UNIVERSITY BUILT FOR WHITE SETTLERS ENVISIONS AN INDIGENOUS FUTURE
Colleges are ‘indigenizing’ — infusing stodgy Western institutions with aboriginal belief systems and traditional knowledge
On a recent brilliant morning, the University of Saskatchewan transformed its college green into a powwow arena, with white canvas tepees, drum circles and lines of young women braiding their hair and affixing eagle plumes in preparation for graduation festivities.
The university’s founders could hardly have imagined such a sight. The college was built in the last century, modelled on the great American and British universities. It was imagined as a grand preserve of Western thought for the children of Canadian settlers, then flooding into the country’s youngest province in the prairies. Indigenous students were not banned, but they were not welcomed either.
Now, all that has changed. The powwow graduation in May was one example of how universities across Canada are “indigenizing” — a new, elastic term that means everything from drawing more aboriginal students and faculty members onto campuses built largely for white settlers, to infusing those stodgy Western institutions with aboriginal belief systems and traditional knowledge.
While sporadic efforts on many campuses took root decades ago, a true campaign was set off by the Canadian commission that looked into residential schools and their abuses against indigenous children.
Many universities set up reconciliation task forces, formed advisory councils of aboriginal elders and began to recruit indigenous faculty members. Two smaller Canadian institutions introduced indigenous learning requirements for all undergraduates this past school year.
The University of Saskatchewan is leading the charge to become a kind of Reconciliation U, committing to change in areas including scholarship and governance, and envisioning itself as an institution of “knowledge-keeping”, as well as research and learning.
The trend has its detractors, who call it “redwash” at best and assimilation by a different name at worst. Aboriginal scholars say that colonial education philosophies and aboriginal theories of knowledge are incompatible.
“We need to build curriculum that builds community and strong connections, in the context of Western development and capitalism that’s marginalised many of us,” said Priscilla Settee, a professor of indigenous and gender studies at the University of Saskatchewan.
Even Peter Stoicheff, the university’s president, recognises the challenges.
“Universities are so inherently white and Western, when you start to push against it, you realised how intractable a lot of that is,” Stoicheff said.
“Everything is based on reading stuff,” he explained. “Everything is laid out in a hierarchical and linear fashion. Look at the aboriginal ways, from visual expression to the wampum belt, dances and oral storytelling. It’s not linear. Everything is based on the circle.”
Supporters of the effort, though, say that no matter the challenges, or the motives, a university degree is a long-term cure for many of the insidious ills afflicting aboriginals — poverty, unemployment, addictions, poor health, incarceration, hopelessness.
Those ills, the commission found, can often be traced to the residential schools, where the government used education as a weapon of assimilation for over a century by pulling more than 150,000 aboriginal children away from their families and cultures and educating them to be Western workers. Many were physically and sexually abused.
After the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s findings were released in 2015, universities across the country publicly vowed to close the graduation gap between mainstream Canadians and aboriginals, only 9.8% of whom have university degrees. By comparison, 26.5% of nonaboriginal Canadians have degrees.
“These are the changes the whole country needs to make,” said Blaine Favel, the former grand chief of Saskatchewan’s 74 First Nations, or indigenous groups. He was appointed the University of Saskatchewan’s chancellor in 2013 — an act of reconciliation in itself, he added.
“It hopefully will reverse and remedy the damage done by residential schools,” he said.
The University of Saskatchewan and its president seem, at first blush, unlikely candidates to lead this movement.
Stoicheff, 60, who calls himself “as white as you get”, arrived on campus in 1986 from Toronto as an English professor. But he quickly learned that Saskatchewan was home to a large aboriginal population, and has festered with racial tension since Canadian troops quashed the North-West Rebellion in 1885.
Just one month into his presidency in October 2015, Stoicheff became co-chairman with Favel of the country’s first university forum on reconciliation.
The university’s existing plans to increase aboriginal student and professor numbers were bolstered, and a new focus was added for university research to be useful to aboriginal communities. Stoicheff’s mantra has become “nothing about us, without us” — something he has heard repeatedly from aboriginal communities.
So far, most indigenous students on campus, who make up about 11.7% of the student body, seem to wearily approve of the university’s efforts and plan.
They love the Gordon Oakes Red Bear Student Center, the campus’s new flagship aboriginal building, designed by Douglas Cardinal, an architect of Metis and Blackfoot ancestry. It opened last year as a physical symbol of the university’s commitment.
The graceful, east-facing building has quickly become the campus home for the university’s 2,830 aboriginal students, drawn by regular cultural events.
“I see the university making efforts,” said Jennifer McGillivary, 23, a single mother and nursing student who dropped out after her first year because she felt purposeless and lonely on campus, so different from her Cree reserve of Muskeg Lake.
A year later, she re-enrolled in one of the growing programmes that offers first-year aboriginal arts-and-science students smaller classrooms, mentoring, flexibility and cultural activities. She graduates next year, but brought her 4-year-old daughter, Alexa, to dance in this May’s graduation powwow.
But is it really possible for a university, born from a view that all knowledge — like land — is conquerable, to deeply incorporate an aboriginal philosophy, which values nature, relationships and balance?
“Universities are intrinsically colonial,” said Mylan Tootoosis, 30, a doctoral student and co-chairman of the university’s Indigenous Graduate Students’ Council. “They are not set up for indigenous students. The way to solve indigenous problems is not getting a salary. Why not get our land back, get the indigenous lifestyle back?”
That’s a question that many aboriginal scholars are asking and that Stoicheff is open to debating.