McGill wants more indigenous students
Task force charged with making campus more welcoming
Paige Isaac didn’t see it coming.
She enrolled at McGill University in 2003 expecting a challenge — leaving her family and culture behind in the seaside Mi’gmaq territory of Listuguj to carve a place for herself in the vast, impersonal metropolis.
There would, of course, be the marathon cramming sessions, entire weekends spent buried in her biology textbooks. But there would also be new friendships, experiences and the rush of being a university student in a city overrun with rambunctious college kids.
“I really thought I was ready for it,” Isaac said.
“It was exactly what I wanted. But often I’d find myself walking around campus feeling really strange, really isolated from everything.
“My first year was rough. I was lost.”
Isaac’s story is sadly typical of what McGill’s small, fragmented aboriginal student body experiences on campus. Fewer than one out of every 100 students at the university is aboriginal — with some coming from far away, tiny communities before settling in Canada’s second largest city.
Just over 300 of McGill’s 40,000 students are indigenous. Many describe similar feelings of alienation.
“I felt invisible sometimes, it was surreal how people would say these really insensitive, and sometimes outright racist, things without hesitating,” said one former McGill student, who wished to remain anonymous. “Sometimes it felt like your identity is this kitsch, funny thing for other people. Mostly it wasn’t intentional but it made me feel unwelcome.”
McGill University wants that to change. On Thursday, the school launched a task force that will devise a plan to attract and retain aboriginal students. The group also wants to grow McGill’s small core of aboriginal professors, create a more welcoming campus for indigenous people and enshrine aboriginal perspectives in its research and major school projects.
Isaac, who graduated from McGill a decade ago, now works at the university and will co-chair the task force.
“I’ll be honest: I think it’s going to be hard to start,” said Isaac, the coordinator of McGill’s First Peoples House. “For the professors who come here, for the students who come here, you’re among the first indigenous people on campus. You’re a trailblazer, and that’s not easy work.”
Isaac says McGill might consider a cluster hire of aboriginal faculty — easing the burden placed on each indigenous professor by hiring a group of them at once.
The task force will have its plate full — its participants have about 10 months to break off into working groups, consult with students and aboriginal stakeholders and issue a report to McGill provost Christopher Manfredi. The provost insists this won’t just be lip service or tokenism, that the university is prepared to make sweeping changes.
“It’s time for McGill University to take a leadership role on this,” said Manfredi. “There are not a lot of universities in the eastern half of the country leading the way in this area.”
To Manfredi’s point, schools in Western Canada have already engaged with aboriginal communities in a meaningful way. Four years ago, the University of Winnipeg appointed Ojibwe journalist Wab Kinew as its director of indigenous inclusion.
Kinew held the post until he left to pursue a career in politics, but his role at the university signalled the school’s commitment to develop, recruit and retain aboriginal talent. It also helped it build lasting relationships with surrounding Cree, Ojibwe and Métis nations that help inform the institution’s mandate and role within Manitoba.
Task forces similar to McGill’s already exist in the Prairie Provinces — where about 50 per cent of Canada’s 1.4 million indigenous people reside.
These measures are central to a report issued last year by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada — which studied how best to repair the country’s strained relationship with its aboriginal population. The document recommended universities across Canada create programs in aboriginal languages and also include indigenous perspective in its research and curriculum.
Last week, McGill hosted a powwow that welcomed local aboriginal dancers, storytellers and singers to share their art on the rolling green hill behind the Roddick Gates. The ceremony also featured speakers, teachers and others who showed up to share traditional indigenous knowledge and history.
It marked the beginning of McGill’s sixth annual Indigenous Awareness Week.
And on Thursday, the university unveiled a new location for the Hochelaga Rock. The rock is a five-tonne granite slab that commemorates the Iroquois village that once thrived in downtown Montreal. It used to be tucked off to the side of campus but its new location, right by McGill’s Sherbrooke St. entrance, is meant to give the area’s indigenous roots more prominence.
“For years, we’ve fought for changes that would celebrate our indigenous history but also our indigenous presence on campus,” said Isaac. “We’ve heard from indigenous students that (the powwow) helps them feel grounded at university. It helps create a sense of pride and belonging at the university to see indigenous culture being celebrated on the grounds.”
Christian Quequish is a fourthyear political science major at McGill who hails from North Caribou Lake First Nation in Northern Ontario. He says that while places like the First Peoples House provide a space for the university’s indigenous students to meet others from similar backgrounds, they often bond over their common grievances.
“My whole undergrad, it felt like I was the only indigenous person in my program,” Quequish said. “There’s a lack of understanding about how to approach indigenous issues while respecting indigenous people.”
For example, a teacher of beginner’s French refused to call Quequish aboriginal, instead referring to him as an Indian — a term considered dehumanizing and offensive.
“I thought: Did he really say that?” said Quequish. “I was shocked. I felt sick. It’s like, ‘You’re not acknowledging me as a human being.’ ”
Last year, the university surveyed its students on how to make the campus more inclusive. Isaac said results were surprisingly positive.
“Non-indigenous students are hungry for that perspective. Something significant is happening on campus,” she said. “There’s so much to be gained here, and I know it won’t be easy. But if we do this the right way, we can accomplish something meaningful.”