Major award for teachers who created treaty project
When Naomi Fortier-Frecon and Leia Laing receive their Governor General’s History Award for excellence in teaching next week, it will be with mixed feelings.
The Regina teachers co-founded Treaty4Project in 2014, when they were both working at Campbell Collegiate and noticing that their students weren’t really grasping treaty education.
But, said Laing, the first thing they did to establish the program was to call on other people for help.
“We were supposed to write a speech to give when we receive the medal, but our speech has sort of become a list of names of people,” said Laing.
Even though she and Fortier-Frecon teach in elementary schools now, the program is ongoing at the high school level.
“There have been so many other people who have started doing it and who keep planning it because they see the importance for the education of our students,” said Laing. “There’s so much support from the community as well.”
Laing and Fortier-Frecon collaborated with about 25 education colleagues, including elder Noel Starblanket and retired Aboriginal education co-ordinator Calvin Racette, to establish the program that makes treaty education more relatable for students.
While students understood reconciliation on paper, “We (did) not see the action … like in the comments they would all say to their friends,” said Fortier-Frecon.
“They thought at first that treaty was for First Nations people and they were not included,” added Fortier-Frecon.
She tried to help them understand that, “if I have a house in Regina, there is a reason. It’s because a long time ago there (was) an agreement.”
In the first year of Treaty 4: The Next Generation Project, 250 students at four high schools — Campbell, Martin, Balfour and Scott — learned from their teachers, as well as from at least 15 guest speakers. They also met at a two-day conference, now an annual event.
With a $10,000 grant from the Saskatchewan Arts Board, artist Ray Keighley was hired to guide the students through a collaborative art project. They created a tiled mural inspired by treaty rights, which was unveiled in June 2015.
The next school year, students collaborated on an e-book.
Getting students to work together was a big part of this project.
“We get kids who normally wouldn’t be mixing with each other,” said Laing, “and especially not to talk about treaties and to talk about education … but kids coming from different places, from different socioeconomic backgrounds, and every school has its own culture to it.”
Community involvement was another major point to the program, reason being that “it’s not just in the classroom that you learn about this,” said Laing. “It actually exists and matters in real life … but students aren’t going to run into those people on the street.”
Students have heard from guest speakers like Idle No More cofounder Sylvia McAdam, journalist Creeson Agecoutay, author James Daschuk, hip-hop artist Brad Bellegarde (a.k.a. InfoRed) and Cowessess First Nation Chief Cadmus Delorme.
The project that began in the Regina Public School Division now extends to the Conseil des ecoles fransaskoises, as Laing now teaches Grade 6 at Regina’s Ecole Monseigneur de Laval.
In collaboration with FortierFrecon’s Elsie Mironuck students, Laing ’s class might write a song this year about what they learn from Metis, First Nations and Fransaskois guest speakers — although the artistic aspect is up to the students.
At the elementary level, “The (teaching) situation is more, ‘How do I want to empower my students to feel comfortable and to live in that reality and to give them a voice?’ ” said Fortier-Frecon.