Grads celebrate a brighter future
For a group of aboriginal students who received social work degrees from Ryerson University and First Nations Technical Institute on Thursday, education ’is the best form of reconciliation,’ Louise Brown reports.
Vivian Timmins: “This is reconciliation for me”
At the tender age of 5, Vivian Timmins was sent away to residential school and for six years, was made to feel worthless. That “traumatic” education drove her to drop out over the years, but on Thursday Timmins graduated with a Bachelor of Social Work degree that “tells me I’ve truly made it. I’ve come full circle with education — this is reconciliation, for me.”
Trish Meekins: Program “Helped me understand who I am”
Single mother Trish Meekins of Cape Croker First Nations was able to earn her social work degree while keeping the counselling job that supports her four kids because the joint Ryerson-First Nations Institute program needs students to come to campus only one week out of six. For this granddaughter of a residential school survivor, the program’s aboriginal focus “helped me understand who I am.”
Heather Sararas: “I lost my culture”
Heather Sararas didn’t know about the “Sixties Scoop” that took native children to be adopted by white families, until she studied it during her social work degree. Then she realized she had been part of it; taken from her First Nations family at 4 and adopted by an older white couple. “I lost my culture,” said Sararas, but her birth mother came to her Ryerson graduation.
Murray Sinclair’s spirit ever-present
The spirit of truth and reconciliation and its aboriginal champion Justice Murray Sinclair was in the air Thursday in the Ryerson quad, where aboriginal social work grads celebrated cultures, spoke in Ojibwe, smoked a prayer pipe, quoted Sinclair and called education “the best form of reconciliation.” Ryerson granted Sinclair an honorary degree in 2013.