Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Aboriginal Peoples
Issue 11 - Evidence - Afternoon meeting
EDMONTON, Thursday, October 7, 2010
The Standing Senate Committee on Aboriginal Peoples met this day at 1:32 p.m. to examine the federal government's constitutional, treaty, political and legal responsibilities to First Nations, Inuit and Metis peoples, and other matters generally relating to the Aboriginal Peoples of Canada (topic: issues concerning First Nations Education).
Senator Gerry St. Germain (Chair) in the chair.
[English]
The Chair: Ladies and gentlemen, our committee is here today to gather information for the study that we have undertaken concerning First Nations primary and secondary education. We are hoping to examine the possible strategies for reform with a view to improving outcomes. Honourable senators, among other things, our study will focus on tripartite or partnership education agreements, governance and delivery structures and possible legislative frameworks. This is our eleventh meeting.
Senators, we have before us from the Edmonton Public Schools, Margaretha Ebbers, Supervisor, Aboriginal Education Programs; and Mr. Edgar Schmidt, Superintendent. From the Wild Rose Public Schools, we have Brian Celli, Superintendent. From the Edmonton Catholic Schools, we have Richard Dombrosky, Assistant Superintendent, Learning Services — Enhancement; and from Red Deer Public Schools, we have Bruce Buruma, Director of Community Relations. I apologize if I have mispronounced your names.
Edgar Schmidt, Superintendent, Edmonton Public Schools: I have very brief comments after which I will turn it over to Ms. Ebbers to provide some details. We appreciate this opportunity.
Very briefly, Edmonton Public Schools is within the City of Edmonton and we have 80,000 students, 7,500 staff members and about 196 schools throughout the city. We have a growing Aboriginal student population, and as of this September, we have approximately 7,000 self-identified Aboriginal students.
As we indicate in our report, we have tried a number of things over the last 40 years in relation to improving outcomes for our First Nations, Metis and Inuit, FNMI students. One of the things that we have learned, in keeping with the theme of brevity, is that we have learned many things that have not worked, and that is valuable learning for us.
Further honourable senators, through the leadership of our board of trustees, who expressed great concern about the outcomes for our FNMI students, we initiated a task force. The task force undertook investigations into the communities in Edmonton, and spent time talking with parents and community members about what we were doing and what we were struggling with. We heard the voices of elders, students, family members and parents. Our board led the policy direction that came out of our task force. In our organization, we follow up immediately with administrative regulation which is the work that we do on the ground in schools to achieve the policy direction.
Finally, the last part of the report that you have before you outlines the direct actions undertaken by our organization to help achieve the policy and regulation direction.
Margaretha Ebbers, Supervisor, Aboriginal Education, Programs, Edmonton Public Schools: One of the things we heard through all of our various community consultations was that indigenous communities are consulted often and they believe that nothing is done after that. Once we heard the various concerns that they raised, we took it upon ourselves to claim those concerns as our responsibility.
The number one thing that came out and I wish this could be more positive, was that our system was filled with barriers, both systemic and individual. Our systemic barriers were the unexamined practices that we had for close to 30 years. These unexamined practices often privileged particular family groupings, lifestyle or economic strata. One of these barriers is the buildings that look like residential schools, built on the same plan in many cases, from the same era. Another is our registration processes. A particularly painful example is the requirement that we have guardianship papers for every student in our schools, even if they are living temporarily with a family member. Our Aboriginal families told us they would send their youth to live closer to a high school or to live with an auntie who may have a better education. They send their children to the city to get a better education.
It is not a family problem. It is actually a family strength, but our schools were not registering students without guardianship papers, and this meant that some families had to, even on paper, give up the guardianship of their children. We are working on that very common barrier.
Other barriers include lack of child care and lack of optional courses to do with Aboriginal history or any Aboriginal content whatsoever.
We also found out that we had many individual barriers. Many of these barriers became uncovered not only through our consultation processes with the community, which I might add is one positive thing we are doing. We do not really make any decisions without our community involvement. Many of them came through our partnership work with Enoch Cree First Nation, the band that is right alongside our school district. That is the band that is coming in tomorrow to talk with us and with you. Through our two years of working together towards a partnership agreement, we uncovered many of the difficulties. Another one rampant in our school system was racism and stereotyping.
At first blush, when people hear the word ``stereotyping'' they believe that a mandatory Aboriginal awareness program is a good idea. We fought that idea and instead, we did the four following things. If possible, our Aboriginal staff does all presentations about Aboriginal people. Second, we do cultural responsive training for all of the new hires to the district and we use all our Aboriginal staff to do that. It does not matter what position they might have. In our district, they are part of that package. All beginning and new teachers receive a series of in-services on practices suitable for working with Aboriginal students and families and some practices that knock them out of their comfort zones. All programs and schools were to be done with our Aboriginal colleagues who work in partnership with us for many programs. We found that was the number one way to break the stereotypes. Finally, we found that just as our school system was part of causing a rift between our Aboriginal communities and us, we also played a major role in healing. We found this out through our external advisory committee. For the first year, all we did was listen, and when they presented the difficulty, we found a way to solve it with them. Soon our committee believed we were responsive.
Then we looked at the residential school look-alikes. We began to do what we could to make them welcome, inviting the families in and making sure that whatever we did, we ensured that all families had the opportunity to get there, whether it involved helping with transportation, child care or meals.
Finally, we did a lot of celebrating about successes, and I am happy to report that out of our schools, at least one half last year did some kind of special thing that acknowledged the importance and role of our First Nation, Metis and Inuit families. Many are starting to celebrate some of the feasts, highlighting powwows, including community events in their newsletters and welcoming the community.
Our next steps are many. I have not said anything about curriculum or teaching. Our achievement gap is still there, but we believe that now that we have started to make a bridge into community, that gap is going to start to close. We are graduating more students, not just because we have more students but our graduation rate is increasing at a higher rate than our population rate.
In conclusion, we have 7,500 staff, 80,000 students, and in order to succeed, we need to engage every one of them, and that is our biggest challenge to date.
Brian Celli, Superintendent of Schools, Wild Rose Public Schools: I was just telling Mr. Buruma that I was a little bit uncertain initially why we had been invited, but the clerk helped us through that process.
I will use the paper I have given senators as a guide only to spark questions. I would not have anywhere near enough time to talk about everything today, but you might find something of interest in the outline.
The story that wound up in us being here started a little over 10 years ago. It began with the untimely and extremely unfortunate death of one of the brightest young souls I have met. It began with the belief that surely to heaven with all the resources and expertise and knowledge that we have at our disposal, we could do a better job than we have been doing in terms of addressing the needs of First Nations folks.
It probably begs the obvious to say that what we have been doing does not work. In listening to the folks from Edmonton Public here today, a number of our answers actually come out the same way. It seems to me that when we take a look at what we have been doing, the biggest problem that we face is that we have been asking the wrong question for the last many decades. We have been asking, ``How do we help First Nations folks fit into our system?''
I think that is a fundamental error because for one, the way that we have gone about trying to answer the question is not respectful. I know how I respond when I have a whole bunch of people telling me what to do. I think that has led to us coming up with a number of well-intentioned but poorly directed solutions. I will talk a little bit more about that later on.
The second key point is to change the question and ask instead, ``How can we utilize public education to help First Nations communities' better meet their needs?'' Once we change the question and make use of the tremendous resource the public school system provides, we have a completely different arrangement.
The second point is that the best people to identify the needs are First Nations folks, and once they have identified those needs, then we sit down and we have a conversation about how we can take this tremendous resource and help address those basic needs.
I have one more main point. When we got through those first two things, it led us to our youth forum, which I think was the reason why we were invited here today. When we said that we needed to have a different relationship and that First Nations communities probably were best able to identify their needs, we had to find out what those needs were, much like what Edmonton Public did, so we have a consultation process.
We wanted to start with youth, those kids who were in varying degrees of being in school and out of school, as well as a number of folks who had just recently left school. As it turned out, we wound up with people going back a number of generations who came to our youth forum. It was not really a youth forum; it was a marvellous conversation.
We asked them to identify the things that stood in the way of them being successful in school. We thought we were going to hear that the teachers did not understand them. We did hear that comment but we heard three big issues that gave us a clear indication that we were on the wrong track. They were sexual assault and abuse, physical assault and abuse, and drugs and alcohol.
We had young ladies who would show up in class Monday morning after having been sexually assaulted over the weekend. I have never been through something like that so I can only imagine what it would be like, but I am assuming that if you have gone through something like that, you would not be interested in Macbeth. You have something else on your mind, and yet a well-meaning teacher is trying to give you an education and saying, ``Look, please focus. Please focus. Look, I have spoken to you three times, can you focus?'' At that point, the young lady has had enough and blows up and says — well, you know what she would say.
Now we have another problem because we have someone who is disobedient and all the rest of it so we impose another set of sanctions or approaches and we never get to the basic problem, which is a community problem. Until we marshal our resources to start to address those things, we are not going to make the headway we need to make an education.
That was the beginning of our relationship with the local friendship centre. Senators can see we have had a number of outcomes, and I would say that we have made more progress in the last six months than we have made in the last number of decades.
We have had David Bouchard come in, a Metis author. He has worked with our kids. They are now in the process of collecting their stories to publish a book to get their voice out there now.
Of the 17 students who were in school in various stages, we still have 17 in school and that is amazing. In fact, we just reached the critical point the other day with one of the young ladies not coming to school. We talked with the principal and said we have to make a decision as to whether we are going to insist on the system functioning the way it is in black and white or whether there is potential to make some accommodations to meet the short-term needs of this young lady. We discussed whether we wanted to get her to the long-term goal of having her stay with it and get her education. She is a marvellous young lady. She will be a great force if we can get her to school.
There are a number of other things. Now that we have the youth involved, they are now insisting that their parents come to school to help us out. Well, there are many barriers, a lot of them identified by Edmonton Public.
Two weeks from now, we will sit down with the parent community and ask parents about the barriers standing between them and their involvement in their child's education. We will listen to their answers and start to address the issues. One I heard the other day floored me. One parent said, ``I would love to come but I am stupid. I do not want to go in there and look stupid.'' We can help with that. We can help get around that problem so they do not feel that way and so they know what they need to do. We are going to take that on.
One of the things I wanted to talk very briefly about, though, was the way we have done this, and it really is a handshake deal. We do not have any written paper on the table. This is something that is built around or within the expectations inherent in a respectful relationship.
Paper will not change whether or not there is respect and goodwill around the table, so if we have that, we do not need the paper. It has worked well for us. I would not want to say that it would be generalized on a large scale because we are just too new to it, but it has worked very well for us and we have faced some very difficult problems.
I think we are on the right track. The details are evolving. It is like that plane they are building as it flies along, but again, the initial indicators are very, very positive.
Richard Dombrosky, Assistant Superintendent, Learning Services — Enhancement, Edmonton Catholic Schools: It is great to be here. We very much appreciate being invited and Ms. Zlotnick did a great job of trying to twist my arm to make sure that somebody was here to represent Edmonton Catholic.
Edmonton Catholic Schools is a school district of 87 schools with 33,000 students and we have just under 3,000 FNMI students. Most of our students are urban and that means that they come to live in the city and they come quite often for an education.
Our district is proud of its past. We began Aboriginal education, called Native education in 1977, and we have had a department in our district ever since then.
One of our successes has been Ben Calf Robe School, an urban all Aboriginal school that we began in 1981. It is a kindergarten to Grade 9 school.
We began two Cree bilingual programs, one in 2004 at St. Francis of Assisi School and a second in 2007 at Our Lady of Peace School, so we have a west end and a north side school teaching Cree bilingual.
I want to highlight four things that we are currently working on. These things have given us a lot of success in the last nine years because we refocused when we began the Rainbow Spirit Project.
First, we are focused on high school completion, and that includes all kinds of strategies. In some of our schools, we have graduate coaches just for FNMI students and we do whatever we can to get them through, including summer school. We do not end their education at any particular time of the year.
We serve our whole district, staff and schools, with cultural programming, and most schools participate in that standard during the year. We have a group of individuals who present that and professionally develop all of our staff.
Third, we have aligned all our goals with Alberta Education because they have a new goal, and that is success for FNMI students. We have realigned our goals in the same way.
Finally, we have a council of elders that is a special committee of our school board and they meet with the board. This is a highlight for us. They meet four times to discuss, consult and advise our school board on FNMI students, families and issues that they face. It began in 2008, we have had a very, very successful time with it, and our school board very much understands the needs and the issues of our community.
Bruce Buruma, Director of Community Relations, Red Deer Public Schools: We were invited to share with you information on the Aboriginal Family and School Frontline program, and I am pleased and privileged to be able to share that with you this afternoon.
The Aboriginal Frontline Program is a partnership which is unique because it involves both Red Deer Public and Red Deer Catholic schools, so both jurisdictions working together to provide supports and services for our First Nation, Metis and Inuit students, and that totals over 1,000 students between both of those jurisdiction.
Our staff includes three teachers, two educational assistants working in high schools as well as support from senior administrations from both jurisdictions. I have served as the senior administrator responsible for that program for the last 10 years.
I want to extend my appreciation and acknowledgement to staff from our program. In preparing for our presentation today, I also had the opportunity to talk with students, parents and community members, and their voices are reflected in my comments today.
The program has also received support through Central Alberta Child and Family Services Authority, which is our social services authority for this area. They have provided funding to support two Aboriginal family school wellness workers in situations where families need additional supports. In working together among these authorities, we feel we are better able to meet the needs of our Aboriginal students.
Over all, in terms of Red Deer Public Schools, we serve 10,000 students and we have 800 self-identified First Nation, Metis and Inuit students within the City of Red Deer. Red Deer Catholic has 7,100 students, of which 295 have identified themselves as First Nation, Metis or Inuit. We serve 38 schools, so our program is involved in each of those schools.
The self-identification of FNMI students is of value. Initially, there was some question as to the readiness and willingness of people to self-identity, but we have had good success and strong support, and we believe that it allows us to respond to student needs. We believe it supports accountability and ultimately will make a difference to student success. Although we are one program, we are very responsive to the needs of both jurisdictions and the unique needs in each of our individual schools.
Being primarily an urban centre and not in close proximity to any reserve or settlement, our FNMI population is diverse. Over two thirds of the population is Metis and the remainder represents a wide range of First Nation people. These First Nations speak Cree and Blackfoot for the most part.
At the same time, we note that we have students representing over 30 different First Nations. We also have 12 Inuit students within our jurisdictions.
We also maintain close connections with service providers and agencies and programs within our community as well. Given our distance from First Nations reserves and settlements, we do not have any formal partnership agreements with First Nation authorities. We do try to work closely when we have students who come from First Nations areas, particularly when we have students transferring in and we need to get support for them. We also utilize elders and cultural advisers when we are working on projects.
While it varies among First Nations, at times it is a challenge to develop relationships that support the education needs of First Nation students who are in our community. At issue is what are the obligations of First Nations in educating those students who are off reserve, and with an increasing number of students who are coming into urban settings from a variety of locations having significant needs, how are we able to access support from First Nation authorities. This is an issue for many families.
As mentioned, the Alberta government has instituted a new goal, success for FNMI students. This goal applies to jurisdictions as well as each of our schools, and the outcome of is to improve key learning outcomes for all FNMI students. These include accountability measures in the area of dropout rates, high school completion, achievement on provincial exams, scholarship eligibility and the high school to post-secondary transition rates.
It is important to note that these particular measures were put in place because this is where we have disaggregated information for FNMI students. It is readily available, it fits in with accountability measures we have for all of our students, and that is why that data is there.
There clearly is a gap in the achievement of First Nation, Metis and Inuit students in comparison to all of our students and thus the need to move ahead with this specific goal. Really the question is, should success for FNMI students be any less than for all of our students, and we believe that the answer to that question is no. By having this goal, expectations, reporting and accountability really are important drivers in supporting the success for all FNMI students.
To support the success of FNMI students, the province has also provided funding of $1,155 for each self-identified FNMI student, allowing school jurisdictions the flexibility to provide services that directly or indirectly support FNMI students.
Red Deer Public Schools has responded in a number of ways in developing strategies to support that. We have increased the extent to which the Aboriginal Frontline Program focuses on academic achievement. All of our school education plans must include strategies that address the learning needs of FNMI students.
We are examining best practices and we have shared with other jurisdictions the practices and ways of improving academic achievement. We are collaborating and working with the local community to support excellence in achievement.
Teacher professional development activities are focusing on the knowledge, skills and attributes that are needed for them to support FNMI students. We are increasing the number of our staff and teachers who do have an appreciation for an understanding of Aboriginal cultures, and we are supporting students as they make transitions between schools and into post-secondary.
We have also had a recent change in our senior administration structure, which has increased the emphasis on FNMI student success. Our assistant superintendent for learning services will focus on curricular supports relating to this goal while the deputy superintendent, who is responsible for school improvement and priority schools, is working on specific initiatives within schools that have identified that as a priority.
With regard to the priorities and the goals of Alberta Education, we believe in these goals and outcomes. Performance measures are vital to success for our students. There are times, though, where we do struggle with the validity and importance of these particular measures.
As mentioned earlier, these particular measures are in place because that information is available, the disaggregated data for FNMI students. However, there are many other important measures where specific data is not readily available but still important. We have had some very interesting discussions among staff and the community on the significance of these goals to Aboriginal people and families. While they may align with provincial priorities, are they important to Aboriginal people? We need to continue further dialogue in terms of what is important to them.
We are very committed to supporting Aboriginal student success, but we also realize with these significant gaps that success and improvement must be measured incrementally.
We do want to honour and recognize that most of our FNMI students do very well in school leadership positions, many of them excelling in academic programs and leadership positions, in athletics and the arts. Many of them are doing well. However, many of the students we work with most closely face incredible challenges, be they personal, family or other obstacles that stand in their way. We need to recognize the small but significant steps students may reach in achieving their personal best. Given the challenges some of these students face, the very fact that they show up to school at all may be accomplishment enough. As a school system, we must acknowledge but more importantly support students in these challenging situations. We also need to respect that FNMI students and families may have different dreams and aspirations, and must honour those as well.
Creating connections between school and communities is essential, and while results are important, by building strong foundations for our students and creating connections in our school, often times we believe results will take care of themselves. Culture is a valuable tool in creating those connections for our students and we utilize that a lot through our program. However, but we also need to recognize that for many students, athletics, the arts, leadership opportunities as well provide meaningful connections to support their success.
We have good relationships within our Aboriginal community and we are increasing our efforts to develop ongoing connections and have real dialogue with elders and parents and Aboriginal agencies and students.
In doing that, there are varieties of audiences and they require a range of approaches. We have to honour the ways that are best to connect with those to have meaningful engagement. It is going to take time to nourish these in order to have important and deeper conversations in order to move forward.
We also believe the needs of First Nation community schools are significantly different from those in urban Aboriginal settings. Each presents their own unique challenges and opportunities.
It is important to recognize that urban Aboriginal populations are increasing at a significant rate, and while there are greater similarities among FNMI students on reserves, the diversity in urban settings is significant and presents both challenges and opportunities.
In many cases, there is also an achievement gap between First Nations schools and our schools, which is most notable when students transfer into our schools from reserves. In many cases, that gap is significant. The transition is difficult and this causes real issues for students who are achieving well on reserve and yet fall behind when they enter our system.
An area of concern is FNMI students in care. We have many of those who are in care and how can we best meet their needs? Many come to our schools with significant gaps in schooling, but more significant is the real trauma that many of those students come with when they enter our system. The school completion rate for FNMI students who are in care is 19 per cent.
The province has implemented the Success in School initiative for the development of a work plan to meet unique needs of students in care. It has real potential but resources are not allocated to that initiative. If we are going to make a difference for our Aboriginal students in care, then we need to have those resources.
We notice in an urban setting a real continuum in terms of cultural knowledge and connections among students. Many of our students gain their cultural knowledge through schools and our programs. Recent past generations have been denied their cultural experiences. We have the opportunity to expose students to their culture and heritage. In many students, it is very refreshing to see the development of pride in their Aboriginal ancestry. Some students, however, are reluctant and apprehensive of understanding what being Aboriginal means to them.
There has been considerable effort within the Alberta curriculum to increase Aboriginal perspectives and increase that knowledge among all of our students. We celebrate this and believe this positive step will have an impact on all of our students. However, a few areas of concern include the need for a contemporary perspective of 21st Century Aboriginal people in addition to historical perspectives. Oftentimes when we are talking about Aboriginal culture, it is from an historical perspective; we need to understand contemporary Aboriginal issues. While there is value in providing a pan-Canadian perspective on First Nation, Metis and Inuit cultures, it is also important that students have a better understanding of Aboriginal cultures within their area.
Finally, there are concerns that not enough emphasis is placed on the residential school issue and that an accurate perspective on the deep impact this has had on Aboriginal people is not known and understood by all students. As part of our program, we support our students and teachers in doing that by providing curriculum, resources and presentations and building that cultural knowledge.
The other thing is we need to move beyond cultural awareness and understanding to a much deeper level of cultural competence in our community. We have to move from just basic awareness and tolerance to really having a much deeper and better appreciation of our diversity.
In meeting the needs of Aboriginal students, many of the strategies to support their success are the same strategies we need to incorporate for all of our students: access to services, differentiated learning, and parental engagement. However, there are some specific strategies we believe are important that are unique to Aboriginal students and we need to continue working on that.
With support for building cultural pride and identity, the infusion of Aboriginal perspectives, one of the challenges in the infusion of Aboriginal perspectives is other teachers' capacity and knowledge. It would be fair to say that when teaching about Aboriginal culture compared to other content, many of our teachers have heightened levels of sensitivity and concern among them about needing to get things right or conversely, to make sure they do not do what might be perceived as wrong. This can create apprehension and reluctance on the part of teachers in terms of teaching those kinds of culture and knowledgeable pieces, and that is an area where our program can work.
We recognize that sometimes special provisions need to be made for FNMI students. We need to create a culture. Many of our students think they are the only Aboriginal students within their schools. We need to let them know that they are part of a bigger community.
We have to increase cultural awareness and sensitivity among our teachers and administrators, particularly when they are dealing with issues. We have to honour that not all students are the same and that we do not treat them all the same.
We need to provide more tactile and kinesthetic learning. We need to recognize, particularly for some Aboriginal students, that they have strong ties to families and reserves, and try to accommodate the desire to maintain these important connections.
We believe programs like ours can start developing trusting and caring relationships with families and students. One of the most important pieces that I have heard from stories from our students is the importance of a caring and trusting relationship with a significant adult. This is essential, particularly in our at-risk youth.
I am touched by the many stories of our FNMI youth that have succeeded and they insist it is because of a special relationship they had with people in our schools, be they from our program, a special teacher, a counsellor or administrator or a person in the community acting as a mentor who saw hope and potential in them. Without these relationships, many admit they would not have succeeded.
There also needs to be recognition that significant change will take time. We have learned from many others. There are great examples in British Columbia and Saskatchewan. I know I have appreciated meeting with Rick Dombrosky a few times in regards to the good programs that are happening in this area, and we have shared with other jurisdictions as well.
One of the challenges we face is the balance between academic and culture. We are moving to improve the success of Aboriginal students but we do not want to do that at the cost of culture. Culture provides an important connection. We struggle with that because with an increased emphasis on academics, we have moved away somewhat from the cultural piece because we are focused in on those areas of success, but we have to recognize that culture is a valuable tool. It is a way of creating connections, and we need to support our schools in being able to provide this for our students.
I will leave it at that and appreciate the opportunity to share some of those perspectives with you.
The Chair: I would like to thank all of you for your excellent presentations.
Senator Dyck: I do not exactly know where to start. There were so many things each one of you said that deeply resonated within me, and I am going to share a little bit of my personal history.
I am an Aboriginal person. My mother was a Cree woman from the Gordon First Nation in Saskatchewan. My father was Chinese. When I was in the public school system, we bounced around all over the place from town to town, from school to school. When I was in Grade 9, I went to three different high schools, but by some miracle, I succeeded.
I was one of the top students. I attribute that to genetic native intelligence. I have the highest earned university degree. I have a doctorate degree in biological psychiatry.
I was asked to look back to identify the factors that allowed me to succeed. One of the factors was a great deal of determination from my parents. However, in the high school, we never fit in but there were teachers, the individual teachers who saw the potential in myself and my brother, and I think it was you, Mr. Buruma, who mentioned that.
Despite all those other odds, those teachers, in particular, for my brother, whose life in school was much tougher because he used to get beat up physically — and you mentioned that, Mr. Celli. He was beat up all the time. Mostly the students left me alone; I was pretty quiet.
However, one teacher took my brother aside and said, ``You are a smart guy.'' Even though we were smart, we were placed in the slower rooms. He told my brother that both of us should go to university. He told us that to get there we first must learn French.
He put my brother into French in Grade 11. So he did Grades 8, 9 and 11 French in one year, and he said to the French teacher, who was the toughest teacher in the school, he said to her, leave him alone. Do not pick on him. Because she was so strict, she would pick on you all the time. Do not pick on him because he needs to succeed. It was through those efforts that my brother and I succeeded.
We are talking about processes, but you also mentioned the fact of the individual life experiences of the teachers and the students. You were talking, Mr. Celli, about the life experience of the students who were being sexually assaulted, abused and had drugs and alcohol. Some of those assaults can come from the other students.
To me, there was a need for education of the students involved and a need for education of some of the teachers, because some teachers are outstanding, and I think today probably more teachers are outstanding than was the case in my generation.
I do not know if there is a question in there, but I just felt the need to put that out there.
Ms. Ebbers: There is an implied question. One of the things that we found that works really well is when we identify champions in schools, and there are champions in every school. What we find that they do, particularly at the junior high and high school level, is they start bringing groups of kids together. A recent study from the Canadian Council on Learning indicated that there is a much higher rate of volunteerism amongst our First Nations students than amongst the general population.
We find repeatedly that these kids get together, say okay, what are we going to do, and do something for the school, and because of that teacher, they are reconnected into the school fabric in a very positive way. That seems to be happening over and over in our schools. Again, it takes the champion in the school who says, hey, I recognize you, you are going to do great things and then they help each other.
Mr. Buruma: About your comment in regards to the safety and caring aspect of it, I had an interesting conversation with someone from our Native Friendship Centre in preparation for this and she brought up that concept of culture connectivity and the deepness of cultural connections.
What she was getting at is that instead of just this awareness and understanding, if we truly are culturally connected, then those barriers and differences among people are not at the level that you were referring to. She said that is a direct connection to ensuring we have safer and more caring schools, that connection between those two concepts, and that resonated with what you said.
Mr. Dombrosky: Our comment is that it is crucial to have students make it through high school. It is so critical that we do not even talk about it, it is just automatically understood, I think.
We also find that the smaller the program, the smaller the group that the student has to work with and the knowledge, direct knowledge with that teacher creates a great deal of success. Unfortunately, the students find this outside of the regular high school in our outreach centres. These centres are very much a place that students like to go to because they have a relationship with someone in that room and someone in that school and they will take them through their high school. They will take them through their junior high school. Relationships underlie all successes.
Mr. Celli: One of the approaches that we have begun to implement is placing the youth that we are working with in the position of teacher.
The thinking there is that we are going to do a couple of things, one of which is through the process of learning to teach their culture, hopefully they will be able to establish a better connection, because there is certainly a strong disconnect. We are finding that they are in neither one culture nor the other at this point in time.
If we put them in the position of teacher, hopefully they will develop that cultural understanding and understand the culture, and the intent is they will deliver the cultural lessons in our younger classrooms. They will hopefully have that deeper level of understanding and be able to get it across.
We have come across a particularly strong approach to teaching which is very reflective of traditional approaches to the passing on of knowledge, where you do not actually tell but you invite people to uncover and discover. We are very optimistic about that as well.
Senator Dyck: I think what impressed me in your talk was having a youth forum and finding out from the youth themselves what they thought the barriers were and what their experiences were.
I believe that what you found was very similar to the survey through the National Aboriginal Achievement Foundation, and it was a similar sort of thing. They were dropping out for reasons very similar to that. Maybe we ought to be asking the youth what the barriers are more often.
The Chair: Are any school divisions making a concerted effort to hire Aboriginal teachers? Are First Nations parents or educators on the public school board? Is there any effort to do that? I think Mr. Dombrosky said that he had an Aboriginal advisory council of elders.
Mr. Celli: We are at the beginning stages, but as a follow-up to the youth forum, we thought we would get a small committee of the youth come and present to trustees at a board meeting about their findings with the idea that we would open up a dialogue to further conversations. We wound up with 34 people. We had the entire set of youth plus their parents, which was unusual because they had never set foot in our building at any point in time for any reason. Out of that meeting came the intent, once we have the new boards, to do a similar type of thing to what they have with Edmonton Catholic.
We have always said to the adult population, that they must get more involved with their children to help them learn. The problem is that there is probably a generation and a half, maybe two generations of parents who do not understand that participation or have had very negative experiences in a school setting.
That is what is leading to the conversation we are going to have with the adult population very soon. We have the expertise. We can help them develop the skills and understandings necessary to get involved with their children, but we need to be able to do it in a sensitive way.
We have a couple of folks who are able to deliver the teaching assistant training and we are going to start to grow that capacity within the community because right now, it is not there. That is somewhat of an answer, I think.
Mr. Dombrosky: Just to relay how our council of elders came to be, for a number of years we used to have an annual meeting for all our parents. We would make it a very hospitable situation so we could get all of our FNMI parents out and we would invite them from every school. We sent out personal letters, and from that group came the idea that it is crucial to listen to the elders. We also noticed that our students would defer to the elder in the room very quickly. They very much understand, respect and listen to the elder.
It has been a useful committee because our board of trustees understands where the elders are coming from, the kinds of situations they have each lived, and there is an understanding that allows our district to proceed with the kinds of strategies that they would all agree with and that we have discussed beforehand.
It has been a history to get to that point, but it is valuable, and our board of trustees very much enjoys those evenings with them.
Mr. Buruma: In terms of hiring, we have attempted to hire Aboriginal teachers, particularly for this program. We have gone to great efforts promoting that within the Aboriginal community and many times, applicants are not coming forward, and it is a challenge for us. It is one of our goals.
It is interesting to note that we have had a number of non-Aboriginal people apply who have taken Native Studies as a minor and that is refreshing to see as well, but it is challenging to get Aboriginal teachers.
Ms. Ebbers: We, too, are working hard at getting more and more FNMI teachers in our district and we have been somewhat successful. There are new ones coming into the district.
Part of the difficulty is that a number of our staff has not self-identified. We are finding that as barriers are coming down, more and more staff are coming out and saying, guess what, I am Metis, or my mother is Cree from Saskatchewan.
Part of the thing is we are much more comfortable about talking about place. We will say, ``Where are you from and where are your people from?'' That has been a very nice thing.
Because it does not say on our application forms to the district to self-identity, we are not aware of how many more there are. Unless they come directly to our unit and say we would really like a job and you sound like a good place to work and then we work with human resources, we are not aware of the total numbers, but definitely, they are on the increase.
Every time we start a new program, we have started a number of Cree programs as well, that is a little trickier. It is harder to find people who speak indigenous languages and have teaching certificates.
Mr. Dombrosky: Just to follow up with staff, we do a fine job of finding staff who are FNMI but also the Cree speaking staff because we are teaching Cree to our students. In Edmonton Catholic, we have administrators who have a FNMI background. We have a district principal who is First Nations.
We do the best we can, but I will say that it is difficult to accomplish those goals. It is not easy to approach the universities and find the type of staff that we need. We do our best, but there is room for improvement for sure.
Senator Poirier: Yesterday when we were in Onion Lake, we had the opportunity to speak to a mother who had the responsibility of eight children, though I do not think they were all her own. She spoke specifically about one of her daughters who was 12 years old and had gone to the Cree immersion school and had transferred to the public school system. She talked about all the challenges and complications and the loss of her first years of education, how quickly she lost all that she had learned in tradition and culture as soon as she went into the public school system.
One of the presenters mentioned that there are many challenges concerning the transfer of students from First Nations schools, specifically if they were in immersion schools, and going into the public school system.
What system do you have to address that situation and help that along so that that does not happen? In reality, our goal is for students to continue to learn their language and their culture and to understand who they are, and once they understand who they are, they can accept it and move on. However, if they are going from one stage, going into another, and falling back, then you have to question whether we are truly accomplishing what we are setting out to accomplish.
Is that a challenge in the public school system? What is being done to address that challenge? Are there any other challenges that you can share with us on the transferring of students that you need to deal with and how you are dealing with them?
Ms. Ebbers: Senator Poirier, you are correct; it is a definite problem. Part of the issue is we are in a very large city and we do not have any indigenous immersion programs. One of the problems is that children are bussed at a lower rate and our transportation dollars support that for French and for English but not for indigenous languages. We have to pay a higher transportation rate.
The other issue is that in a very large city, our First Nations people live in pockets. In those areas, we try to have second language programming, and we have started one at a time, with Cree. If a family settles on the other side of the city, it may be an hour and a half bus ride to get to that program. There may not be enough people where that person is living to have a full, sustained program. That is another part of the issue.
There are other problems, not just the language problem. In fact, this just happened this week. I received a call from a principal who said that a child needed to be coded because the child was two grades below. We asked where the child was from. There is a learning lag coming from a reserve school into our school system, but the student can catch up. Why do you want to code the child as soon as he or she walks into the building? We have no idea how they are going to do in the new school.
The student has to make many adjustments such as learning to deal with a much larger class in a much larger school in a much larger community. The student may be accustomed to being in a classroom with a family member. We have to give the children a chance to acclimate. We will support the family during this period but we do not agree with the coding.
The third is the movement back and forth, because sometimes kids will be here for a while and then they will go back to their reserve school. Sometime later, the child might come back to the public school and this back and forth is hard on the child.
Senator Poirier: Is it the child's choice that they move back and forth?
Ms. Ebbers: No, not usually.
Senator Poirier: Is it the public school system or the First Nations school system.
Ms. Ebbers: Sometimes it is the family. Schooling is a big draw, so a family will come and the student will take a program. It may take only six months or they choose not to be in the program any longer and they go back to their reserve. They may come back again to try a different program, and meanwhile the child is moved back and forth.
Senator Poirier: While the child is in the public school system, are there programs to help with the transition? Is there assistance in maintaining his or her culture so that the child does not lose what he or she has already learned?
Ms. Ebbers: We have many cultural things going on in our schools. I would say that in the last three years, that has really picked up. Any school can access it, they just have to call our unit and we send someone. We alert principals if they have people coming from reserve to call our unit because we have a number of staff who will go out and talk with the family to see if we can provide support.
In terms of the language, no, unless they happen to be in the neighbourhood or very close by our Cree programs, but then again, that is a second language program, not an immersion program.
Senator Poirier: You said that transportation costs were added costs. Who covers that cost?
Ms. Ebbers: We do; we cover a portion of it and parents pay.
Senator Poirier: So the portion from the parents, is that from the Department of Education or the INAC transfer to the First Nation? Is it federal funding or is it paid by the parent?
Ms. Ebbers: The parent pays for it privately.
Senator Raine: Thank you very much for being here today. You have a wealth of experience that is very valuable for this committee.
Have any of you heard of the Sunchild Cyber School? If you have, do you see that fitting in to deal with the problem of trying to have enhanced cultural content with children who are not in large groups?
Mr. Celli: Sunchild Reserve borders Rocky Mountain House, which is where we are located. Just two weeks ago, I was out talking with the principal, Martin Sacher. I have a long history with Martin and his cyber school, and we certainly see it as a potential way forward that we will be drawing on.
Most of the population that we deal with is in Rocky Mountain House but they do have a very successful model going on out there that might help to address some of what Senator Poirier was talking about in terms of getting the higher levels of education that are required and desired while still maintaining that contact with folks.
I think we can draw a lot more on that. In fact, we have just had initial conversations about how we can link our schools up because the work is already done. We just need to make the link happen between where our students are located at where their school is located.
Mr. Dombrosky: Senator, we have spoken to Sunchild about their programming. We have our own online school so that we do have areas that they can tap into, so we do have it covered in several ways.
We have found, though, that face to face, person to person, is by far the way students learn the best, and that relationship is crucial. You do not always have that in a cyber school. Relationships are much more important.
Mr. Buruma: Just as an indirect response, we are trying to provide as much culture as we can. We did try to offer Aboriginal studies and I know a number of jurisdictions across the province have been trying to do it. That program is in the Alberta curriculum and one of the challenges is it is just one of many other available courses.
We were creative this year in running it through our outreach school centre. One of the barriers to allowing greater culture could be broken if that could replace something like social studies. It is very much aligned with social studies. It would meet one of the graduation requirements, and I know in Saskatchewan and places like that, it can replace a social studies credit.
I think there are some inherent barriers in providing some of that cultural programming: It has to be a viable course, you have to have a number of students to do it and t is difficult to schedule.
We did it through our outreach program. We made that available through three different high schools, which made it practical, but even with that, it was very difficult to do. We have to look at removing some of the barriers that might allow us to better equip students with cultural teaching.
Senator Raine: Many of you have talked about what you bring to the First Nations in terms of their students and what you offer them. Have you ever thought about what they can offer to you by reaching out more to their communities and what they can bring to the traditional school system? Their culture has a huge amount to offer in a contemporary setting.
Ms. Ebbers: Actually, that was a nice segue. We are doing a lot of work with the Enoch Cree First Nation. It is taking quite a while, but we are actually putting the agreement into place before we have the written document, so we are working through barriers and challenges.
One of the things that the nation proposed was that we develop a course based on Enoch Cree First Nation and some of the history around this area, because we are in this treaty area.
It just so happens that we have this young, keen academic from Montreal Lake Cree Nation in our unit. This summer he worked at a high school that many Enoch students attend, and he got together with the elders and the councils and did a locally developed pilot course looking at all of their archives and photographs. He built a library with this group of students, and it turned out to be a phenomenal thing.
We are looking at turning it into a locally developed course because we have living history here and the descendants live here as well. In fact, one of the researchers found some of his family that he did not know about. This is the very beginning, but it is a wonderful thing that has happened.
The other thing is that many of our students are realizing that they truly do have a voice. We also have done numerous focus groups and think tanks and brain drains with students, and one of the things that they keep saying is they would like these options. We will give up our art and our music in junior high if we can have a cultural option. As a result, in a couple of junior highs, we are actually doing options and working on making them locally developed courses.
We have the same problem with high school. It is hard to use that as a high school option but in junior high, where the real disengagement begins, that is where we are having some success, and absolutely it is coming from the kids, it is not coming from us.
Mr. Celli: It is interesting you would ask that question because the journey to get here actually started with a question like that. We have been concerned about discipline for some time.
I recently read a book, I am not sure if you had the opportunity to read it, it is not a new one, it is called Returning to the Teachings by Rupert Ross, a former Crown prosecutor.
He spoke of his experience going through the North as a Crown prosecutor and the challenges he faced, and the places where they had the best success were places where they followed the native — at that time they called it native — approaches to teaching. It had to do with vision circles and healing circles.
Every student we suspend once we usually suspend twice and three times. Quite often, they end up going out the door and this is not acceptable. We had this particular group of kids, we know who they are, we know where they are headed. We have to do something different, so we set up a meeting and asked them if they could help us. We went away and came back two weeks later, and by golly, they had a vision circle structure already set up. They had talked with elders already in the broader community and they said we are going to set up this approach for our whole community.
That is the approach we are taking now and their circle meets four times a month and they have given us one of those meetings to bring forth any children, any students, any youth, we wish to have in the circle. They use a healing approach. Something is not right internal to the person. That is why they are not able to behave properly. If we heal and provide community support, we will get somewhere. We are optimistic about the potential that holds. It certainly cannot be worse than what we have been doing.
Mr. Buruma: We try to access resources as much as possible, and there are some good resources in our community, but accessibility is a real issue. One of the curriculum resources tells teachers to invite an Elder. They phone our office and say give us an Elder, and there are no elders around. Partly it depends on locations, but I would think across the province, that becomes a real issue. Accessibility to those resources is very limited in some communities.
Senator Sibbeston: Our committee is dealing with the issue of closing the gap between First Nations students and other Canadians, and there is something like a 28-year gap.
I do know that the future of First Nations in Canada lies in part with cooperation and learning from school boards such as yours. I consider that you are very successful, you are highly organized, and you are dealing with children of people who are very highly motivated. Children come to school very smart, very learned, and so you have a successful system.
If you were to give advice to First Nations, recognizing that most of the First Nations are out in the rural areas of our country, what advice would you give considering your professionalism. You know how the system works; you know how to be successful. The only thing that you probably lack is knowledge of the people and the communities in terms of where they are located.
You do not have the same situation as you have in a city where people are professional, very well organized, and highly motivated. In the rural areas, people are there because of the quieter and slower pace of life.
What would your advice be if you were given the task of helping with Aboriginal people in our country to close the gap within 10 years instead of 28 years? If you were given the opportunity, the mandate, and the resources to do that, how would you go about it?
You are very professional, experienced and smart. How would you do that?
Mr. Dombrosky: I think that is what we all would love to see and love to work with. Make learning fun, make it purposeful, make it a part of who they are, make it a part of their daily lives; make it a part of all that they believe in. I think that that alone gets students motivated, and motivated students are what counts.
Whatever ways you can motivate a student, and sometimes it is a glass of milk and an apple that does it, so it can be very simple but it also can be complex. They need to know and be shown what is important to the world.
Senator Sibbeston: I was smiling a little bit, in part thinking, would part of your solution be to be sure that there is a strong economy in each of the communities?
Mr. Dombrosky: Yes.
Senator Sibbeston: Would that be part of the solution?
Mr. Dombrosky: As soon as you mentioned resources, I am assuming that they would have the resources necessary.
Mr. Schmidt: Yes, resources in the community are critical, foundational. I think another element in terms of advice is what we can do to help parents state as part of their values in their home that education is critically important. Parents who may have variable levels of education can still hold a very strong value and communicate that strongly to their children. That is one key element that I think can motivate students to stick with it when the going gets tough.
It is a very important attitudinal piece. We know for some of our families, when parents have low educational levels but the value of education is still highly maintained, their children actually far surpass their parental educational levels.
Mr. Celli: Probably the fundamental thing that needs to happen is as a community, they would need to decide what it is they want, and from that flows the organization of how you go about getting it. It does not have to be resource intensive but you do have to have a clear idea of what it is you want to get to and then you can start to identify what you have, what strengths are already there.
As Senator Greene Raine pointed out, we can build on many strengths, and then you then seek the other ones that you need. Part of the problem is that question has always been answered from outside the community. That has been a fundamental problem all the way along, and I think will continue to plague the education of First Nations students unless we change that.
Mr. Buruma: One of the resources that we have in Alberta is Education is Our Buffalo, and it speaks to the importance and the significance of education and I think that needs to be a two-way process. We have to work with the Aboriginal community. They need to work with us. It is a shared responsibility and the way we make those connections is going to be critical for that to happen.
Senator Hubley: Each of you as educators and administrators has faced the challenges that have come your way and you have come up with programming and innovative ideas to address that situation. Do you have the opportunity to share that among yourselves and throughout the broader community? There are probably many things that would be helpful to different jurisdictions and I am wondering if the opportunity is there for you to share those good ideas and good practices.
Mr. Buruma: We have known for years that there has been a significant gap and there have been efforts to try to improve that gap, but finally it has come down to a specific goal for jurisdictions and schools to meet.
There is measure of accountability. There is reporting required with that. I think that is an important step for us to be able to take, and that has created I think opportunities for a stronger perspective. Each of us has that responsibility and part of that is through sharing.
We have worked on developing connections with other programs and we have an awful lot to learn from one another. That is an important piece. Alberta Education has regular learning consortiums as well as through the First Nations Metis Inuit services dialogue opportunities. They have publications they are working on regarding promising practices for First Nation Metis Inuit education that highlight some of those programs.
Twice a year, there are different sessions and some of those have focused on high school completion mentorship programs, pieces like that, and those are bringing people together for that very purpose.
Senator Hubley: When you are celebrating an Aboriginal event or a special day, does the whole student body participate?
Mr. Dombrosky: Yes, we have entire days but we also do have special sessions in classes according to the program that they are looking for, so they will be as small as a classroom but as large as an entire school.
We also have district wide celebrations. We have an annual powwow we run under the Ben Calf Robe School in which the entire district participates, and our new partner this year will be the City of Edmonton. Definitely many celebrations are intertwined with a variety of agencies.
Senator Raine: I am always very interested in what is happening in the school system with regard to physical education, physical literacy. In particular, I think there is a demonstrated need for physical and health education for First Nations students because sometimes they face different health challenges, as they get older.
Do you have any special programs aimed at physical education, health education for First Nations students?
Ms. Ebbers: Actually, two of our staff members have been certificated in international indigenous games and along with the Catholic board as well, because we have secretly collaborated in some presentations with the two boards, which is a wonderful thing.
That is starting to really take off, both in terms of schools and we are hoping physical education teachers will also want to be certified, so that is a positive thing.
There is a new person in our unit who wants to start a city-wide lacrosse intramural league, so ask me about that next year.
Senator Raine: Physical literacy is a lot more than just sports. It is also about learning how to look after your body and how to exercise properly so that you are fit.
Ms. Ebbers: The indigenous games are not actually a competition. Some of the games include stimulating the brain, some of it is thinking. The entire body is involved in it; it is not necessarily a sport.
Senator Sibbeston: How times have changed from the time that I went to school. Society has become much more affluent, but one of the reasons that drove me on to higher grades is that I did not want to work as a labourer. I come from a background of hunters and trappers, and that way of life was tough.
As I went through high school, I had summer jobs out in the bush or working for Poole Construction, hauling cement in a wheelbarrow. That was enough to motivate me to pass my grades because I did not want to spend my life as a labourer.
I do not know who works nowadays. Everything is mechanized and I sometimes think —
The Chair: Senators work.
Senator Sibbeston: Our society has become so affluent that perhaps you do not even have to work in order to live these days.
I have always said that people cannot develop in a vacuum. There has to be some motivation, some purpose. It is like going to church. I go to church because I generally feel better coming out than when I went in. If that were not the case, then you would not go to church, so going to school has to be the same thing. There has to be some purpose. There has to be some prospect of a job in the future that motivates you to keep going.
I am of the view that any First Nations group, in order to develop, really must be involved in some economic development. There has to be something going on. You just cannot go to a little community in the North, even as smart as you are, and say we are going to develop a system and we are going to close the gap.
Part of your work will have to be to develop some economy so that the parents can work and the children can be motivated to get jobs eventually.
In Edmonton, everybody works. All the parents have jobs. They are highly sophisticated and highly trained. They are motivated, and that carries on through the children.
If you go to any group of people, unless they are in a similarly motivated of situation, they are not as likely to be motivated and to encourage their children because they say, what is the use of work, what is the use of education.
I recognize too that there is a difference. Not everybody wants to live in Edmonton and do the kind of work that is available. There is a wonderful life out in the rural areas where life is slower and much more peaceful; less stressful I am sure.
I sometimes think that we also need to deal with this issue of is the test everybody becoming a scientist, everybody becoming a doctor? Is that the test? Should it be in a little community whether a person is engaging, whether he is happy, whether he has a purpose in life and is happy living there? I think that is the test.
If we get someone in a rural area that just finishes Grade 10 or Grade 11 has a meaningful job and that makes him happy, that person we should deem to have been successful, even though he is not a scientist working at the university. For his situation he has succeeded, you know, so I think we sometimes need to recognize that too.
Mr. Celli: There is a book written by a fellow resident right here in Edmonton called The Economics of Happiness. If you have not read it, I think you would probably really appreciate reading it. The author takes on that very argument: Should everything be focused on an economic end or are there other goals equally desirable to pursue such as a good life and a proper life.
I think that one of the things that we need to do in all honesty is rebalance a little bit the entire education system, not just dealing with the First Nations population. Is the focus always on getting a job? Surely, to heaven, there are other reasons to educate people. I think we need to pursue that alternative and that fits nicely with some of the work we are doing with the First Nations.
Senator Sibbeston: I expected someone from the Catholic school system to jump in and say the end goal of our lives is to get to heaven.
The Chair: I hope that is the end goal of everyone here. I do not think that other place is too favourable. There are no golf courses down there.
Mr. Buruma: Your comments mirror comments we have had within our program, and while the accountability pillar states that we need to do well on exams, we need to complete high school, we need to go on to post-secondary, those have been the very questions and those are the kinds of dialogues we need to have with our communities. We have to ask what the Aboriginal students see as success because their measure of success goes beyond the types of measures that we have here. Yes, those are important, but there are many other aspects as well.
Mr. Dombrosky: I have a comment, and it will not be religious.
I think that every time we see a student graduate that is the first person in his or her family to graduate, there is a very deep sense of accomplishment. I think that we aim for that goal because graduating from high school gives the student the tools to do whatever he or she may choose to do after graduating. I think that high school diploma is crucial.
The Chair: As other senators have said, we have an array of professionals before us who bring a great deal of experience to the table. Teachers are so important.
As a Metis, I was mentored and given a bit of special treatment in mathematics and science by a Grey Nun in St. François Xavier, Manitoba. It made a big difference in my life.
Recently, I represented my political party at a forum in Ottawa. While there, a young teacher from Terrace British Columbia stood up to speak to me. She noted that I am a native of British Columbia. She said that 20 per cent of her students are Aboriginal and that 80 per cent of those students were abused. She asked if I had any solutions or recommendations about how to deal with this problem.
I just shook my head and I said that we have to start from the beginning. All teachers, I believe, should know about this, about what really happened. For 10,000 years, our indigenous people lived here in harmony with the environment. Then, on contact, their economy started to be dismantled, beginning with the bison. Then, they were relegated to reserves, ghettoized. I said to the teacher, ``I do not care who you ghettoize, whites, blacks, yellows, reds — generally the result is the same.'' I added that they were put on these reserves, their land was taken from them and treaties were never honoured. Residential schools were established. The White community or the European community knew best. Take the Indian out of the child was the program, and here the abuse was, without a doubt, horrific.
I then told her that INAC was set up; a paternalistic organization that really wanted to put everybody on welfare and give everybody a handout instead of a hand up. I said that organization continues to this day in that paternalistic manner.
I added that if a child is raised in violence, he or she becomes violent. If a child is raised in abuse, he or she becomes an abuser. That is the sad part of this whole commentary. I then said, ``The key rests with you teachers because if any profession in the world can make a difference, it is you, the schoolteachers.'' Every teacher should understand exactly what he or she is dealing with, this chronology of events.
I could elaborate, but I am trying to summarize to keep it short. The key is with you, as all of you are in charge of this profession in this great province. I believe many of the solutions rest with you, and what is encouraging is that we are starting to understand as a society. We have to go to them to find out what they need and see it through their eyes.
I really want to thank you on behalf of the committee that you took the time to be with us, to share with us your thoughts, your hopes, your dreams and your aspirations for our First Nations people. God bless all of you.
We will now proceed to hear from our next panel of witnesses. From the Northwest Nations Education Council we have with us Gerry Guillet, Director of Education and Chief Executive Officer; and Wes Fine Day, Cultural Adviser and Partnership Coordinator. I would like to welcome from the Ile-a-la-Crosse School Division, Lon Borgerson, Director of Education; and Duane Favel, Chair of the Board of Education.
You know that we are studying kindergarten to Grade 12. I think most of you here are well aware of what the Senate is trying to undertake so that we can come up with a concise, precise, focused report with four recommendations. We are relying on you to give us the four recommendations that the Prime Minister will act on immediately. Is there any doubt?
Duane Favel, Chair, Board of Education, Ile-a-la-Crosse School Division: Chair, I have a special request before we go further. We recognize we only have five to seven minutes to make our presentation, so we have practiced a tag team presentation. We recognize the time limit and we are asking if we can jointly present because that is the way we have gone through it.
The Chair: So you want to be two against one. Go ahead, as long as you keep your time tight.
From Regina Public Schools, we have with us Calvin Racette, Aboriginal Education Coordinator; David Hutchinson, Superintendent; and Betty McKenna, Elder.
From the Saskatoon Tribal Council, we have with us Chief Larry Cachene and John Barton, Acting Director of Education.
Gerry Guillet, Director of Education, Chief Executive Officer, Northwest Nations Education Council: Thank you, Chair, honourable senators. As per the Ile-a-la-Crosse request, I also will limit my time, as my partner is critical to our presentation.
Thank you very much for the honour of being invited to this committee meeting. I will go through very quickly the executive summary of Northwest Nations Education Council, as we are extremely new in the field of education and a model that is very unique, different and as we are being told, certainly the only model of its nature in Canada.
We are trying to establish a First Nation education system or governance of education for on-reserve schools. We were officially implemented in July 2005 as a five-year pilot with INAC support out of the region and out of Ottawa.
We began with six First Nation bands surrounding the Battlefords that wished to improve the quality of instruction and learning in their schools and so we began with six nations. We currently have four members in our organization.
As we are an independent authority, an education authority that is non-political, we are not attached to any tribal council. We exist on our own as an education authority.
We have a board of directors responsible for policy establishment and there is one representative from each participating band. We are responsible to the community and to the chief and council of their respective bands and bring their interests and their concerns to our table. We are a registered non-profit corporation within the Province of Saskatchewan and again, our services are for on-reserve schools only.
We do not receive any funding whatsoever from the First Nation bands in our operation. We are funded completely by INAC region, very insufficiently. However, through a proposal driven program, our attempts to receive sustained funding has not yet come to fruition.
We are designed to provide second level services in education to our band schools, to the board of education or school committee on reserves, to the chiefs and councils and to the parents and students.
I have outlined our services that include the director of education superintendents. We have special needs services such as educational psychologists, speech language pathologists and family therapy services that we provide out of our offices.
The band funding for second-level services is directed towards NNEC, and that is the only level of funding that we receive that would otherwise go to the bands.
The highlights of our services beyond the basics, our superintendent services provide all superintendent services to the community, to the schools, to the staff, also to school committees in an advisory capacity, and we make recommendations. We supervise and evaluate all professional and non-professional staff, and as I said, our capacity is in recommendations and in an advisory capacity.
We established a Catalyst Mentoring Program to address issues in literacy. This has put a teacher in each school to assist classroom teachers in improving the quality of instruction for our children, so that reading and literacy would become the focus point in improving those levels.
We have targeted literacy from Grade 1 to Grade 9 with a heavy emphasis on our primary level and we have seen some dramatic results. Students at the Grade 4 level are now after five years reading at grade level and beyond. There is no gap.
We have provided assistance in the Cree language instructional programs as well as the cultural programs in the schools. We also provide assistance for resources and curriculum materials for teachers.
We have established a central resource centre in our central office. We circulate books and materials for students. We provide technology and assistance for school libraries, improving the quality of the libraries and establishing libraries in schools that did not have libraries.
We also provide access to technology for our students and teachers in the schools, and we have gone beyond the schools to provide technology in the community.
We have dramatically increased the professional development for professional staff — teachers, teacher assistants, guidance counsellors, secretaries —, which was not there before. We have established professional learning communities in all our schools.
We provide curriculum in-service. We are doing a significant amount of testing, diagnostic reading assessments, to provide teachers with knowledge on what needs to be taught for our students.
We have also assisted in record keeping in the schools with school administration software and we provide regular meetings for the Catalyst Mentoring Program members, for our special education teachers, our primary teachers and our Cree language teachers so that they can network and learn from each other.
We have established some major partnerships. One that we are extremely proud of is with the University of Saskatchewan, where our high school students attend the university to increase their knowledge and to get assistance in the sciences, in particular physics, chemistry and biology. We are moving into computer technology as well as math. Our students utilize the services of the university and their labs.
We also have a special partnership with a scientific research centre in the Netherlands. We have partnerships with our local school divisions, with the Ministry of Education, and most recently, a partnership with Regina Public School Division in the province in the development of curricula and professional development.
We have had many challenges, some that are financial, and some that are political, but we have survived and we will continue to survive.
Wes Fine Day, Cultural Advisor/Partnership Coordinator, Northwest Nations Education Council: My focus has been on developing the cultural component of the education system, in order to incorporate traditional teaching methodologies, philosophies and the evaluation procedures. We have been trying to make our teaching staff aware that this culture existed before the schools were introduced into our communities and they are still in force and effect among our traditional teaching community.
We have begun working with the elders in our communities to try to engage with the elders, the parents, the teaching staff, the superintendents and our own office staff. We are working with them to bring an understanding of what culture is all about. We are exploring with our partners and incorporating traditional research methodologies and hooking them up with contemporary scientific research methodologies in the hope of beginning to develop a more holistic understanding of what potential holistic education can have to improve our communities.
We have people who are proud of who they are, who understand who they are, who have a sense of their historical perspective and a sense of place from the land.
We are introducing our cultural perspective into our institutions because it will benefit our students. If we can harness that cultural perspective with the academic portion of our schools, we will have people who have skills that they can take out into the mainstream society. They will be take these skills into mainstream society and be proud of who they are and they will understand their role in society, to a certain degree. They will be ready to explore and embrace that journey in finding out more about what their purpose and destiny here on this earth.
The Chair: Thank you very much. That is a very honourable and credible position.
Duane Favel, Chair, Board of Education, Ile-a-la-Crosse School Division:
[The witness spoke in his native language.]
Thank you for inviting us. Ile-a-la-Crosse is a Metis community situated on the Churchill River system in Northern Saskatchewan. This historical community was established in 1776. We have about 1,600 people in our progressive, modern and dynamic community.
The Ile-a-la-Crosse School Division was established in 1975 through a very difficult struggle for local control of local education. Of course, this gave us the experience and the authority to do the things we needed to do in education to be successful, and I will discuss a few of these things today.
Saskatchewan recently went through an amalgamation process and we went from 81 school divisions to 29 school divisions. Ile-a-la-Crosse is one of only three community based school divisions in Saskatchewan.
We have two schools in our community, Rossignol Elementary and Rossignol High School. The high school is unique in the sense that we are part of an integrated facility. We share this facility with many different agencies in our community, including a hospital, our day care and our long-term care for our elders. These are based out of this facility so it is unique in that sense and it gives us some challenges but also creates opportunities for us.
We have about 460 students from pre-kindergarten to Grade 12, and 95 per cent of our students are of Metis ancestry. More than 50 per cent of our teaching staff is Aboriginal and our support staff is as high as 85 per cent Aboriginal. Many of these teachers are graduates of the Northern Teachers Education Program.
Lon Borgerson, Director of Education, Ile-a-la-Crosse School Division: In Saskatchewan as in other provinces, there has been more of a focus on assessment and the publication of student results on a provincial level.
I am sure this committee has already had presentations on this and you know the results of indicators in Saskatchewan are that at the bottom of most of the categories you will find Aboriginal students and northern students.
The Ile-a-la-Crosse School Division is determined to close and eliminate what people call an achievement gap. However, the problem with these education indicators is that they only tell part of the story. Missing are those other indicators, health indicators, social indicators, economic and cultural indicators that tell the whole stories of our students' lives.
Our board members see those indicators every day. They live those indicators
every day, and they have built in accountability on a daily basis. This is the
advantage of being a small, locally controlled school division. As Stuart McLean
says, we may not be big but we are small.
We will discuss cultural and spiritual learning, early learning, and inclusive learning.
Mr. Favel: One of those priorities is cultural and spiritual learning. Of course, this is a priority of our school division and we try to do this by offering a mix of language instruction program in kindergarten to Grade 10 culminating in an annual community Michif festival.
We emphasize the instruction of Metis culture and Metis history and we support this through annual cultural camps and an elders program that is vital to this portion of our school division. If you want to learn little bit more about that, you can visit our website at www.icsd.ca.
Mr. Borgerson: We recognize as a school division the dramatic learning that occurs before children come to school. We know this is beyond the mandate of this commission but we believe it is probably the highest priority area.
We would like to offer pre-kindergarten to four- and three-year-olds. We offer it now to pre-kindergarten through an arrangement with the friendship centre and the Head Start program. We are bringing early learning partners together in the community to address this area and provide continuity and transitions.
We are piloting a full-time kindergarten that seems to be working well, so far. To develop continuity, we ran our first summary literacy camp this past summer, and we are, thanks to the foundational work of the Canadian Council of Learning, working on an Aboriginal holistic assessment project with three other school divisions in the province.
Mr. Favel: The bottom line is we want the students in school. We do not want them on the street, so we emphasize partnerships as one way of doing this.
Our board has decided that we want our schools to be schools of opportunity for every young person in our community. We want to engage those who attend and invite those who do not. We try to do this by providing a well- rounded inclusive program.
We offer practical applied arts, pre-employment welding in partnership with Northern Career Quest and our Northland College. We offer an adult 12 program in partnership with Dumont Technical Institute, adult basic education with an MOU with Dumont Technical Institute.
We offer a new storefront program we just implemented this year, and of course, we try to tie all our students in by offering a strong support program.
Mr. Borgerson: Finally, we believe that there is one area of the curriculum that is left aside, and that is the area of arts education. We have invited professional artists into our community including the Metis fiddler John Arcand. Mr. Arcand works in our community all year round, and we know the power that the arts can have to affirm the personal, social and cultural identity of our students.
Both Mr. Favel and myself were a part of a theatre and education program many years ago. I was a teacher-director and Duane was one of the students. We are both aware of the power of the arts.
In our haste to address the achievement gap, we have to make sure that we are careful not to create other gaps in programming.
Mr. Favel: In conclusion, we want to emphasize the importance of relationships with our staff, with our students and with our community. One was of strengthening those relationships is we get our director of education to communicate through our local radio station and have that positive working relationship with the community.
Dave Hutchinson, Superintendent, Regina Public Schools: Good afternoon, senators. We really appreciate this opportunity to present to you some of the work we are doing in Regina Public Schools around Aboriginal education. I will also be brief so that my good colleagues, Elder Betty McKenna and Calvin Racette, can share their perspectives.
We are all clearly trying to wrestle with one thing and that is the lack of a standardized framework for improving Aboriginal student academic achievement. Like the other divisions you have heard from today, we also have a number of initiatives under way.
Our first and probably the most significant initiative we are connected to at this time is all about elders and creating space for elders within our schools and at division office. About five years ago, we created a division Elders Advisory Council of which Betty is a member. There are 10 elders on this council, First Nations and Metis, and they work directly with the board.
The idea was to create an opportunity for Aboriginal people to influence change and improvement in the division at an executive level. So rather than having the executive level create policy and programming for Aboriginal people and then share that with Aboriginal community reps and ask for their opinion, we thought it would be better to have our elders involved right at the outset.
In addition to the advisory council, we have 31elder-in-residence programs in our schools. We are just beginning to gather the data on the relationship between the work of the elders and the improvement of academic achievement. However, the information we are gathering so far is starting to paint a clear picture of the correlation between elders and improving student learning, and our elders work with all students, not just First Nations and Metis students.
We consider our elders to be our community partners. Many divisions have created partnerships with First Nations, and our elders represent First Nations in the Treaty 4 area as well as the urban areas, Regina and Moose Jaw where Betty is from.
Another area of focus for our system is curriculum and instruction, and I will share with you a few of the things that we have done connected to that.
We have created division office cultural room so we have a space at division office for ceremonies and for educational purposes connected to staff professional development and student learning.
We have trained most of our staff and we have got close to 1,300 teachers in the Circle of Courage model, and that is a training model that is focused on helping teachers understand better ways of working with at-risk youth and ways that are focused on Aboriginal people's ideas about effective teaching and learning.
All of our schools are required to have a goal connected to First Nations and Metis education. We have highly recommended that they focus on treaty education.
In Saskatchewan, the ministry has created an assessment at the Grade 7 level, and so we now have a way to measure the degree to which a Grade 7 student has mastered content connected to the treaties. We think it is vital that all of our students learn as much as they can about the treaties.
We have partnered with the File Hills Qu'Appelle First Nation on the development of a curriculum that is focused on the world views of the First Nations and Metis people who live in the Treaty 4 area. We have also added indigenous studies teachers to four of our community schools and we have a program of division wide, culture based support.
We have about 60 resource persons who can be deployed throughout the school system. Their work is coordinated by a cultural liaison worker and they are at the ready to help schools implement content connected to First Nations and Metis people.
Another area that we are working on is governance. I just spoke to the Elders Advisory Council and we have developed an Aboriginal education policy for the division that steers our work and ensures that the politicians who are helping to guide the bigger vision around the systems development put the right resources into this particular area.
Another area of focus for us is academic achievement accountability. Senators have heard a few of my colleagues speak to that today. We have a continuous improvement plan as a division. We are hyper-focused on strengthening Aboriginal students' success, yes, in literacy and numeracy. We are also monitoring very closely retention and graduation rates.
We disaggregate data in our provincial and division assessments so we can monitor the degree to which our Aboriginal students are successful in comparison with their non-Aboriginal counterparts.
Another area of focus for the system is human resources. We have added division staff. Calvin Racette is one of those folks. We also have a cultural liaison worker who is our elder liaison person and coordinator of culture based programming.
We have beefed up our teacher hiring. We have a concerted effort every year now to hire a pool of First Nations and Metis teachers. It is a targeted hiring process. We work closely with the teacher education programs at Gabriel Dumont Institute and the First Nations University and we try to be as proactive as we can in getting as many high quality First Nations and Metis teachers in front of our students. They are not just great role models but they do a phenomenal job of inspiring their colleagues to embrace things like our elder-in-residence programming and the treaty education model.
We also include elder representation on interview committees. If the system is going to commit itself to hiring people with a background in First Nations and Metis education, elders are instrumental folks at the interview table who can help make sure we are hiring the type of people that we want and need for the available position.
The final area in our system that we are working on is leadership development. We are pursuing the growth and development of our leaders around cultural awareness, cultural proficiency, working effectively with elders, and building bridges with the Aboriginal community.
Those would be the main areas of focus for our system at this time.
Calvin Racette, Aboriginal Education Coordinator, Regina Public Schools: All I want to say is I make sure it gets done.
Betty McKenna, Elder: All I see in the Regina Public Schools system is a total success package for students, parents, teachers and people at board office who can see where this is going. We are working with our children today, and that is all we have is today, because if we work with them properly and we get them prepared and ready, they are ready to learn. They are ready to read. They are ready to do math.
That in itself is such a huge thing for children and no one is going to benefit more than the future if we do it right today.
The Chair: Are you from Moose Jaw?
Ms. McKenna: Yes.
The Chair: I took my air force training there. I did not see you there.
Larry Cachene, Chief, Saskatoon Tribal Council: I would like to express my appreciation and gratitude to the senate to hear about our issues and First Nations communities. Let us build our communities together so that Canada gets stronger and our First Nations people are taking part in society. Let us give our community members the skills to enable our community members to move forward with education.
I would like to talk a little bit about the education problems that we face in our communities. The problems began with the residential schools that took away our language, identity and our pride in our culture. Our school systems need to start addressing those issues and must recognize cultural programs and language as a part of the programming.
A few years ago, we had an opportunity to try to put a language program together that would deal with the cultural and historical side of our language. We wanted a language program so that students could learn different things as they were learning the language, and that was something that we did not have the ability to do. We need a lot of time to do that.
We can start but then we do not advance. We did not have ongoing support for that development. I believe we need to look at language in our communities because language will give back that sense of pride that the elder was talking about and that sense of identity. As part of that, we need to look at resourcing not only with dollars but also with staff that will assist the communities in developing these programs.
If we do not have our schools working properly and we are not bringing the students through to graduation and going on into post-secondary programs, then we are not going to get anywhere, we are not succeeding. If we do not accomplish this goal we will be a group that will always be left behind, the gaps will always be there.
One of the gaps is the funding gaps. We run an education system that is supposed to be equal to the provincial schools in Saskatchewan, but the funding gaps are there and we have to try to manage those funds as best we can.
I believe we are doing it, but we do not have the success because there are so many different learning levels in our schools. We have learners who are really having trouble grasping a concept and then we learners who are grasping that concept and we are holding them back because our system is not able to handle teaching different levels in the same classroom. We need good teachers, and to get good teachers, we need the resources.
We need to look at the community's needs, the community's vision, including our language and our culture. We need to give the students the chance to succeed by making school fun, bringing in different kinds of curriculum that changes the view that school is something negative.
This again comes back to the residential schools. I know in our community, when we talk education; people back off. When we talk religion, people back off. Those two things should have benefited our communities but they have not, because an important part of it is missing. That self-worth is missing in our schools.
We want our schools to enable our kids to succeed and to learn and to be the best that they can be. We want them to build healthy homes in our communities, leading to healthy communities, leading to being part of society as healthy partners, working together to build Canada and our families.
I know you heard a lot about the lack of resources, but the important thing is that if we are going to build Canada together, then we need to start resourcing properly to support life in higher education. We have so many barriers when our students go to school. We have rents that are $800, $900 a month, and in our community, rates for post-secondary education barely cover those rents. How are our youth supposed to live?
If you do not have the coping skills that should be a part of our education system, the failure rates, the kids are coming back from university because they cannot meet their immediate needs and their children's needs. That should be looked at — sustainable rates for people when they go to school and university.
We get roughly $1 million a year for our post-secondary program and every dollar goes towards post-secondary classes or tuitions or student support. We have a waiting list and we can only fund so many people a year. The kids that are coming out of high school have two, three, four, five years to wait before we are able to send them to school, and that is a disadvantage. We see our youth sitting and waiting to get to post-secondary schooling during which time their brain is getting stagnant.
A problem we are facing is the wait list that we have in our communities and INAC reviewing the status quo. What do you do? You need to address it somehow. For communities like Yellow Quill, our resources are actually going to post-secondary funding items.
We need to keep supporting that. The bad side of this is my community and other communities that are maximizing the use of their post-secondary funding are going to be penalized, and then again, our members will have to fight for that extra funding.
I do not know what is going to happen with that post-secondary funding, but it is going to be changed in some form. Is it going to be harder for communities that are growing, learning, and trying to build better communities? Will those communities be penalized? That extra fight is just going to knock the wind out of the students who want to go to school eventually.
The importance of our language and our culture, I think we need to start building that internally with the community's vision and the elders' help, and again, you need actual resources. We have to have more resources to make an educational system from kindergarten to Grade 12 work, to have more student's graduate, to have more students stay in school.
Then we start dealing with the issues in our community through that program. We are learning about health programs, our history and our value system in the past. That is coming through that language program. Teaching all of this at least gives youth a chance to have the coping skills and the mechanisms to help them cope with many of the struggles that they face once they leave the community.
Thank you again for the opportunity to speak and I would like to say that post-secondary education leads to all the successes that we need to meet. We heard a little about the economic development that needs to happen for First Nations to grow and become more self-sufficient. A key part of it is the education has to be there to help the community and our membership to move on to self-sufficiency and become productive members of Canada as a nation.
If there are any questions, I think John Barton will field them. There is a lot of work that we are doing at the Saskatoon Tribal Council. Again, with our own resources, we are trying to build our materials and our programs, but again, we are doing it with bare minimum staff, where we could be moving forward if we had the chance of securing good people to help us along the way.
Senator Poirier: Your presentations were very interesting, and I am glad to hear from all of you and to hear about some of your successes.
I have a few questions for the Northwest Nations Education Council, NNEC presenter. Mr. Guillet, you mentioned a five-year pilot project that began in July 2005, which I assume finished in July 2010. I am under the impression that the pilot project has been extended and will continue to be financed by INAC.
Mr. Guillet: Yes, it has.
Senator Poirier: Are you aware if this pilot project was offered only in Saskatchewan and if, now that we are beyond the stage of the pilot project and it has been such a success, it is being offered in other provinces in Canada?
Mr. Guillet: To the best of my knowledge, I do not believe it has. We are struggling with recognition, in particular in the region. However, we have received verbal recognition out of Ottawa headquarters that NNEC is leading the pack across the country in its initiatives and its structure and its model.
We had an independent evaluation by INAC out of the regional office and one of the recommendations in our evaluation to INAC was that this model should be implemented across Canada. To date, it has not.
Senator Poirier: You mentioned you targeted literacy from Grade 1 to Grade 9 with heavy emphasis on Grade 1 to Grade 4. You said that you did not have a gap. Would you expand on that please?
Mr. Guillet: With the implementation of the Catalyst Mentoring Program, our initial testing indicated that by Grade 3, our students were still at kindergarten to Grade 1 reading level. Currently our Grade 3 students are reading at Grade 3 level and beyond. We have eliminated that gap at those levels with 90 per cent to 95 per cent of our students.
Senator Poirier: Have you eliminated the gap between First Nations schools and public schools?
Mr. Guillet: Yes.
Senator Poirier: Great, excellent work.
The Chair: How many First Nations schools do you represent?
Mr. Guillet: We have four First Nations.
The Chair: You started with six.
Mr. Guillet: We started with six.
The Chair: Do you mind explaining what happened?
Mr. Guillet: The political environment around the Battlefords was in upheaval with the creation of a second tribal council. We are independent of any tribal council, but there appeared to be amongst some of the First Nation leader's insistence that we were part of the Battleford Tribal Council, which we are not. Then the Battlefords Agency Tribal Chiefs council was established. Three bands were in what we call the BTC. Three bands separated from BTC and developed BATC. Those three bands decided to remove themselves from NNEC.
Within our partnership agreement, which was signed by the six chiefs, originally it was indicated that a band council resolution was required to remove a band from our organization. That occurred with no consultation in their communities about the removal of their membership from our education authority or organization. Without that consultation with parents, it certainly created some ill feelings within their communities.
Last June, an independent band joined our organization. This band certainly solidifies our premise that we are independent; we are not part of a tribal council, therefore non-political.
The politics is not part of our organization, but we are severely impacted by the politics in the area.
The Chair: That pretty well answers it.
Senator Poirier: You mentioned that you are now a registered non-profit corporation and that your financing comes from INAC. You mentioned that you are underfunded. Being a registered non-profit organization, does that allow you or have you been receiving grants or funding from other organizations? Is that a possibility for you in the future?
Mr. Guillet: That is our vision, our possibilities in the future. We have not to date received any other funding source other than from INAC, and our funding has been diminished annually from INAC. Despite the cuts in funding, we are successful.
The Chair: You are under the Saskatchewan educational system. You are not receiving any assistance from the federal level at all, are you? You never have.
Mr. Favel: No.
The Chair: I am in a bit of a conflict here because I happen to be Metis. Is the Métis National Council working toward getting any funding through the interlocutor for cultural linguistic initiatives?
Mr. Borgerson: I do not know of any initiatives in that sense. I will indicate there have been informal relations with the First Nations in the area, like the Meadow Lake Tribal Council. Just on an informal basis, we share resources in terms of staffing and workshops and those kinds of things. In the distant past, we had as a school division an arrangement with Meadow Lake Tribal Council, for example, to have students that had special education requirements attend our school. There have been some arrangements there, but in terms of the interlocutor's office, we have received any funding from those folks and we do not have an arrangement at this time.
Senator Dyck: Mr. Guillet, concerning closing the gap in literacy, I presume you were measuring the different kinds of literacy like prose and numeracy and so on. You talked a bit about having partnerships in science education. Are you closing the gap in numeracy, literacy and science literacy?
Mr. Guillet: Yes, we are attempting to do that, Senator Dyck. We felt our concentration had to be in literacy. In order for our students to be more successful in the numeracy and scientific studies, they had to learn to read and comprehend. Once the student has accomplished comprehension then he or she can understand math and science concepts. Our focus has been in literacy at the primary level with the goal to move forward in the later primary years to other subjects.
We are developing a literacy program for the middle year students, attempting to reduce that gap at that level. Because there is no commercial program out there, we are writing our own and piloting it as of this fall.
Senator Sibbeston: I would like to ask the representatives from the Regina Public Schools if you have any relationship, formal or informal, with First Nations in the area. I know when we were in Saskatoon, we learned that there was a relationship with First Nations in the area, so have you done the same in Regina at all?
Mr. Racette: As David mentioned, we had a political MOU with the File Hills Qu'Appelle Tribal Council. We found that education and politics has differences of opinion sometimes, so we have formed our partnership predominantly with the elders.
We have an unofficial MOU and an agreement to work together with the First Nations University, with the Gabriel Dumont Institute and with the health district. We agree to work together but our biggest partnership is with our elders. Our elders are the voice of our community. Via interacting through them, we get the community support, and then because of that the politicians do not contradict the words of the elders.
It is very much a community based elder partnership, but we do not have legal and formal partnerships with the bands, but we certainly do with all of the important players in the area of education.
Senator Sibbeston: Do you consider that what you are working with is progressive development? Is that where the future lies in terms of advancing Aboriginal education in our country?
Mr. Guillet: I really agree with that statement in the sense that our students have tremendous skills and talents and they need the opportunities that are not there for them on an equal plane. I referred to on-reserve schools, because those are the schools I work with; however, I have 30 years' experience in the provincial system, and certainly, our students, our schools on-reserve are disadvantaged when I compare them to the provincial schools.
The future for our Aboriginal students lies within that equality, that they have the equal opportunities that all students have. So yes, the future for our FNMI students definitely lies within the context of education and being prepared.
As my partner Wes has said, the cultural aspect and the language is extremely important in that development.
Mr. Fine Day: In terms of the future, maybe we can get more knowledgeable Aboriginal people and more knowledgeable non-Aboriginal people working together to build this country.
For instance, take the medicine wheels. What do we know about the medicine wheels? Perhaps a better example for people who do not know about medicine wheels would be the pyramids.
If archaeologists go there, they will take their tape measures and they will measure the pyramid, how long, how wide are there entrances, what is in there? You will notice in those pyramids and in the medicine wheels that there is always a focal point.
When people have issues of significance to talk about and they need help from a greater power to find potential answers, we say as traditional knowledge keepers, there is a level at which that knowledge resides, where the thoughts of Creator and the thoughts of humanity are intertwined, and it is in a certain dimension.
When you get a group of people together sitting around a table, each person brings his or her spiritual energy, intellectual energy, emotional energy and physical energy. Now, if we are of one mind and we focus our thoughts and our energies into the centre, into the focal point, at that point, our individual energy is magnified to a point where we have the potential to connect to the dimension where knowledge resides. Each of us sits and asks our questions in silence to the Spirit, and each of us will be given the answer from that level of knowledge and awareness, the dimension where Creator's thoughts and humanity's thoughts coincide.
This is important for people to understand. I am a spiritual person. I am a ceremonialist, and if we are to improve our societies, it is imperative that we have an understanding of this aspect of our culture.
I find that to be more important than the width of medicine wheel or the pyramids. When we focus your energy, we can create changes in the physical environment.
How did those people build the pyramids? When you are able to create changes in the physical environment, you can change the power and the nature of gravity. If you have enough people in a circle, you can do what seems impossible to the average person who does not have access to that energy and to that power. Yes, I think it is important.
[Editor's Note: Technical difficulties with the sound system.]
The Chair: Chief Cachene, could you please repeat what you said word for word and not change one word.
Mr. Cachene: Partnerships are being developed, but we need to consider the visions of the community for it to work.
For the last 100 years, without our input, systems have been brought into our communities. For us to succeed with our partnerships, we have to take the communities' visions into those sessions to develop the work that has to come out of the partnership.
In a way, I agree that they will be the way to go, but we still need to consider the big portion coming from the community. The development that happens needs to be led by the community's thoughts and the community's guidance.
Mr. Borgerson: I had the privilege of being a teacher and principal with a locally controlled school division of Ile-a- la-Crosse. I was fortunate to return as a director of education, but I have also had the great privilege of doing projects with First Nations that had just gained local control of education.
Frankly, we are dealing with the aftermath of a lot of incompetence and lack of funding, from INAC. I saw, particularly with one First Nation in Northern Saskatchewan, a real turnaround in terms of being able to exercise local control.
We hear the word ``community'' mentioned many times by Chief Cachene, that ability for the community to take control of its own education.
Ile-a-la-Crosse 30 years ago did not have Grade 11 and Grade 12. Its students went out to boarding school and the graduation rate was dismal. When it took local control, it brought in Grade 11 and Grade 12, and as a result, we have about 20 graduates every year.
The Chair: What percentage is that?
Mr. Borgerson: That is lower than it should be and it is between 65 per cent and 70 per cent graduation rate. That is not what you will see in the indicators report but that is another story.
What I am getting at is when I saw Big River First Nation take control of its own education; within a very short time, they had their own Grade 12. They had a community-based model.
When I saw Turner Lake take control of its education, it as well, with its brand new school this year, which it should have gotten years ago, now has Grade 11 and Grade 12, and so there is far more hope for the future. I fully support the words of Chief Cachene.
Senator Sibbeston: In the North, we have a similar situation, but I have always thought that there is an advantage for a student to come from the smaller communities and to work his way to a high school where the standards are a little higher. The notion is that if you have Grade 11 and Grade 12 in your own community, the standard is not going to be as good as that in a regional centre.
Sure, maybe they will get through but maybe the standard is not quite as high. Invariably they have to move out into the bigger world, so there is some benefit, I think, to moving along. Do you want to comment?
Mr. Borgerson: I have told people that I am part of a long-term qualitative project because I get to see the results of the educational system that I was a part of 30 years ago.
On a daily basis, I meet graduates, my former students, who are always full of humour, and I am constantly impressed with what they have done with their lives.
I am also extremely impressed with the ownership they take. They graduated from the high school in Ile-a-la-Crosse so they are comfortable walking in and talking about courses and credits with teachers. They and their children are far more comfortable now dealing with post-secondary institutions.
It is a smaller world that we live in. Everyone is text messaging. There are more paved roads. I hope that answers your question. Their ability to move beyond the community is stronger than it was.
Senator Raine: I would just like to ask for a little clarification on the Circle of Courage model.
Mr. Racette: Quite a few years ago, there was a model that came out of South Dakota and it is a Lakota model. It is a reclaiming model for students at risk and it focuses on the four dimensions of the Aboriginal worldview of human learning. We focused on training our teachers how to be better teachers and how to work with kids who are having a tough time.
We have brought the trainers in and worked on just being more understanding and more flexible and having a spiritual and holistic component.
Senator Raine: Do you work with their parents at the same time?
Mr. Racette: Well, I think indirectly, yes, because as the teachers take their training, they are certainly a lot more comfortable when they go back to the schools and so because of that, in an indirect fashion, they would, but not directly, no.
Senator Raine: When we were at Onion Lake yesterday, we were so impressed with the Cree immersion school. Now they have a second elementary school on the reserve and I was astonished to find out that the school of choice for many parents was not the immersion school. Obviously, there is still a residual reluctance to embrace their language and culture amongst many people in their community.
Do you have any thoughts on how we can break down that misconception that immersion will hold the children back?
Mr. Racette: In Regina, we are light years behind, I suppose, in terms of immersion programs and Cree language programs. However, I do believe that has been sort of the myth, certainly, that if you learn your first language first, it is a detriment to your learning; it is a detriment to making it in the real world, in the Western world. There is a misconception that you must learn English or you must learn French.
If you want to address it, make Aboriginal languages an important part of the Canadian foundation and incorporate it into the constitution. Let us say that people are allowed to speak their own languages and recognize them in communities.
In Saskatchewan, less than 2 per cent of the population are French but we have all kinds of French funding coming in, multi-millions of dollars from the federal government for French language programs and at the provincial level, it is zero for Aboriginal language programming. In fact, our school division is 25 per cent Aboriginal kids and not 10 cents comes forward for Aboriginal people. That is a way we could address it, from my perspective.
Senator Hubley: My question is for Betty. If one thing has impressed me during our visit, it is the importance of the elders within communities to tell the stories, to share the traditions, to take an important role in the education of the young people.
Elders in school sounds really good to me and I was pleased to hear about it and I would like you to share with us how many schools — I think there are 31 elders in residence that David had relayed to us. How are those schools chosen to have an elder in residence? How broad is the project? Tell us a little bit about the work that you are doing.
Ms. McKenna: The Elder in Residence Program is division wide so it is throughout all the schools in Regina, but certain schools apply to have an elder come in. It is not based on the number of Aboriginal students in the school. It is based on how the teachers are ready to work with an elder in their school. I am there for all students, not just for Aboriginal students.
For Grade 9 students, for instance, we do a tawaw ceremony. Tawaw is a Cree word that means welcome, there is plenty of room. We do this welcome ceremony for the Grade 9s when they come in because they are so scared. They were the top dogs in Grade 8 and all of a sudden, they are low man on the totem when they come in to high school.
We have this welcoming ceremony, the teachers are involved in it, and we hug these children as they come in the door and say, there is plenty of room here for you, and everyone has a role to play in this school and this school is your family now. For four years, they carry a stone. They choose a stone that we bless and these children carry the stone.
I now have students who have carried the stones for three years. They are in Grade 11, and they have been coming to me saying, ``What do we do with our stone when we graduate?'' I said I think we will leave them behind as a cairn to have all the other students be encouraged that you were here and learned, so the following students will do the same for others.
That is one of the things we do in the schools besides being able to greet those students and tell them how important it is that they are there that day. I always tell them, you keep me alive today, and they are so happy about it, and my students are coming to school because they want to keep me alive and they say, we want to make sure that you get home safely too, beside keeping you alive today.
I have little girls who do not know their place in the world and I have sage girls. We go to the board office, they smudge, and they learn things about being a girl. They learn how to take care of themselves and how they should traditionally know the protocols if they ever go to a feast or if they go to a smudge or anything that they would be doing with other people in the community. Instead of someone saying, oh, look at that child, those children help one another. They will remind one another, where is your skirt, we are going into a ceremony, or they will also help one another along in school and they support one another as little girls.
It is important that those girls know their importance as life givers in this world, where they stand and the very importance they hold here. Those are the things that I bring into the school, and I know that all the other elders, my colleagues do the same thing.
It is just nurturing those children along. All children need that nurturing so they can feel; I belong here.
Senator Hubley: I commend you on that.
Mr. Racette: If I could answer the first part of Betty's question, I do the administration end of it so I get to set it up. I have a little more background perhaps than Betty does on it.
There are 31 programs, we have limited funding, and we have two excellent partners. First, one is the provincial ministry that gives us partial funding to support our Elder in Residence Program, and the federal government contributes the funds through the Urban Aboriginal Strategy.
The schools apply to us, we look at the schools that are best prepared in terms of their learning improvement plans and what are they prepared to do themselves, and to what the teachers are prepared to commit. We find that successful schools are the schools that have teachers and administrations that are willing to work with our elders. If they are not willing to work with our elders, they go to the back of the line. We have to be pretty disciplined on that point.
We have an equal number of community and non-community schools and so it is based on belonging and it is based on wanting to work with our people.
The Chair: The question I have to ask is about heroes, mentors and role models.
I have been on this committee for about 17 years, and in the last little while, I have been asked by some First Nations leaders to approach business people that I know and they know are successful to come and speak to their young people, to inspire them.
I have heroes, as I believe most of us have. My mom and dad were logically my first heroes but after that came people like Terry Fox, Mother Teresa, Stanley Burke, which most likely none of you have heard of.
I can remember as a little Metis kid, this fellow used to come around with a cowboy hat — that is why I guess I still wear one — in a Cadillac. He was an MLA, and he used to take time and talk to us and say, ``Look, you guys got to go to school and you got to get educated because if you do not, you are not going to get out of this place.'' He said, ``I have no family. I am not married, but if one of you needs any assistance, I will give it to you.'' He did. He took one of the Metis kids, Morris Todd, because we encouraged Morris to go and see Jack McConnell, and he did. He became our hero. He became our inspiration, and for a couple of us, we dug our way out of there with education.
I can recall being at a political convention and Randy Travis was singing the song, ``Heroes and Friends'' which you have all heard I am sure, or a lot of you have, as the President of the United States walked into the arena in Houston, Texas. I can tell you, you could have walked up on the goose pimples on my back.
This to me is what is really lacking, really portraying our Aboriginal leaders, whether Metis, Inuit or First Nations, and creating mentors that people can really look up to and creating a program so that these people can go and do the work that they should do with our young people.
There is a great story that many people have to tell that would inspire the young people. Really, has any thought been given to that idea?
Mr. Racette: I can talk a little bit about that. From our perspective, certainly one of the senators mentioned the significance of the Aboriginal performance at the Olympics in Vancouver. We took a great deal of pride in that but the two-hour ceremony cost how many millions of dollars? It was an incredible cost to Canadians in general.
In our school division, as I said, we have limited resources. I prefer to spend my dollars investing in day-to-day incorporation and work with our community people and our elders at a day-to-day level and I believe we get a lot bigger bang for our dollar out of long-term investment than a one hit wonder.
That is sort of the perspective I come from and I run the program so I get to make those decisions.
I hear what you are saying, and I think it has value every time you can do that, but because there are so many organizations, we all operate on very limited funds and we have to do what we can and we have to do what is in the best interests of our community. We simply do not have the resources to do that.
The Chair: I do not think all the mentors necessarily have to be Aboriginal people.
Senator Raine: If you know any Olympians in your region, just ask. Ninety-nine per cent of them would be happy to come get involved and help. The only reason they do not is because nobody has invited them. They are shy, believe it or not. So just ask and I think you would be surprised.
The Chair: There is so much talent out there and so many good stories to be told that could really inspire, because you have to be inspired. If you are not inspired, you are a dead person walking.
Mr. Borgerson: We wanted to highlight teacher education. Saskatchewan has had the great fortune to have a number of Aboriginal teacher education programs including ITEP, SIFC and the First Nations University, NORTEP and three SUNTEP programs. I had the opportunity to work with one of those SUNTEP centres and most of the students especially in the older days in those TEP programs were women, most were single parents. Most were taking a huge step forward, and the graduates from those TEP programs provided mentorship.
You will see the children of some of those graduates now entering the TEP programs. I know Manitoba has a program, the BUNTEP program, but this is a model that I think could be imitated across Canada.
Mr. Guillet: I would just like to add to your comments. My cohort here is a little shy to say, but NNEC through Wes is doing tremendous things in our communities with our elders and recording and transposing all the stories from our elders into an archive that we at NNEC want to have available to all our students, and these stories are absolutely unbelievable.
The history of our First Nations is being lost because those stories have not been captured, and we are attempting to capture them. Such stories like the story of great Chief Poundmaker are just unbelievable stories and we are in the process of putting those stories into an archive.
Senator St. Germain, our children know very little about these role models. Even though the reserve is named Poundmaker Reserve, who was Chief Poundmaker, what did he do? Who was Little Pine, what did he do? Those stories are being captured now and these are role models.
The Chair: On behalf of my colleagues, I would like to thank all of you who participated in this session. If you have any other information that you would like us to have, you can always forward it to the clerk of our committee, and hopefully through the information that we have received from you and from others, we can create a report that nobody can ignore and that the whole world can celebrate and especially our country, Canada.
Before adjourning the meeting, colleagues, I have a bit of housekeeping. I am aware that I have the committee's agreement to permit TV coverage of the witness presentation, but I would like a formal motion on the record to that effect. Do I have a mover? Senator Dyck?
All in favour?
Hon. Senators: Agreed.
The Chair: Opposed, if any?
Colleagues, if there are no other comments; we are adjourned until tomorrow morning. We will be going to Amiskwaciy Academy. We hope you all can join us.
Again, thank you, God bless, and may the Creator look after all of us.
(The committee adjourned.)