators do, I taught when I was an administrator in order to keep my finger on the pulse of what was happening in the institution.

I taught a contemporary indigenous issues course, and I assumed that the people who would be attracted to this course would be those who didn't know much about it—non-indigenous students. No, it was almost exclusively indigenous students. I remember asking on the first day, “What are you guys doing here? Why are you interested in this?” They said, “Because we don't know these things.” A lot of this is about a reinforcement of identity. They like to come to classes where there are lots of indigenous students. They know they'll be there. They like to study together.

In some classes there was a critical mass of Cree-speaking students, where a lot of the discussion occurred in Cree. It was really interesting for me to see, but you will find, I think, that lots of indigenous students choose indigenous studies or Canadian history, especially with an indigenous focus, for these reasons—for the idea of collegiality and of coming together with another group of indigenous students.

It can be challenging. We, at Indspire, for example, get all sorts of requests to find students in physics, AI and different scientific disciplines, and we realize that we have very few numbers there. There's a critical need to direct students, or at least to give them a sense of what the options are for them beyond their first choice, and to maybe intervene with them in their third year of university and say that they're doing well but the world's a big place and here are some options for them based on what they're doing.

[Eric Melillo, Conservative, Kenora, ON]

I think that's my time.

[The Chair, Liberal, Jenica Atwin]

Thank you, Mr. Melillo.

We'll move to Mr. McLeod for six minutes.

[Michael McLeod, Liberal, Northwest Territories, NT]

Thank you, Madam Chair, and congratulations.

Thank you to the presenters today. It's very interesting and very inspiring.

When I first entered the workforce, one of the jobs that I held for a number of years was band manager in my home community. The elders on our council would encourage our council to do more so that our young people could stay in school and get educated, because that was the way forward—but it was a tough task. We didn't have the financial resources. We didn't have capacity. It was always frustrating for everybody involved. I'm really happy to hear that things are starting to change.

What did work, though, were on-the-land programs. We also saw that the summer camps had a lot of young people applying, because they were all together and they were all friends. We'd always recognize that the attitude of the students would change when an elder walked into the room. There was a lot more respect. Things would quiet down.

I listened with interest when the Yukon first nations representative talked about culture-based learning being a big part of the schools. I want to ask her to explain to us how important this priority is that they've set for the Yukon schools, and how it will help better prepare students for educational success.

[Melanie Bennett]

I think it's integral. I really appreciate your comments about on-the-land learning and cultural learning—there are lots of descriptors. In Yukon, as indigenous people, we say it's our way. It's how we do things. It's integral to our world view.

I think the most important thing—and I've heard from some of the other presenters, even in that streamlining—is when our students know they have a sense of place, which is so important to us, and that sense of place comes from the land. It is all within our own world view. That sense of place has to be built in the education system as well. Currently the sense of place in the education system for an indigenous student is very fragile. It is built on an industrial model of moving children through by grades to attain this thing called a graduation certificate and move on into the world. It has benchmarks.

In the ones that I as an indigenous person have had to meet, in terms of graduating, being one of 12 in my family who made it through the system, then moving on into university and getting a bachelor's degree, then a bachelor of education and a master's degree, and then moving on further into a Ph.D., I look at my indigenous elders, as I would call my colleagues, because those are our Ph.D.s. When we build that equity and demonstrate to our children that a Ph.D. is the same as an elder sitting there, and we give them the ability to have that sense of place and not have the feeling that they are less than but that they are equitable to, this will then lead to success.

It can't be just the pictures on the wall. I often as an educator would hear about cultural inclusion, which really alludes to that you're going to fit us into a model. Inclusion is when we partner, and I think the school board agreement that we've implemented here in the Yukon is a model of that, a beginning, a start to it. When we partner to say we're both coming in at an equal stance and we have to learn, the duality that comes with that is where we will find success.

[Michael McLeod, Liberal, Northwest Territories, NT]

I'm going to interrupt you, because I really want to ask this question of all of you. Our report is going to be based on what you're recommending to our committee.

I want each one of you to tell us what financial support gaps first nations education institutions suffer from the most. How can the federal government and provincial or territorial governments do a better job of offering more targeted support in these cases?

[The Chair, Liberal, Jenica Atwin]

Answer in about 30 seconds, please.

[Melanie Bennett]

I would say that, for us in Yukon, the greatest financial support would be providing financing for access to do on-the-land learning. It costs more. It takes a lot more intensive work, and it needs to be funded appropriately.

Then the second piece to that is funding for training and tracking that.

[Michael DeGagné]

I would say that what's mostly needed is some sort of consistency in the funding. I'm not going to comment on how much, because more is better.

When we create programs for the general population and when we try to address a problem in the general population, we create structures with people in them, and they are ongoing. In a first nations community, Inuit community or Métis community, we tend to create projects or programs that are temporary that go on from one year to the next.

If I had to categorize the need for funding for, let's say, the university system as it addresses indigenous students, it's just that everything is temporary. Everything is one year at a time, one project at a time. You can't build a system of support on temporary funding.

[Suzanne Brant]

I think that an institute like FNTI needs operational funding. Right now we're only getting $360,000 from the federal government to support our programs, yet we have great success. If we had adequate operational funding, we could bring in any indigenous student without tuition. We could open up our indigenous programming to our indigenous students and not have to charge the tuition. They wouldn't have that burden put on them. It's not a lot of money. In terms of the return on that investment, when you look at graduation rates like we have of 92%, 94% and 97%, depending on the year. It's not a lot to invest to be able to see that kind of result.

Also, we need programming that is indigenous-based.

[The Chair, Liberal, Jenica Atwin]

Thank you, Mr. McLeod.

Ms. Larouche, you have the floor for six minutes.

[Andréanne Larouche, Bloc, Shefford, QC]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

Ms. Bennett, Mr. DeGagné and Ms. Brant, I want to thank you for joining us today. You have already answered some of my questions in your opening remarks and in talking with some of my colleagues, but I have more.

Since we began this study on indigenous students' education and the improvement of their educational success, organizations on the ground that see the work that needs to be done have provided us with a picture of communities' different needs. We have also learned about gaps and heard about urgent needs.

Ms. Brant, you even talked in your opening remarks about financial and infrastructure requirements. I'd like you to tell us about the urgent needs that you are noting in your work that would be good for us to consider in our study. For example, it has been said that project-based funding may not be ideal and that more recurring and stable funding is needed. I would like to hear your views on this, as well as Mr. DeGagné's if he would like to comment.

[Suzanne Brant]

The other thing is that we need to make sure there are supports there for the students. For us, the reason we have such success in our organizations is that we have cultural advisers in every program. There is an elder in the program who actually informs the curriculum from an indigenous world view and understanding.

The other is that we have to be able to unburden those traumas that have affected generations. That's why I was saying that we braid our learning with healing so that the students have the opportunity, through circles and processes.... The faculty, the cultural adviser and the student success facilitator help them. They're not only learning the skills. They're also learning to become whole again.

Those kinds of resources are critical to the success of a student.

[Michael DeGagné]

At Indspire, we offer support to students. In this day and age where we can do it online or via Zoom, it works very well.

What we offer to students who are in college and university are the typical academic supports: how to write an essay, how to get along in first-year university, how to choose courses, and these types of things. Not long ago we offered an introduction to the Mohawk language. It sold out. Hundreds of students signed up to take it. We had to split it over two nights. We introduced an introduction to Anishinabemowin, the Anishinabe language. It sold out.

What's interesting is that we are trying to develop.... We see as a gap their knowledge about university, but that's not a gap. What they, as students, are identifying as a gap is their cultural supports. They want some sort of cultural grounding in order to get through. I think that's very important.

The other part that we don't think enough about is, as they are approaching graduation and about to become professionals in one place or another, connecting them with other indigenous emerging professionals, so having places where the indigenous students we have in teachers college can connect with other students in teachers college so that they have a process of peer and professional support out there for them. That's also something that's emerged for us.