All Posts Tagged With: "aboriginal"

Money for skills training, education, counselling

Federal Aboriginal Affairs Minister Bernard Valcourt says new funding will help aboriginals get off welfare.

Valcourt was in Saskatoon on Wednesday where he announced $241 million to help aboriginals achieve the same job opportunities as all Canadians.

Saskatchewan Tribal Council Chief Felix Thomas says the money will help get welfare numbers down for aboriginals, a major issue for all First Nations across Canada.

He also says it will help improve quality of life for everyone in the province.

Continue reading Ottawa commits $241 million to aboriginal youth jobs

An interview with Michael DeGagne

Protesters outside PM Harper's residence on Dec. 23, 2012 (Fred Chartrand/CP)

Michael DeGagne, an Aboriginal Canadian, will become president of Nipissing University in January. The school is located in North Bay, the self-proclaimed Gateway to Northern Ontario, a region of vast mineral wealth that is also home to deep Aboriginal poverty. That poverty is concentrated in places like Attawapiskat, the James Bay reservation made famous by Chief Theresa Spence, who is now on the 18th day of a hunger strike—a protest she says will end only with a visit from Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

DeGagne, who once worked for the federal government and was executive director of the Aboriginal Healing Foundation, has been watching closely. He spoke to Maclean’s On Campus about his plans for expanding access to education and offered his thoughts on the movement that made Chief Spence front-page news.

How did your work with the Healing Foundation prepare you for Nipissing?

The healing foundation had the good fortune to have a lot of resources to provide mental health healing supports to Aboriginal communities. Programs were directed to people who had been through the Indian residential schools, so we spent a lot of time in consultations asking survivors what they wanted, did a lot of professional development, community development and human resource development, so I think a lot of that work will lend itself to my work at Nipissing.

Continue reading Nipissing’s new president on access and #IdleNoMore

Jennifer Campeau balances motherhood, school and politics

Saskatoon Fairview MLA Jennifer Campeau

Running for office isn’t easy. But how many politicians can say they won their seats while parenting and working on their PhDs?

Not many. But Jennifer Campeau, the newest member the Saskatchewan Legistlature can.

Campeau, 38, is pursuing her PhD in Native Studies at the University of Saskatchewan.

The Yellow Quill First Nation members’ election in Saskatoon Fairview on on Nov. 7 marked only the second time a First Nations woman was elected to the Legislative Assembly in Saskatchewan and the first time an Aboriginal Canadian woman snagged a seat for the Saskatchewan Party, which cleaned up with 49 out of 58 ridings this month.

Despite the rigours of campaigning, Campeau chose not to take any time off from her studies.

“You’ve really got to be out there knocking on doors at least 3 hours a night, if not more,” she says. Still, Campeau doesn’t take the opportunity of post-secondary education for granted. A single mother, it took her a long time to earn her first degree. It was simply too difficult to study full-time while working to support her young daughter. ”It was just the two of us so I didn’t have the support that I could have had to do well in school; I had to work to support us both,” she says.

“[But] when I was 30 and she was old enough to be in school all day, I’d had enough of telling her that education was important when I didn’t have a degree myself,” she says. Sometimes she would bring her daughter to class, explaining “it instilled in her the value of post-secondary education.”

Campeau now has a Masters in Business Administration from the University of Saskatchewan.

She’s pursing her doctoral degree in Native Studies to learn more about aboriginal policy. She says the economic challenges facing Yellow Quill First Nation are part of the reason she chose her field of study.

As an MLA, Campeau hopes to provide a voice for both Aboriginal Canadians and newcomers alike. “The Saskatchewan economy and population is growing, so we have a lot of people new to Saskatchewan in Saskatoon Fairview,” she says. “I want to bring their concerns to the table.”

You’re forigiven if it all sounds tiring. ”In the last eight years, I haven’t really had a life of leisure, I’ve always been working and going to school,” jokes Campeau, “so I kind of got used to a fast pace.”

How universities are embracing the Aboriginal baby boom

Students at Lakehead University. By Andrew Tolson.

From the Maclean’s University Rankings—on newsstands now. Story by Ken MacQueen.

It’s one of those small things that’s actually very big. The University of Manitoba has a policy on smudging: the Aboriginal tradition of burning sage, sweetgrass or cedar as a way of setting a positive tone and purifying the mind. Say a love affair goes sideways, or a professor is unimpressed with your political science presentation, or it’s autumn on the reserve and here you are in Winnipeg, lonely and blue; well, retreating to a quiet place to wash yourself in the smoke of a smudge is a way to turn the page, to gain strength and clarity. The policy on smudging and pipe ceremonies is the product of deep bureaucratic thought, legal consultation and many meetings, because, of course, there are no-smoking laws. So, it’s complicated.

Continue reading Success, one student at a time

How to use terms like Native, Indigenous and Aboriginal

Photo by kwankwan on Flickr

After Deborah Young was appointed the Executive Lead, Aboriginal Achievement at the University of Manitoba in April, she quickly changed her title to Executive Lead, Indigenous Achievement.

That’s caused the school to explore in a podcast, “What do I say?” Local experts explain that there are important nuances in the terms we use to describe the decendents of those who lived in Canada first. Here are just a few of their ideas.

Young says that she chose the term Indigenous because it’s more uniting than Aboriginal. Indigenous is a term that crosses borders and recognizes a shared history. Indigenous is the word used by the United Nations. Aboriginal is not wrong. It’s simply an umbrella term used for First Nations, Metis and Inuit people in Canada. But, warns Young: “One of my pet peeves is that people don’t capitalize Aboriginal.”

Continue reading University of Manitoba asks: What should I say?

Almost 700 Aboriginal students are enrolled at the University of Victoria

Increasingly it seems we must look to the University of Victoria for good ideas. This year’s Times Higher Education Supplement rankings put it sixth among Canadian universities and 130th in the world. UVic does well in our own rankings too, as you’ll see. Rankings were the first thing David Turpin, UVic’s president, wanted to talk about when he visited me in Ottawa last month. But his other story was more focused and may be more important: Victoria’s success in attracting, retaining and rewarding Aboriginal university students.

In 2006, only eight per cent of Canadians with Aboriginal ancestry had university degrees, compared with 23 per cent of non-Aboriginal Canadians. This is not merely too bad. There is a genuine economic and human cost, because the correlation between higher education and various social goods is exhaustively documented. Post-secondary education attainment is associated with better health, increased civic participation, lower crime rates, higher income, correspondingly higher tax payments, reduced dependence on social benefits, and more.

A February 2010 study by the Centre for the Study of Living Standards suggests that if the gap in educational attainment and labour-force participation between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Canadians vanished by 2026, total tax revenue would increase by $3.5 billion and government spending could decrease by $14.2 billion. Obviously that won’t happen, but any progress in that direction helps. Never even mind the human benefits.

The best results I’ve seen in promoting access and achievement for Aboriginal students are from the University of Victoria. Some of this is a long-term trend. The university counted fewer than 100 Aboriginal students in 1999; today it’s nearly 700. The number of graduate students has grown from fewer than 10 to nearly 150.

Since 2005, UVic has been working on programs to solidify and extend those trends. With money from the Liberal-created, now-defunct Millennium Scholarship Foundation, the university came up with seven programs under a blanket name, the LE,NONET Project. (LE,NONET is pronounced “le-non-git.” It’s a Straits Salish word referring to success after enduring many hardships.) Most of the programs are for students. There’s a straightforward bursary program, which paid recipients an average of about $3,500 a year. There was also an “emergency relief fund.” Turpin told me some students were going home to their communities, say for a relative’s funeral, and not returning. Simply covering travel costs helped fix that, and at a cost lower than $600 per student per school year.

Finally, there were programs to keep the whole university experience from becoming too weird and foreign, for students who might be the first in their family to pursue higher education: a peer mentor program that matched young Aboriginal students with older Aboriginal students; a 200-hour internship with an Aboriginal community group outside the university gates; and a 200-hour research apprenticeship with a UVic faculty member. The project also included online counselling and workshops for staff and faculty members.

Did all this help Aboriginal students? They sure thought it did. Seventy-eight per cent thought the peer mentor program contributed to their success. Every other element of LE,NONET scored even higher. Almost 99 per cent liked the bursaries. Clear majorities said the program helped them feel connected both to the broader university community and to “who I am as an Aboriginal person.” Sometimes people suggest being a member of the First Nations and being at university are contradictory. Most LE,NONET participants disagree.

Bottom line: does all this fuss keep Aboriginal students in school? Participants in the program were less than one-third as likely to drop out as Aboriginal students who weren’t selected for the pilot program. They were more than twice as likely to continue from one year to the next. Graduation rates were significantly higher. It’s a safe bet that over their lifetimes those graduates will repay the extra investment many times over.

David Turpin says he’ll share details of the LE,NONET program with any university that’s interested. Many will be. Across the country, there’s been a recent and overdue emphasis on promoting access and success—getting students into university, and ensuring they get out with a degree—among under-represented groups. That includes Aboriginals, but also some immigrant populations and even, by some definitions, young men, who are entering university markedly less often than young women.

It should be obvious why this is all a good idea. An aging population needs higher productivity so a smaller workforce can pay for the benefits of ever more retirees. The needed human capital could come from immigrants, and a lot of it will. But it’s dumb to import brains when there are plenty of good minds right here that can succeed if only they’re given a fair chance and, yes, some extra help where appropriate.

Higher educational attainment needn’t make First Nations students feel forced to deny their identities. The skills and knowledge they acquire can go right to work in their home communities, or they can become part of a network that makes it that much easier for the next cohort of students to follow their example. It’s no coincidence that one of the country’s fastest-rising universities is the one that has pushed all these considerations to the top of its agenda.

Both province and feds are withholding funding from beleaguered university

Officials from the First Nations University of Canada are accusing the federal and provincial governments of being uncooperative and unnecessarily negative in their attempts to address alleged governance problems at the Saskatoon school, according to The StarPhoenix.

“The government should just get off its pot and start doing something more positive,” said faculty member Sharon Acoose in a speech to a gathered crowd of about 100 at Thursday’s open house. “Work with us. We have a beautiful university. Open your eyes and see that.”

In 2005, Morley Watson, chair of the university’s board of governors, suspended several senior administrators and allegedly seized the university’s central computers, copied the hard drive with all faculty and student records, and ordered administrative staff out of their offices.

Since that time, two different studies by both the provincial government and the Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations have recommended changes to the university’s board structure in an effort to improve transparency and good governance. Enrolment at the school has plunged, and many of the faculty and administrative staff have left.

In November 2008, the Canadian Association of University teachers imposed censure on the university, which meant that most of the Canada’s university teachers have been told to refuse appointments at the university, decline invitations to speak or participate in academic conferences hosted by the university, and turn down any distinctions.

Last March, the province suspended $200,000 of funding to the school, saying that “fundamental changes” needed to be made, and the federal department of Indian and Northern Affairs Canada is withholding more than $2 million for the same reason.

Those reactions are not sitting well with many of Thursday’s speakers, reports The StarPhoenix.

According to Acoose, the university is being “picked on.” She praised the work of university president Charles Pratt and vice-president of finance Al Ducharme. “Let us do our jobs. Quit holding the purse strings above our heads. We are not puppets.”

The university’s vice-president of academics Herman Michell said he agrees with Acoose.

“Sharon Acoose mentioned the struggles our university has gone through in the past four or five years. She’s right. As far as I’m concerned, we should have 50 of these First Nations universities across Canada. A lot of institutions across Canada are facing the same challenges we are,” he said.

“I call on the federal and provincial government to step up to the plate and help us do our work.”

A spokesman for Indian and Northern Affairs Canada says his department is “not going to address the comments made at the open house.” He said the funding conditions will remain, along with their late-November deadline.

New documents suggest feds downplayed risks and hired PR firm for damage control

Internal documents suggest the Harper government downplayed health risks and hired a PR firm for damage control after halting plans for new schools on native reserves.

The papers discuss the hiring of Hill & Knowlton to help the government handle what one official described as “not a good story.”

The government stopped plans in 2007 for new schools and major renovations that weren’t considered health and safety priorities.

But internal documents obtained by the NDP suggest some of those projects were put off despite health and safety issues flagged by Indian Affairs.

New Democrat MP Charlie Angus says the government paid spin doctors while neglecting urgent education needs.

The Conservatives have announced $50 million for five new schools and seven renovation projects, but critics say much more is needed to lower native dropout rates.

- The Canadian Press