Kwe. Halu. Greetings. Bonjour.
I'm honoured today to be invited to speak to you on unceded Algonquin territories.
I'm here to recommend to your committee the continuing resourcing of indigenous education, learning from indigenous perspectives of success, and a trans-systemic alignment and commitment to indigenous peoples' knowledges as the foundation of first nations' learning and success.
I am a Mi’kmaq educator from Potlotek First Nation, an author and a professor emeritus at the University of Saskatchewan with my colleague, Kevin, where I have completed 28 years in teacher education, having taught courses and supervised graduates in first nation, Métis and Inuit education, anti-racist education and decolonizing education.
I'm currently working part time as a special adviser to Cape Breton University on decolonizing the academy, now in my home area of Unama’ki.
For a period of my career at the University of Saskatchewan, starting in 2005, I was the co-director of one of the five nationally funded projects of the Canadian Council on Learning—called then the aboriginal learning knowledge centre—which served learning for first nation, Métis and Inuit communities.
One project was to review graduation rates across the country and identify ways to improve them. From literature reviews, we reviewed graduation rates of indigenous students compared with other non-indigenous Canadians. We found that often these metrics were being interpreted through a deficit lens of indigenous students—in other words, what Indigenous students lacked compared to others, not what they had.
Indeed, those rates illustrated more clearly the failure of assimilation policies of residential and public schooling and their ongoing intergenerational damage to indigenous families and communities.
This realization led us to generate community workshops and collaborations with first nation, Métis and Inuit leadership and communities to identify what success meant to these communities and how learning supported it. They defined success in multi-layered processes leading to three first nation, Métis and Inuit holistic learning models. Learning was described as holistic, life long, experiential, communally activated, grounded in the language and cultures of the communities, from their land, and involving their spiritual and relational world views and growing roles and responsibilities in those places, with each other and their ecology. It also included the braiding of diverse knowledge systems of diverse indigenous peoples and conventional western education.
These themes have largely been the foundations in first nations' control of their education, as you've been hearing. Within them, graduation rates have been improving.
However, to generate better outcomes first nations schooling must have foundations that are transferred from and aligned with provincial schools and post-secondary education to create what I call a better trans-systemic fit. Without that, indigenous students are limited in the transfer of their learning from their community schools to public and post-secondary education.
Decolonization of public and post-secondary education is unpacking the colonial structures, content and outcomes, and rebuilding new structures and impacting disciplinary knowledge traditions. These are still a struggle that's unfolding.
Today, the mandate for reconciliation from the TRC calls to action, indigenization and decolonization requires new trans-systemic learning, new opportunities, and different theory and practices, some of which are not yet available in current post-secondary teacher education. A return to a type of resourcing and support for indigenous knowledges that the former aboriginal learning knowledge centre offered can mobilize the needed foundation for a pan-Canadian architecture that is supportive of the infrastructure that is needed across Canada.
The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which is now enacted in Canada, affirms inherent indigenous rights in Canada, but only as potential unrealized learning opportunities in and through education—public, federal and post secondary.
Learning for success is a focus on building for the future, on sustainability, on collective identities and on indigenous rights, a reconciliation that Canada and its institutions must continue to address.
For indigenous parents and elders, passing on what we know is an act of love, not just to our children but to the seventh generation. This can only be achieved when we re-examine the educational purposes of learning, the requirements for that education and what it purports to achieve with the graduation of indigenous students.
It is about the continuous scrutiny and alignment of indigenous knowledge content with learning in schools and systems and the honouring of indigenous contributions to the cognitive advancement, self-determination and well-being of our people. It needs to continue to affirm and honour excellence in the experimentation, exploration and diffusion of indigenous knowledge, languages and traditions that contribute to the uniqueness of the institutions and knowledges of Canada while also ensuring that graduation contributes to self-determining, flourishing communities by their successes in multiple knowledge systems.
Wela'lin, Nakurmiik, thank you, merci.