More work needed to overcome legacy of colonialism in HE

Canadian academic institutions need to do more work to promote reconciliation between the country’s indigenous population and descendants of settlers from overseas and more recent immigrants, a forum of experts, including senior academics, in Toronto, Canada, has been told.

The forum, staged by discussion group Worldviews, which is supported by University World News, was assessing the impact of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) report on Canadian higher education.

This institution from 2008 to 2015 researched the impact of the past residential school system on indigenous students and their families. Residential schools were a network of government-funded boarding schools that operated in Canada from 1879 to 1996, to which indigenous children were sent, forcibly if necessary.

Their often-negative experiences were brought to light by a class action lawsuit that led to a CA$2 billion (US$1.5 billion) compensation package for all former students.

Damage inflicted

The TRC was a component of the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, a landmark agreement between the federal government in Ottawa and Native Canadians. It sought to address the damage inflicted by an educational system of which one of goals was to assimilate children into the culture of Canada’s dominant settler society.

The Worldviews forum discussed recommendations made by the commission, which included boosting funding levels for education targeted at an indigenous community that numbers more than 1.6 million people out of Canada’s 36.7 million total population. It has also aimed to increase the number of indigenous graduates, raising access to quality education on reserves.

But what actual reforms have been taken since the TRC’s report was released? Has the ongoing legacy of colonialism in the Canadian education system been properly addressed?

“We really won’t know the answers to those questions for about a decade,” cautioned Professor David Newhouse, of Trent University, in Peterborough, Ontario. “The seeds have only been planted in the short time” since the TRC made its recommendations in 2015 “and it takes time for change to happen. But we know there is a foundation we can build upon to move forward.”

Newhouse is the director of Trent’s Chanie Wenjack School for Indigenous Studies, where he has been teaching since 1993, when residential schools were still operating in Canada. He is himself an indigenous Canadian, being an Onondaga, from the Six Nations of the Grand River community, in southern Ontario.

He was in Toronto to take part in a discussion being held at Ryerson University teeing up a 2019 Worldviews on Media and Higher Education Conference in June.

University World News was a media partner of the 19 March talk and lecture.

Entitled ‘Truth and Reconciliation in Higher Education and the Media’, it brought together a panel of indigenous educators and journalists to discuss changes that have been made, including those that have been enacted by Canadian universities.

Indigenisation plans

Some of those have included adding courses that deal with indigenous histories and with reconciliation. Most universities in Canada now have some form of indigenisation plan developed in partnership with indigenous faculty and with indigenous communities.

However, there remain a number of serious barriers to higher education for indigenous students, including insufficient access to computers, the internet and even secondary schools in aboriginal communities.

Nevertheless, the number of indigenous students attending post-secondary institutions has continued to rise. When Newhouse entered university in 1972, he says there were only about 200 aboriginal students like him studying higher education across the whole of Canada. Now he says there are 45,000 nationwide, as well as around 150 indigenous professors.

Newhouse is adamant that the truth must be told about what happened to First Nations, Métis and Inuit (sub-groups of indigenous peoples in Canada) children and communities during the residential school era. He believes strongly that this will help them move past the colonialism that has been a part of Canadian higher education culture and systems.

But he also recognises that there is a certain resistance to learning such real and painful history across Canada, because most Canadians believe they are good people and that their country is a good model.

Courage to confront

“In many respects we live in a culture that is ahistorical, in which some believe the past doesn’t affect the present. So, when people learn that the Canadian state acted badly, it challenges their understanding of their collective life and of themselves. That takes a lot of courage to confront.”

Tanya Talaga, an Anishinaabe Canadian journalist for the Toronto Star, and author, agreed in the event’s opening comments that people constantly admit not knowing the history of residential schools in Canada, nor the impact they had on indigenous communities.

She reminded the audience that these were native children “taken away from their families, their culture, their language – everything they knew. And we are still only one or two generations out from this genocidal era. The legacy it has left behind is still very, very much with us. It has meant generations of lost opportunities, of people never realising their true worth.”

Talaga recounted saying this to the respected indigenous senator Murray Sinclair, who was chief commissioner of the TRC, who told her that Canadians did not learn about this scandal because they were not taught about it.

“Non-indigenous people grew up in a culture of looking away, because they didn’t understand us. They didn’t respect us. And yet those were the generation of folks who became our lawmakers, parliamentarians and teachers.”

Talaga’s message to educators present at the meeting was that they should “reach out from your institutions to [indigenous] communities and say ‘What can we do to help your students?’ Your universities can offer the chance to give a leg up to high school students so they can gain admission to your [tertiary] schools.”

Professor Susan Hill, another speaker at the event, said there must be wider discussions about reconciliation that include talking about the dispossession experienced by indigenous peoples, such as the loss of their languages.

Statistics Canada has reported that only 17.2% of Canadians with an aboriginal identity were in 2011 (the most recent government figures) able to conduct a conversation in an indigenous language.

Hill is a Haudenosaunee from Grand River, who has a joint appointment with the University of Toronto’s department of history as well as its Centre for Indigenous Studies.

Assessing the impact of the residential school system, she said that the schools per se were not the core problem; rather it was the “concept and a thought that indigenous peoples were not capable of being in charge of their own lives”.

That kind of thinking needs to be challenged through Canadian higher education, she said, and when it comes to higher education and indigenous people, that means holding institutions accountable. “We have priorities around a broad, liberal education. Well a truly broad, liberal education [in Canada] means an understanding of indigenous issues [and] an understanding of indigenous ways of knowing.”

Colonial amnesia

Another speaker, Dr Hayden King, is an Anishinaabe from Beausoleil First Nation on Gchi’mnissing in Huronia, Ontario, as well the executive director of the Yellowhead Institute at Ryerson University, and an advisor to the university’s dean of arts on indigenous education.

He agrees that it is important for Canadians to learn and to understand the history of settler colonialism but worries that there is still wilful ignorance and what he labels ‘colonial amnesia’.

“I’ve been in this for 11 years as an educator,” King said, “And it is frustrating to have classroom after classroom, individual after individual, community after community, through the years say to me, ‘This is the first time I’ve heard about residential schools’ or ‘I can’t believe this is happening in Canada’.

“It’s frustrating because it speaks to our failure to adequately communicate the horrors of colonialism through time.”

King said several components must be addressed. One is restitution, such as allowing for the return of traditional languages to indigenous peoples. Another is an awareness that the present education system is not an indigenous creation, so it must be transformed to better accommodate native communities.

“You have to give back that which was taken away,” he said, while challenging non-natives to step up and take an active part in making change happen. “None of this is an ‘indigenous’ issue. It’s a Canadian one.”

Newhouse says such changes will require people from across the landscape, native and non-native, to address the TRC’s recommendations. In its final report, the commission included 94 calls to action that touched almost every aspect of life in Canada. And while this is an impressive list of proposed reforms, Newhouse remains positive that addressing the needs of students can occur.

“I say to my students that reconciliation is messy, but it’s necessary when you live in a place where the state tried to change your culture, your language, your belief system, and they did that using education. But I am optimistic about the future because I’ve seen universities respond, moving from being an agent of colonisation to places where their central mission is knowledge creation and knowledge transmission.”