Aboriginal Education in Inner City Winnipeg High Schools

Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives-
Manitoba
Aboriginal Education
in
Winnipeg Inner City
High Schools
by Jim Silver
and Kathy Mallett
with Janice Greene and
Freeman Simard
December 2002
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ ??
@? @@
@?
@? @@
@@ ??
Winnipeg Inner-City
@?
@? ?O2@@@6X @@
@@ ???
@? W2@@0M?I')X? @@
@? 7(M?fV')K @@ ?
@?
@? ?J(Yg?V'@@?
?7H?hN@@L @@
@@ ???
@? ?@he?@@1 @@
@?
@? ?@he?@?@
?@L?hJ@?@ @@
@@g?@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ ?
@? ?31?h75?@ @@g?@ @@
@? ?N@?h@HJ@ @@g?@
@?
@? @?g?J@?75
@?g?75?@H @@g?@
@@g?@ ?O2@@@g@@@@6K ?O2@@@g@@
@?
@? @?g?@HJ5?
3Lg?@?7H? ?O2@@@@@6K @@g?@
@@g?@ ?W2@0MhfI4@6K?hW2@0M?h@
?7(M I4@6X?g7(M?he@
@? N1g?@?@ ?W2@@@0Me?I4@@@@@6Khe?W2@@@@@g@@g?@ ?@H? ?@)Xg@Hhf@
@? J@g?@?@ W.M?hf?I4@6XhW&(Mhe@@g?@ ?@L? ?@@1g@?hf@
@? 75g?@?@
@?hW2@@@6K?hf@Hg?@?@h?O2@@@6Kh?*@? ?W&H B)K?g7(Y?he@@g?@
?@@@g@Hhf@@g?@ ?31?
?N@L ?@?@g@?hf@
?@?@g@?hf@
@?g?W&(M?I4@@@6K?g?J@?g?@?@f?O2@@@0MeB@6Xg?N@L ?@@@g@?hf@@g?@ 31 J@?@g@?hf@
@?g?7(Yg?I4@@6K?eO&@?g?3@@?O2@@@0Mg?3@)X?g31
@?g?@H?he?B@@@@@<h?V4@@@0Mhe?N@@1?gN@ ?@@@g@?hf@@g?@
?@?@g@?hf@@g?@ N@
?@L? 75?@g@?hf@
@HJ5g3Lhf@
@?gJ5heW&?J@??W@? @?@?g?@L? ?@?@g@Lhf@@g?@ ?3)K @?7HgN)X?)Xh@
@?g7Hhe7@W&@?O&@W@? @?@?g?31? ?@?@g31hf@@g?@ ?N@@@@@@@@he@?@?gJ@1?@)?@g@
@?g@?g?@K?@@@@@@@@@@@?
@?g@?g?@@@@?@@@@@@@@@W@? 3@@Lg?N@? ?@?@gN@hf@@g?@
N@@1h@?@@@@@@@?h?@?@g?@L?@6X?g@@g?@ @@@@@@@@he@?@?g7@@?@@@5g@
@@@@@@@@he@?@?g@?@@@@@?g@
@?g@?f?@X@@@@T@@@?@@@@@@@W@?
@?g3Lf?@@@@@V@Y@@?@@?@@@@@@L ?@?@h@?@@@@@@@?h?@?@g?@)X@@1?g@@g?@
?@?@h3@@@@@@@@?h?@?@gJ@@@@@@Lg@@g?@ @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@?g@@@@@@@1g@
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@?@@Lf?J@@@@@@@@g@
@?gN1fJ@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@1g?@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@?@hN@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@?@g7@@@@@@@g@@g?@ @@@@?@@@@@@?@@@@@@?@@1fW&@@@@@@@@g@
@?g?@f7@@@?@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@g?@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@?@h?@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@?@g@@@@@@@?g@@g?@ ?J@@@@?@@@@@@?@@@@@@?@@@e?O&@@@@@@@@@g@
@?g?@L??J@@@@?@@@?@?@?@@@@X@@@@g?@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@?@hJ@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@?@f?J@@@@@@@1g@@g?@h?O2@@@6KgO&@@@@?@@@@@@?@@@@@@eI4@@@@@@?@@@@@X?g@
@?g?3)X?7@@@@@@@@@@@@?@@@V@@@?@@@f?@@@f@@@@e?@@@?@h7@@@e@@@@@??@@@@@@@@@fO&@@@@@?@@g@@g?@h@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@fW@@@@@@@@@?S@(g@
@?g?V4)X@@@@@@@@@@@@@W@@@?@@@?@@?f?@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@?@g?J@@@@e@@@@@??@@@@@@V4@@@@@@@@@@?@@@@g@@g?@g?J@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@f7@@@@?@@@@?7(Yg@
@?h?I'@@@@@X?f@@@Y@@?@V'@@@1f?@(MW@@@@X@@@@@@@@@@@6K?eO&@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@?eI'@@@@@@@@@XW5g@@g?@g?7@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@f3@?@@@@@@@?@H?g@
@?heV4@@XS@@@@@@@@@@@@@@?S@@@5f?@HW&(M?I4@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@?e?S@@@@@@@@V@(Yg@@g?@g?@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@fV@@@@@@@@@@5h@
@?hf?I40M?gI'@@?@@@Y@@Yf?@?7(Yg@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@?@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@?e@@Y?@@@@@@?@H?g@@g?@g?@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@e?@@@@@?@@@@?@Hh@
@? ?N@@@@@@?@@@@?e?@?@H?g@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@?@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@?e?@@@@@@?@@T5h@@g?@g?@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@f@@@@@@@@@?@?h@
@?
@? @@@@?@@@?@@?e?@?@h@?e?@@@@?e?@@?@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@?e7@@@@?@?@V@Hh@@g?@g?@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@?@@@@@@?@@@@@@e?@@@@@@@@@@@@?h@
?J@?@@?@@@@@@?e?@?@h@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@?@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@?e@@@@@@@@@@@?h@@g?@g?@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@?@@@@@@?@@@@@@fW@@@@@@@?@@?h@
@?
@? ?7@@@@@@?@?@5?e?@?@h@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@?@@@@e@@@@@??@@@@@@?e@@@@@@@@@@@?h@@g?@g?@@?e@@@@@?e@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@f7@@@@@?@@@@Lh@
?@?@@X@@?@@@f?@?@h@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@?@@@@e@@@@@??@@@@@@?e3@@@@@@@X@@Lh@@g?@g?3@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@f3@@@@@@@@@@1h@
@? J@@@V@@@@@@@1?e?@@@h@?e?@@@@?e?@@?@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@?e?@@@@@@V@@@1h@@g?@g?V'@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@fV4@@@@@@@@@@h@
@?hfO26Kg?O&@@@@@@@@@@@@?e?@@@L?g@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@?@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@?e@@@@@@@@@@@@h@@g?@hV'@@@@@@@@@?e@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@g?W@@@@@@@@@@g@
@?h?W2@@@@@@6K??O2@@@@@@@@@@@@@@?e?@@@)KeO2@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@?@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@?e?I4@@@@@@@@@h@@g?@h?V'@f?W@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@g?@@@@@@@@@@@g@
@?h?7@X@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@?e?@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@?f?W@@@@@@@@@@g@@g?@heV4@@@@@0M?e?@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@h?@(?'@@@@@g@
@?hJ@V@@?e@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@0Mf?@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@f?@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@?f?@@@@@@@@@@@g@@g?@ ?@@@@@?@@@@@@?@@@@@@h?(Y?N@@@@@g@
@?h75?@@@@@@0MI'@@@@@@V4@@@0Mg?@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@0M?I'@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@?g?@(?'@@@@@g@@g?@
@?h@HeI4@0M?eV'@@@@5?hf?@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@?f?N@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@?g?(Y?N@@@@@g@@g?@ ?@@@@@?@@@@@@?@@@@@@hf?@@@@@g@
?3@@@@?@@@@@@?@@@@@@hf?@@@@5g@
@?h@?he?N@@@@H?hf?@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@?@?g@@@@e@@@@@??@@@@@@?he?@@@@@g@@g?@ ?N@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@hf?3@@@Hg@
@?h@?hf@@@@ ?@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@?@?g@@@@e@@@@@??@@@@@@?he?3@@@@g@@g?@ @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@hf?N@@@?g@
@?g?J@?hf@@@@
@?g?75?hf@@@@ ?@@@f@@@@e?@@@@?@?g@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@?he?N@@@5g@@g?@
?@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@?@?g@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@?hf@@@Hg@@g?@ @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@hf?J@@@?g@
?J@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@hf?7@@@?g@
@?g?@ @@@@ ?@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@?@?g@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@?hf@@@?g@@g?@ ?7@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@hf?@@@@?g@
@?g?31?hf@@@@ ?@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@?@?g@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@?he?J@@@?g@@g?@
@?g?N@?hf@@@@L?hf?@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@?@?g@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@?he?7@@@?g@@g?@ ?@@@@@?@@@@@@@@@@@@@hfJ@@@@Lg@
?@@@@@?@@@@@@@@@@@@@he?W&@@@@1g@
@?h@?hf@@@@)Xhf?@@@f@@@@e?@@@@?@?g@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@?heJ@@@@Lg@@g?@ ?@@@@@?@@@@@@@@@@@@@heW&@@@@@@g@
@?h@?he?J@@@@@)X?he?@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@5?@?g@@@@e@@@@@@@@@@@@@?h?W&@@@@1g@@g?@ ?@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@h?W&@@@@@@@g@
@?h@?heW&@@@@@@)Xhe?@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@HJ@?f?J@@@@e@@@@@@@@@@@@@?hW&@@@@@@g@@g?@
@?h@Lh?O&@@@@@@@@)he?@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@?75?f?7@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@?h7@@@@@@@g@@g?@ J@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@h?*@@@@@@@@g@
78e?@@@@@@@@@@@@?hf@@X?he@
@?h31g?O2@@@@@@@@@heW2@@@@@XheW@?@H?f?@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@?h@@@@@@@@g@@g?@
@?hN@?O2@@@@@@?f?@@@@@h7(M?eV@@@@6K?e?O&5?@gJ@e?W@@@@@@@@@@@@he?J@@X?he@@g?@ @W2@@0M?h@@6Xh?7@>@@@@@@g@
@@Y?e?O2@@@@@@@@@@1h?@V@(Mhe@
@?h?@@@@?f@@@@@@@0MI'@g?J@HW2@@@@@@@V@@@@@@@H?@g7@@@@0M?h?@@@h?7(R@@@@@@g@@g?@ @@@@@@@@0Mh?@L?g?@?@H?he@
@?he?@@@@@@@0MhN@g?75?7(M?e?I4@@@@@?@@?C5g3@@Xe?O2@@@@@@@@@@@L?g?@HJ(Mhe@@g?@ @@0M ?@1?g?@?@hf@
@?he?@0M
@? ?@g?@HJ@HheI4@@@@0YgN@V@@@@@0MhI'1?g?@?7H?he@@g?@
J@g?@W&@? ?@@0M?hf?N@?g?@?@hf@@g?@ ?@5?g?@?@hf@
?@H?g?3X@hf@
@? 75g?3@@@? ?J@?g?3@@hf@@g?@ ?@h?N@@hf@
@?
@? @Hg?N@?@?
@?h@?@? ?75?g?N@@hf@@g?@
?@H?h@@L?he@@g?@ ?@he@@L?he@
?@he@@1?he@
@? @?h@?@? ?@he@@1?he@@g?@ ?@he@?@?he@
@? @?h3@@L ?@he@?@?he@@g?@ J@he@?@?he@
@?
@? ?J@?hN@@1
?75?h?@?@ ?@he@?@?he@@g?@
?@he3@@?he@@g?@ @@he@?@?he@ @@
@? ?@H?h?@?@ ?@heN@@?he@@g?@
@? ?@he?@?@ ?@he?@@?he@@g?@
@?
@? @@g?@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
@@g?@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
@? @@
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ ??
Research Alliance
About the Authors
JIM SILVER is a Professor of Politics at the University of Winnipeg, and past-Chair of the Canadian Centre for Policy
Alternatives-Manitoba
KATHY MALLETT is a long-time activist in Winnipeg’s Aboriginal community, was a Trustee in Winnipeg School
Division No. 1 from 1991 to 1993, and is a Director of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives-Manitoba.
JANICE GREENE is a student at the University of Winnipeg, where she was President of the Aboriginal Student
Council in 2001-02.
FREEMAN C. SIMARD is a former teacher from the Hollow Water First Nation. He is a recent graduate of the
University of Winnipeg, and is currently a researcher on urban Aboriginal issues.
Contents
Acknowledgments 1
Executive Summary 3
Part One
1.1 Purpose of the study 4
1.2 The size and growth of the Aboriginal population in Winnipeg's inner city 5
1.3 Aboriginal educational attainment 7
1.4 Methods by which we selected those whom we interviewed 9
1.5 A profile of those we interviewed 10
High school students 10
School leavers 12
Community people 14
1.6 Parental Support 14
1.7 Goals and Expectations 16
1.8 Relationships with teachers 16
1.9 Curriculum 20
1.10 School Climate 22
1.11 Racism 23
1.12 Aboriginal students and part-time jobs 27
1.13 Employment expectations and school performance 28
1.14 The struggle to survive 28
1.15 Resisting school 29
1.16 Summary of our findings from the interviews 29
Part Two
2.1 Colonialism and education 32
2.2 Aboriginal teachers and teacher training 41
2.3 Aboriginal curriculum 47
Part Three
3.1 Conclusions 50
3.2 Recommendations 52
References 55
Aboriginal Education In Winnipeg
Inner City High Schools
By Jim Silver and Kathy Mallett
with Janice Greene and Freeman Simard
Acknowledgments:
We particularly want to acknowledge the important contribution made to this study by Leslie
Spillett and Ardythe Wilson of Mother of Red Nations Women’s Council of Manitoba, and
Betty Edel of the Community Education Development Association. We are grateful to each of
the many people who agreed to be interviewed and to participate in focus groups: Aboriginal
students, school leavers and adult members of the Aboriginal community, Aboriginal and non-
Aboriginal teachers, and numerous interviewees at the University of Winnipeg, the University
of Manitoba, Winnipeg School Division No. 1, and the provincial Department of Education.
For their contributions in a variety of other important ways, we are grateful to: Kristine Barr;
Harvey Bostrom; Louise Chippeway; George Desnomie; Doug Edmond; Ken Gibbons; Loa
Henry; Lori Johnson; Yatta Kanu; Darren Lezubski; Michael Mackenzie; Astrid MacNeil; Larry
Morrisette; Todd Scarth; Helen Settee; Lisa Shaw; Byron Sheldrick; Leon Simard; Tom Simms;
and Norma Spence.
This research was financially supported by a University of Winnipeg Major Research Grant,
and the University of Winnipeg’s Winnipeg Inner City Research Alliance (WIRA). The opin-
ions of the authors found herein do not necessarily represent those of the UW or WIRA.
Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives | page 1

Executive Summary
In this study we investigate the educational circumstances of Aboriginal students in Winnipeg
inner city high schools. The study is based on interviews with 47 Aboriginal students in
Winnipeg inner city high schools, 50 Aboriginal school leavers, 25 adult members of the
Aboriginal community, and 10 teachers, 7 of them Aboriginal. In addition, we conducted an
extensive review of relevant literature.
Responses by Aboriginal people to our questions about their experiences in school reveal the
existence of what we have identified as a cultural/class/experiential divide between Aboriginal
students and their families on the one hand, and the school system on the other. The life expe-
riences and cultural values of many Aboriginal students and their families differ significantly
from what they experience in the schools, which are run largely by non-Aboriginal, middle
class people for the purpose of advancing the values of the dominant culture. The education-
al system marginalizes Aboriginal students, does not adequately reflect their cultural values
and their daily realities, and feels alien to many Aboriginal people. The incidence of overt
forms of racism—name calling and stereotyping, for example—is high. Institutional forms of
racism are common. The face that schools present to Aboriginal students is decidedly
non-Aboriginal: for example, there are few Aboriginal teachers, and little Aboriginal
content in the curriculum. These characteristics suggest to us an educational system What Aboriginal peo-
that continues to be overly Euro-centric and even colonial—a concept that we elabo- ple have said to us
rate upon in Part Two of the paper. about the educational
Aboriginal students experience the divide between themselves and the school system on system is not that
a daily basis, and a good deal of what they experience in school is negative. Not surpris-
Aboriginal people
ingly, many Aboriginal students resist and even reject this form of education. This is not
the way in which this issue is generally understood. It is generally understood as being a should be forced to
problem of Aboriginal students failing in school, of their having a ‘dropout’ rate double change in order to fit
that of non-Aboriginal students. But what follows from framing the issue as being into and ‘succeed’ in
Aboriginal students’ failures in school is that it is the Aboriginal students who need ‘fix-
ing’, and this inevitably leads back to the thinking that drove the residential schools, school, but rather that
which is that Aboriginal culture is inferior, and that Aboriginal students must be ‘raised’ the educational system
to the level of the superior culture. This approach has simply not worked. Aboriginal needs to change.
people do not and will not accept these racist assumptions. They resist such assumptions,
and thus resist schools.
The evidence that we have gathered suggests to us that Aboriginal people want the education that
is needed to enable them to participate fully in Canadian society and in their own self-governance,
but they do not want to abandon what it is to be Aboriginal in order to do so. What Aboriginal
people have said to us about the educational system is not that Aboriginal people should be forced
to change in order to fit into and ‘succeed’ in school—this is what the residential schools attempted,
unsuccessfully, to do—but rather that schools and the educational system generally need to change
in order to better reflect the rapidly changing demographic and cultural realities of our community.
Making such significant changes will be a challenge, but the benefits to all of us in doing so will
be significant. We conclude the paper by advancing recommendations that arise directly from
what our interviewees have told us. These are recommendations that we consider to be rea-
sonable and achievable, and which we believe are necessary for beginning the process of change
that needs to take place in our educational system.

Part One
1.1 Purpose of the study
In this study we investigate the educational circumstances of Aboriginal students in Winnipeg
inner city high schools. It is known that the educational system in Canada was designed by and
for people of European descent. It is also known that historically schools were central elements
in Canada’s strategy to assimilate Aboriginal people. There is a long history of antagonism
between Aboriginal people who wish to maintain their culture, and a school system designed
to reproduce a different cultural system. Our purpose is to examine the current circumstances
of Aboriginal people in high schools in Winnipeg’s inner city—an area with the highest con-
centration of Aboriginal people in any Canadian city—to determine what problems exist and
what changes are warranted.
This study has been undertaken in cooperation with two community-based organiza-
tions, Mother of Red Nations Women’s Council of Manitoba (MORN) and the
The educational sys- Community Education Development Association (CEDA), and has been funded by the
tem marginalizes University of Winnipeg’s Community-University Research Alliance program, the
Winnipeg Inner City Research Alliance, and by a University of Winnipeg Major Research
Aboriginal people, Grant. MORN, established in 1999, is engaged in political action and advocacy for
does not adequately Aboriginal women in various areas, including education, and in building capacity and
reflect Aboriginal leadership for Aboriginal women. CEDA is an inner city community development orga-
nization established in 1979 to serve the social and economic needs of the inner city, and
peoples’ realities, and communities with inner city characteristics, by helping communities to enhance their
feels alien to most collective problem solving abilities and to work together to bring about positive change.
Aboriginal people. A distinctive feature of this study is that it is based primarily on the views of Aboriginal
people. By Aboriginal people we mean people who are status and non-status Indians,
Metis and Inuit, and who have self-identified as such. We have interviewed 47
Aboriginal students attending high school in Winnipeg’s inner city; 50 Aboriginal school
leavers; 25 adult members of the Aboriginal community; and 10 teachers. All but three of the
132 interviewees are Aboriginal. The interview questionnaires were prepared in consultation
with our community partners, MORN and CEDA. Three of the four authors of this study are
Aboriginal people. Most of the interviews—including all of the interviews with students and
school leavers—were conducted by the three authors who are Aboriginal. Our intention has
been to attempt to gain an Aboriginal perspective on the educational circumstances of
Aboriginal people in Winnipeg’s inner city.
The study proceeds as follows. In Part One, after setting out the purpose of the study, we sum-
marize data showing demographic and educational trends for Aboriginal people in Winnipeg,
describe the methods used to select those people whom we interviewed, and then categorize
and analyze the results of the interviews. In Part Two we discuss colonialism and its impact on
Aboriginal people, and especially the impact of a colonial educational system on Aboriginal
people, and then consider the issues of Aboriginal teachers and teacher training, and
Aboriginal content in the curriculum. In Part Three, we draw conclusions and advance rec-
ommendations that follow from our findings.
It is significant, we believe, that what we learned from the interviews with Aboriginal youth
and adults was largely consistent with the findings of a great many others who have considered
the issue of Aboriginal people and education. The educational system marginalizes Aboriginal
page 4 | Aboriginal Students in Winnipeg Inner City High Schools

people, does not adequately reflect Aboriginal peoples’ realities, and feels alien to most
Aboriginal people. In the past, education was consciously used as a means by which to force
Aboriginal students to assimilate in order to fit into the dominant, European-based culture. It
did not work. Many Aboriginal people resisted assimilation. Our findings suggest that many
Aboriginal students continue to resist, and even to reject, an educational system that still does
not adequately reflect their realities. We believe that Aboriginal people want the education that
is needed to enable them to participate fully in Canadian society and in their own self-gover-
nance, but do not want to abandon what it means to be Aboriginal in order to do so. Many
Aboriginal people operate from a different set of cultural assumptions than those of the dom-
inant, non-Aboriginal culture. An example is the concept of non-interference in the raising of
children, which can appear to people in the dominant culture as if parents are being neglect-
ful, when in fact it is a cultural difference. Such cultural differences can lead to misunder-
standings. These differences are not accepted nor even acknowledged in many schools, thus
widening the divide between Aboriginal students and their families, and largely non-
Aboriginal schools.
What we believe emerges from the results of our interviews, and from our analysis of much
other literature on Aboriginal people and the educational system, is that it is not Aboriginal
students who need to change to fit into the still very Eurocentric, even colonial, educational
system. It is the educational system that needs to change to reflect the realities of, and to meet
the educational needs of, Aboriginal students. This is a big challenge. But it can be done. And
it should be done.
1.2 The size and growth of the Aboriginal

population in Winnipeg’s inner city
Manitoba has a relatively large Aboriginal population, and it is growing more rapidly than the
non-Aboriginal portion of the province’s population. The same is the case for Winnipeg, and
for Winnipeg’s inner city. Further, the Aboriginal population is considerably younger than the
non-Aboriginal population. The numbers, the growth rate and the age structure all have
important implications for education.
First, consider the provincial numbers. According to 1996 Census of Canada data, Manitoba
has a higher proportion of Aboriginal people, 11.7%, than any other province. Saskatchewan
is the only other province that is close, at 11.3%. The province with the third highest propor-
tion of Aboriginal people is Alberta, at 4.6%, followed by British Columbia, at 3.8%. And
Manitoba’s Aboriginal population has been growing rapidly, as shown by Table One:
Table One: The Growth of Manitoba’s Aboriginal Population, 1981-1996

Number of Aboriginal People % of Mb.Population
1981 66,280 6.5%
1986 93,450 8.7
1991 116,200 10.6
1996 128,680 11.7
Source: Canada and Manitoba, 2002, p. 14.

Winnipeg has a larger Aboriginal population than any other Canadian city. According to the 1996
Census there were 45,750 Aboriginal people in Winnipeg, which is “...far more than any other
Canadian city”(Canada and Manitoba, 2002, p.12). Winnipeg’s Aboriginal population has grown
rapidly, especially since the 1960s. The 1951 Census identified only 210 Aboriginal people in
Winnipeg. Ten years later, in 1961, there were 1082 Aboriginal people in Winnipeg. In the 1960s
Winnipeg’s Aboriginal population grew by almost 4000, to 4940 by 1971. In the 1970s more than
11,000 Aboriginal people were added to Winnipeg’s population, bringing it to 16,575 in 1981.
Almost 20,000 more Aboriginal people were added to Winnipeg’s population in the 1980s, so that
by 1991 there were 35,150 Aboriginal people in Winnipeg, and by 1996 Winnipeg’s Aboriginal
population had grown again by more than 10,000, to 45,750 (see Table Two).
Table Two: Aboriginal People in Winnipeg, 1951-1996

Number of Aboriginal People Increase During the Period
1951 210
1961 1082 872
1971 4940 3858
1981 16,575 11,635
1991 35,150 18,575
1996 45,750 10,600 (5 years only)
Source: Statistics Canada, various years.
As of 1996, Aboriginal people constituted 7% of Winnipeg’s population. More than one-third,

35.6%, of Manitoba’s Aboriginal population lived in Winnipeg in 1996. Projections made by
the Social Planning Council of Winnipeg put Winnipeg’s Aboriginal population at 67,000, or
just under one in ten (9.8%) of Winnipeg’s total population, in 2001 (Lezubski, 1998).
Within Winnipeg, the Aboriginal population is disproportionately concentrated in the north end
and inner city, and thus falls primarily within the purview of Winnipeg School Division No. 1. A
recent federal government study reported that: “While 4% of Canadian families are Aboriginal, the
figure rises to 11% for Manitoba, and 28.4% for Winnipeg (School Division No. 1)”. The
community served by Winnipeg No. 1 is home to approximately 60% of Winnipeg’s
Winnipeg has a larger Aboriginal population (KSI Research International, Inc., 2001, p.14). In the north end and
Aboriginal population inner city, Aboriginal people comprise more than 20% of the population in 14 different
than any other Census tracts, according to the 1996 Census, “...a concentration not found elsewhere in
Canadian city. Canada”(Canada and Manitoba, 2002, p. 12. See also Richards, 2001). This will continue to
be the case, since just over one in four (27%) of the children aged 6 years and under in the
geographic area served by Winnipeg School Division No. 1 are Aboriginal ( Lee, 2001, p. 7).
The Aboriginal population in Manitoba is considerably younger than the non-Aboriginal pop-
ulation. In 1996, 20.1% of the non-Aboriginal population and 37.7% of the Aboriginal popula-
tion were under the age of 15 years; 40% of the non-Aboriginal population and 64.5% of the
Aboriginal population were under the age of 30 years(Canada and Manitoba, 2002, p.29). The
younger age structure of the Aboriginal population is attributable to a birth rate twice that of

the non-Aboriginal population. The result is that almost one-third of Aboriginal people in
Manitoba are in the primary and secondary school age population, compared to less than one-
fifth of the non-Aboriginal population (Canada and Manitoba, 2002, p. 29), and in certain inner
city schools, a majority of students are Aboriginal. This situation will not soon change. The high
birth rate of Aboriginal people together with the large numbers of young people “...aging into
their reproductive years, guarantees that Aboriginal birth rates will remain extremely high in
Manitoba for several decades to come” (Canada and Manitoba, 2002, p. 32).
The conclusion that we draw from these data is that in Manitoba generally and Winnipeg’s
inner city in particular, a large and growing proportion of elementary and secondary school
students are Aboriginal, and this will continue to be the case into the foreseeable future. Based
on 1996 data, over the next decade one in five people in Manitoba reaching working age will
be Aboriginal. Some estimates put this ratio at one in four, or even one in three, by the year
2015 (Canada and Manitoba, 2002, p. 29). Thus meeting the educational needs of Aboriginal
people is exceptionally important for the future of the province and the city.
1.3 Aboriginal educational attainment: The proportion of

Aboriginal youth in
The educational system is not now doing well in meeting the educational needs of
Aboriginal people in Manitoba and in Winnipeg. Considering people in Manitoba Manitoba who are
between the ages of 15 and 29 years, 1.9% of those who are non-Aboriginal and 12.4% of attending school,
those who are Aboriginal have less than a grade 9 education. Aboriginal people in that age
range are six times as likely as non-Aboriginal people to have less than a grade 9 educa-
44.1%, is lower by
tion. Non-Aboriginal people in Manitoba in that age range are twice as likely as Aboriginal far than any other
people to have a high school diploma: 33.7% of Aboriginal people in Manitoba in that age province.
range and 62.7% of non-Aboriginal people have completed high school (Canada and
Manitoba, 2002, p.53). According to calculations done by the Social Planning Council of
Winnipeg in 1999, using 1996 Census data, approximately 50% of Aboriginal youth in Winnipeg
aged 18 to 24 did not have a high school diploma, compared to just under 20% of non-Aboriginal
youth aged 18 to 24 in Winnipeg who did not have a high school diploma (Lezubski, July, 1999).
So non-Aboriginal people in Winnipeg in the 18 to 24 age range in 1996 were approximately two
and one-half times as likely as Aboriginal people to have completed high school.
This is partly attributable to the relatively low proportion of Aboriginal youth in Manitoba
who are attending school. The proportion of Aboriginal youth in Manitoba who are attending
school, 44.1%, is lower by far than any other province (Table Three).
Table Three: Proportion of Aboriginal Youth (ages 15-24) Attending

School, Selected Provinces
Manitoba 44.1%
Saskatchewan 50.5
Ontario 55.9
Alberta 50.0
B.C. 51.6
National Average 50.4
Source: Canada and Manitoba, 2002, p.57.

So Manitoba, the province with the highest proportion of Aboriginal people in Canada, is the
province with the lowest proportion of Aboriginal youth attending school.
Similarly, 1996 data show that the proportion of Aboriginal youth aged 15-24 years in
Manitoba who are neither attending school nor employed nor participating in the labour mar-
ket is higher than in any other province (Table Four).
Table Four: Proportion of Aboriginal Youth Neither Attending School Nor

Working/Participating in the Labour Market, by Province, 1996
Neither attending school nor Neither attending school
participating in labour market nor employed
Manitoba 27.4% 37.5%
Saskatchewan 26.3 35.3
Quebec 21.5 32.0
B.C. 16.2 27.2
Ontario 16.0 25.3
Source: Canada and Manitoba, 2002, pp 58-59.
Aboriginal people in Manitoba are less likely than non-Aboriginal people in Manitoba, and
much less likely than Aboriginal people in Saskatchewan, the province with the next highest
proportion of Aboriginal people after Manitoba, to have graduated from university. In
Manitoba, 2.9% of Aboriginal people 15 years of age or older have completed a university
degree; in Saskatchewan 7% of Aboriginal people aged 15-34 have completed a university
degree. The higher rate in Saskatchewan has been attributed to the “...long term presence of
Aboriginally-oriented institutions of higher learning in that province” (Canada, 2002, p. 55).
In Saskatchewan, educational institutions controlled by Aboriginal people and specifically
designed to meet the needs of Aboriginal students have resulted in much higher graduation
rates than in Manitoba, where fewer such institutions exist.
These data—on the growth rate and age structure of Manitoba’s and Winnipeg’s Aboriginal
population, and on levels of educational attainment by Aboriginal people in Manitoba—reveal
a problem for Manitoba’s economic future. It has been argued that 70% of new jobs will require
post-secondary education or training. Therefore, the “...educational profile of today’s Aboriginal
youth is of crucial importance to the province’s economic future” (Canada and Manitoba, 2002,
p. 53). Yet Manitoba is lagging in doing what has to be done to get Aboriginal people into post-
secondary education, even when at least one in five and perhaps as high as one in three labour
market entrants over the next 15-20 years in Manitoba will be Aboriginal. Investment in appro-
priate Aboriginal education in Manitoba is therefore an investment in Manitoba’s economic
future. We put the case in this fashion because the recommendations that we make in this paper
will require that governments make additional expenditures. We believe that, over and above what
we consider to be the intrinsic merits of what we recommend, and their virtues from the per-
spective of social justice, such expenditures would also make good economic sense. Indeed, we
would put the case more strongly. Failure to make the necessary expenditures in Aboriginal edu-
cation would be a failure to take the steps that are necessary to secure Manitoba’s economic future.

Another way to make this case is to look at some estimates of the cost to society of stu- Failure to make the
dents leaving school before attaining their high school certificate. One Canadian esti- necessary expenditures
mate is that “...the cost of allowing 11,000 poor youth to leave school early over a 20
year span was $23 billion in lost income and productivity, $9.9 billion in lost taxes, and in Aboriginal educa-
$1.4 billion in unemployment and social assistance payments ( McCluskey et al, 2001). tion would be a failure
An American study reported that those who leave school without a high school cer- to take the steps that
tificate “... experience higher rates of unemployment, receive lower earnings, and are
more likely than high school graduates to require social services over their lifetime...”. are necessary to secure
The study estimated that one year’s cohort of early school-leavers from Los Angeles Manitoba’s economic
city schools “...cost $3.2 billion in lost earnings and more than $400 million in social future.
service” (Rumberger and Larson, 1994, p.142. See also Catterall, 1985).
1.4 Methods by which we selected those whom

we interviewed
This study is based largely upon interviews with Aboriginal people, and a large majority of
those interviews were conducted by Aboriginal people. We interviewed 132 people, of whom
129 are Aboriginal. Interviewees included: 47 Aboriginal students in Winnipeg inner city high
schools; 50 Aboriginal school leavers, 26 of whom had previously left school and were enrolled
in an adult learner centre at the time of the interviews, and 24 of whom were not in school; 25
Aboriginal community members with an interest in educational issues; and 10 teachers. We
also conducted 6 focus groups, attended by a total of 29 interviewees, one each with the two
categories of school leavers, two with community members, and one each with students and
directors of adult learner centres. The interviews and the focus groups were conducted in May,
June and July, 2002.
The interview questionnaires were prepared in consultation with our community partners,
CEDA and MORN. Separate questionnaires were prepared for each of the five broad categories
of interviewees: students, the two categories of school leavers, community members and teach-
ers. The questionnaires received ethics approval from the University of Winnipeg Department
of Politics Ethics Committee, and the University of Winnipeg Senate Ethics Committee. We
sought but were not successful in gaining the support of the Board of Trustees of Winnipeg
School Division No. 1 for the study, although the School Division was generous in making
available to us some useful data, and Mr. Doug Edmond, Director of Research, Planning and
Technology, reviewed our questionnaires and made numerous useful suggestions, almost all of
which we incorporated into the final questionnaire. All interviewees read and signed a consent
form, which informed them of the purpose of the study and of their right to withdraw from
the interview at any time. Those interviewees under the age of 18 had their consent forms
signed by parents or guardians. Each person interviewed, with the exception of the teachers,
was paid a $25 honorarium as an expression of our appreciation for their giving us the bene-
fit of their time, and an acknowledgment of the value of their knowledge. Each interview last-
ed between one and one and one-half hours.
We selected interviewees by a combination of methods.
For the students, we used a quota sampling method. We determined that we would interview
at least five students from each of six Winnipeg inner city high schools, and that we would
interview roughly equal numbers of male and female students. We attained the names and
phone numbers of selected Aboriginal students from individuals associated with three of the
high schools, and we interviewed all of those people whom we could reach and who were
agreeable to being interviewed. We then used a combination of snowball sampling and poster-
ing to identify students at the other high schools. Snowball sampling involves asking intervie-

wees for the names of other students who fit our criteria, and inviting those people to be inter-
viewed. We also put up posters around some of the high schools, explaining the purpose of the
study and inviting those who fit the criteria to contact one of the interviewers. We then inter-
viewed those who phoned and who fit the criteria until we had filled our quota.
For school leavers, we used a modified quota sampling method. We determined that we would
interview roughly equal numbers of school leavers now in adult learner centres, and not now
in school, and that roughly equal numbers would be men and women. Interviewees in the first
category are drawn from five adult learner centres, although the majority are from one adult
learner centre. Interviewees in the second category—school leavers not now in school—were
identified by means of a version of convenience sampling and postering. Our interviewers
went to two downtown locations where we believed Aboriginal school leavers might be found,
and approached individuals to determine if they were school leavers who were not now in
school, and if so, whether they were agreeable to being interviewed. We also used snowball
sampling—asking interviewees for additional names of people who were school leavers not
now in school—and we postered in these areas, asking people who had left school before com-
pleting high school and were not now in school to contact the interviewers. We interviewed
those who phoned and who were school leavers not now in school until we filled the quota.
To select the 25 community members to be interviewed, we started with a list of members of
the Aboriginal Education Coalition—a coalition of individuals concerned about Aboriginal
educational issues—made available to us by CEDA, one of our community partners. We start-
ed with this list on the grounds that, based on their involvement with the Aboriginal Education
Coalition, these were people specifically interested in and presumably knowledgeable about the
issues we were investigating. We interviewed most of the people on this list, which got us about
75% of our quota of community members. The remainder were identified by asking respon-
dents for the names of other community members who fit our criteria—in this case Aboriginal
adults interested in and knowledgeable about educational issues.
The 10 teachers interviewed included 7 Aboriginal and 3 non-Aboriginal respondents. Some
of these teachers were identified for us by the provincial government’s Native Education
Directorate, others by a snowball technique. We had intended to interview 25 teachers, but
many teachers whom we approached were not agreeable to being interviewed because the
study had not been endorsed by their employer, the Board of Trustees of Winnipeg School
Division No. 1. Most of those teachers we did interview are not now teaching in a Winnipeg
inner city high school, and some of them were interviewed without the use of a formal inter-
view questionnaire. As a consequence we have not tallied the responses of teachers in the same
way that we have for students, school leavers and community members.
1.5 A profile of those we interviewed

High school students:
We interviewed 47 high school students1, 22 women and 25 men, at least 5 of whom were from
each of the following inner city/north end high schools: Children of the Earth, Daniel
McIntyre, Gordon Bell, R.B. Russell, St. Johns, and Sisler. Forty-one of the 47 are between the
ages of 15 and 18 (2 were 19, 2 were 20, one was 21 and one was 34 years of age). Sixteen of the
47 students were in grade 11, 15 were in grade 10, 10 were in grade 12, and 6 were in grade 9.
The girls are slightly younger, on average, than the boys (See Table Five).
1
We interviewed 50 students, but 3 of the interviews have not been used at the request of the Principal of one of the high
schools. These three students were interviewed in the school. When we subsequently did not get the approval of the Winnipeg
No.1 Board of Trustees for our study, the Principal asked us not to use them, and we complied with this request.

Table Five: High School Students, By Sex, Grade and Age
Male Female Total
Grade: 9 1 5 6
10 8 7 15
11 9 7 16
12 7 3 10
25 22 47
Age: 15 1 6 7
16 5 6 11
17 6 5 11
18 9 3 12
19 1 1 2
20 1 1 2
21 1 - 1
34 1 - 1
25 22 47
Just over one-half of the students interviewed (54% of males; 52% of females) live with a single par-
ent or guardian, usually a single mother. Just over one-third of the students (38% of males; 33% of
females) have lived in both Winnipeg and rural Manitoba or Ontario while attending school. Just
over one-half have attended 4 or more schools in Winnipeg—almost one-quarter have attended 6
or more schools in Winnipeg. This suggests a high degree of mobility, both between Winnipeg and
rural settings, and within Winnipeg. This is consistent with what Winnipeg School Division No. 1
has found ( WSD No. 1, 1997/98, Appendices, Tables 6, 7 and 8), and is consistent with the findings
of a recent federal/provincial study: “Annual moving rates in some inner city districts exceed 70%”
(Canada and Manitoba, 2002, p.13). Moving so much—starting and stopping at one school after
another—is likely to have a detrimental effect on educational attainment. A 1990 study by the Social
Planning Council of Winnipeg of 116 renter families with school age children in the Dufferin and
William Whyte school catchment areas in Winnipeg’s inner city concluded that: “The study results
confirm the belief of inner city educators that poor housing conditions impel families to move fre-
quently which, in turn, adversely affects their children’s school performance”(Social Planning
Council of Winnipeg,1990, p.v). A 1995 Manitoba Health study reported that:
Migrancy (frequent movers) is a particular problem for inner city chil-
dren....Migrancy combined with poverty, single-parent families and other
social difficulties further exacerbates the difficulty of school-aged children. In

a 1992 review of inner city schools, the lowest migrancy rate (proportion of
children moving per year in the school population) was 40.6 percent. The
highest rate was 84.7 percent....Some children have been in 13 schools by 11
years of age....In a nine-month period in 1992/93, there were 3,058 single par-
ent family moves out of a possible 3,553 (Manitoba Health, 1995: pp107-108).
We also found that just over one in four of the men (27%) and one in three of the women
(33%), have at least one parent who attended a residential school, while more than half (57%)
of the students have at least one grandparent who attended residential school. We consider this
to be a significant finding. As will be described later, the residential schools have had a devas-
tating effect on Aboriginal people and families and have, not surprisingly, created in the minds
of many Aboriginal people a thoroughly negative perception of formal education. The high
proportion of high school students with a parent and/or grandparent who attended residen-
tial school makes clear that for a significant proportion of Aboriginal students in
Winnipeg, the effects of residential schools are not just an historical phenomenon, but
...residential schools are present daily in the home.
have had a devastating The fact that just over one-half of our high school interviewees live with a single par-
effect on Aboriginal ent, just over one-third grew up in both Winnipeg and rural Manitoba or Ontario, just
over one-half attended four or more schools and almost one-quarter attended six or
people and families more schools, and between one-quarter and one-third have parents who were in resi-
and have, not surpris- dential schools, creates a profile of living arrangements and family background quite
ingly, created in the different from the average non-Aboriginal high school student, and quite different
from the majority of teachers and staff.
minds of many
Aboriginal people a School leavers:
thoroughly negative We interviewed 50 Aboriginal people who are school leavers. Of the 50, 26 are women
and 24 are men. We interviewed 24 school leavers who are not now in any formal edu-
perception of formal cational setting (10 women; 14 men), and 26 who left school at some previous time
education. and are now enrolled in an adult learner centre (16 women; 10 men) (See Table Six).
Table Six: School Leavers, By Sex and by Current Educational Status

Not Now in School Adult Learner Centre Total
Male 14 10 24
Female 10 16 26
Total 24 26 50
A profile of these 50 interviewees in terms of their ages, the age at which they originally left
school, the highest grade attained at the time of leaving school, the percentage with children
and the percentage who are single parents, and their mobility, is shown in Table Seven.

Table Seven: School Leavers, by Age, Living Arrangements and Mobility
Women Men
Not in School Adult Ed. Not in School Adult Ed.
Age:
range 16-61 yrs 18-38 yrs 16-33 yrs 19-54 yrs
median 22 22/23 22 35
Time of leaving school:
median age 16/17 16/17 17 16
median highest grade 9 9 10 9
Children/living arrangements:
% with children 60% 81% 57% 30%
average number children 2.7 2 1 1
single parents 30% 63% - -
Mobility:
% moved 3x or more
last 2 years 50% 50% 14% -
% lived Wpg. & rural

while in school 30% 44% 50% 60%
The median age of those not now in school is 22 years. For the men in adult learner centres it is
35 years. More then 4 in 10 (42%) of the school leavers are 25 years of age or older. The median
age at which they left school is 16 or 17 years, and the median highest grade achieved at the time
of leaving school is grade 9, except in the case of men not now in school for whom it is grade 10.
Roughly 6 in 10 of those not now in school have children, although men in adult learner centres
are less likely to have children(30%) and women in adult learner centres are more likely to have
children (81%, just over 4 in 5). Women have more children than men, on average, and the
women are more likely than the men to be single parents. Just under one-third (30%) of the
women not now in school are single parents, and almost two-thirds (63%) of the women in adult
learner centres are single parents. This is consistent with the finding, reported below, that a desire
to create a better life for their children is a strong motivator for women’s returning to school at
an adult learner centre after previously leaving school as a teenager. The women are more likely
than the men to have made frequent moves in the past two years, while the men are more likely
than the women to have moved between Winnipeg and a rural setting while in high school.

Community people:
We also interviewed 25 Aboriginal community members, 19 women and 6 men. These are peo-
ple who have a direct or indirect interest in educational issues. A majority are members of the
Aboriginal Education Coalition. Ten of them are directly involved in education in various
capacities. These include, for example, a school counselor, a university Aboriginal student advi-
sor, two senior education administrators, and a fifth-year Faculty of Education student. Eight
work with community organizations, many in the inner city and/or directly with inner city
Aboriginal youth. Three are elders, and the rest include a policy analyst, an administrative
assistant, a homemaker, a real estate agent and a political advisor. Two of these interviewees
have Masters degrees, 11 have Bachelor’s degrees, and an additional seven have at least some
university education. All but one have children and/or grandchildren attending school; 18 of
them (76%, or just over 3 in 4) have children or grandchildren attending school in Winnipeg
School Division No. 1.
1.6 Parental Support

We found that there is strong parental support for our sample of high school students. All but
three of the students (93.5%) told us that their parent(s) or guardian(s) encourage them to do
well in school and care about how well they do in school and would be disappointed and/or
angry if they were to leave school. Almost three in four of the parents/guardians (73.9%) meet
with their children’s teachers to monitor their progress. The parents of these Aboriginal high
school students care about their children’s educational success.
It is notable that just over one-third of the students (36.2%) report that at least one of their
parents has attended either university or college, and just over one in four (28.3%) reported
that at least one parent had completed grade 12 but not attended post-secondary education.
When combined, almost 2 in 3 (64%) of these students have at least one parent who com-
pleted grade 12 and/or attended university or college. Since 38.2% of the Aboriginal popula-
tion in Manitoba had grade 12 or better, and 10.6% had some university or had completed a
degree (Canada and Manitoba, 2002, pp 53, 55), the students we interviewed have parents
who, on average, have higher levels of educational attainment than the Aboriginal population
generally. This is consistent with findings in the Youth in Transition Survey, in which more
than 22,000 Canadian youth aged 18-20 years participated. The Survey found that
“...the higher the level of the parents’ education, the more likely their children were to
...many Aboriginal
complete high school”(Canada, 2002, p.30). The same has been found for Aboriginal
parents do not feel students (Hull, 1990, p.3; Mackey and Myles, 1989, p. 147). Students are more likely
welcome in the to stay in school and to graduate if their parents graduated.
schools, and/or have However, when we asked our community respondents,“Do the parents of
had bad experiences in Aboriginal students get involved with their children’s education as much as the
parents of non-Aboriginal students?”, all but one (95.2%) said no. When we asked
the past with schools. why that might be so, we were told that many Aboriginal parents are simply strug-
gling to survive, to make it from day-to-day economically. “The daily struggles are
so great”, said one respondent. Another added: “Parents are stuck in survival mode”.
Providing the supports that young people need to be successful in school is extremely dif-
ficult in such circumstances. Further, we were told that many Aboriginal parents do not
feel welcome in the schools, and/or have had bad experiences in the past with schools. For
many this is the legacy of the residential schools. But the evidence suggests that it is more
than that. One respondent said: “There are cultural barriers, racism, unbalanced power
relations”. When we asked the community respondents, “Do you think the school makes
Aboriginal parents feel welcome”, all but three (87.5%) said no, and many added that
schools need to try different things to involve Aboriginal parents, and to overcome the

cultural and class barriers that divide schools/teachers, and many Aboriginal fam- Our respondents told
ilies. us that many
Some might ask whether this is simply a case of Aboriginal parents not caring how well Aboriginal people
their children do in school. Our evidence suggests that Aboriginal parents do care. For
example, when we asked those of our interviewees who had previously left school,
have a different set
“When you were in school, did your parents or guardians encourage you to do well in of cultural values, and
school?”, just under 4 in 5 (78%) said yes. Their comments reveal that in many cases most non-Aboriginal,
their parents were not able to provide as much tangible and emotional support as
middle class teachers
would have been desirable. This may, in some cases, be attributable to the cultural
norm of non-interference in the raising of children (Cleary and Peacock, 1998). But are unaware of this.
whatever the explanation, their parents cared enough to encourage them to do well in Teachers, they told us,
school. This conclusion is consistent with a considerable body of literature, including, need to learn about
to take one example, a recent study which reported that “...there is not a single parent
I have spoken with who does not want his or her children to achieve at the highest Aboriginal cultures.
level” (Poonwassie, 2001, p. 157). But although they care, many Aboriginal parents are
not getting involved with their children’s schools.
The explanation, we believe, has to do with the fact that most schools are white, middle class
institutions, and most teachers are white, middle class people. There is a cultural/class divide
between schools and teachers, and most Aboriginal students and their families. This is the case
elsewhere in Canada, as well. For example, a study that included focus groups with Aboriginal
people in British Columbia reported that:
“Virtually every focus group expressed the notion that for Aboriginal people,
schools tend to be intimidating places. They attribute much of this to direct or
indirect experiences in residential schools and the attendant fear of the
authority that school represents. … Focus groups told us that many of today’s
schools continue to appear to them as unwelcoming places where there is lit-
tle understanding of their fear, and where institutionalized racism continues
to exist among both staff and students” (BC, Department of Education, 2001,
p. 44).
This cultural/class divide needs to be bridged. “Schools need to go and talk to the parents in
their own communities, get out of the schools and go and see what is in the community”, said
one community respondent. When we asked our community respondents, “Should schools be
trying to engage with the whole community?”, all but one (95.7%) said yes. This came out
clearly and emphatically in the focus group with community respondents. They described how
very intimidating it can be for many Aboriginal parents to cross the divide that separates them
from the white, middle class schools and teachers. Our respondents told us that many
Aboriginal people have a different set of cultural values, and most non-Aboriginal, middle class
teachers are unaware of this. Teachers, they told us, need to learn about Aboriginal cultures.
There is a strong desire on the part of our community respondents for schools and teachers to
reach out to and involve the Aboriginal community as a whole, in order that the walls between
schools and Aboriginal people can be broken down. We know that in some schools this is
already happening (Schubert, April 1, 2002, p.10). But more needs to be done. The objective
should be the genuine involvement of the Aboriginal community in real, substantive decision-
making about their children’s education.

1.7 Goals and Expectations
Aboriginal students still in high school, and former school leavers now enrolled in adult learn-
er centres, have clear educational goals and expectations. For the students, all but one of them
(97.8%) responded ‘yes’ to the question, “Do you consider succeeding in school to be impor-
tant in your life?”; every single student (100%) told us that she or he expects to graduate; more
than 4 in 5( 85.1 % ) say that they expect to go on to university or college; and just over 3 in 4
(78.7%) have clearly-defined career goals.
The students currently enrolled in adult learner centres are also very motivated. We asked them:
“Why did you decide to return to school?”. All of the men (100%) referred to specific job or
career goals. Ten of the 16 women (62.5%) said they wanted to make a better life for their chil-
dren, and 9 of the 16 (56.3%) said they want-
ed to get off welfare. Their comments (see
Why did you decide to return to school?*
sidebar) reflect a desire and a determination to
I want to get a decent job and get off welfare....I got tired of doing become independent and to build a better
nothing....without it (grade 12) you’d be stuck on welfare and living in future for themselves and their children.
poverty all depressed (29 years; F).
Given these responses, it was disturbing to
School now is very important because I have my daughter to think learn that numerous female students in adult
about....I don’t want to be on welfare; I can’t live that way any more learner centres reported being actively dissuad-
(20; F). ed by social workers from returning to school.
I wanted to do it for my children (23; F). This determination to push women into the
labour market rather than support their strong
I want a better way of life for myself and for my children (25;F). desires to return to school at an adult learner
I don’t want to be on welfare....I also want to set a good example for centre seems to us to be short-sighted.
my son (22;F). We also asked the community respondents
*In most cases in this and subsequent sidebars, the words of the respondentsabout student goals and expectations. We
are direct quotes. In some cases the words used are taken from the inter- asked them: “In your opinion, do Aboriginal
viewer’s notes. In these latter cases the words accurately reflect the spirit of
the response. F is female; M is male.
students have high educational expectations
and aspirations?” The responses were mixed.
Just over one-half (52%) said yes; 48% said
no. This suggests to us that the high educational expectations and aspirations of the students
we interviewed may not be the norm. Many of our community respondents observed that,
based on their experience, Aboriginal children enter school in their early years with high
expectations and aspirations. One respondent said that when she taught grade one, “...the stu-
dents came with great expectations...”. But for many of the students, these high expectations
and aspirations are soon eroded. For some Aboriginal students, this is a product of their feel-
ings of marginalization, caused by a school system in which the dominant culture is all-perva-
sive, and in which their own Aboriginal values are not validated. For those who are struggling
with difficult home lives and family chaos and poverty, hope is all too often ground out of
them. One long-time inner city community worker told us that few of the children that she
sees regularly even think of ever attending university. Another said that it is “hard to dream”
when thinking of survival. Without such dreams and aspirations, success at school is unlikely.
1.8 Relationships with teachers

We asked our student interviewees about their relationships with their teachers. The
responses were mixed. In some respects, the responses were very positive, reflecting the ded-
ication and commitment of teachers in Winnipeg’s inner city. When we asked, “Do you think
your teachers expect you to do well in school?”, and “Do you get extra help from your teach-
ers when you need it”, 87.2% and 80.9% respectively of the students responded in the affir-

mative. However, when we asked, “How well would you say Aboriginal students at your
school get along with teachers?”, less than half (46.7%) responded with positive comments
like “very well”, “good”, or “OK”, and interestingly, only one in four of the female students
responded in this positive way to this question. Similarly, when we asked whether teachers at
their school “understand Aboriginal students”, less than half (44.4%) of the students
responded affirmatively.
With respect to this latter question, we believe it would be reasonable to hypothesize that a
similar proportion of all students would say that teachers do not understand them—
teenagers rarely feel that they are understood
by adults. So at first glance one might think
Do You Feel That Teachers At Your School Understand
that not much weight should be placed on Aboriginal Students?
the fact that less than half of the students
responded positively to this question. They try hard but I don’t think they really understand them. Growing
However, at least some of the comments up in the north end and going to school is really tough. Teachers don’t
made by students in response to the ques- really see what is done after school. They don’t really take the time to
tion, “Do you feel that teachers at your see them in their own environment (18; M).
school understand Aboriginal students?”, are Socially, I don’t think most teachers know how it is to grow up on a
quite revealing (see sidebar). reserve or poor (17; M).
We asked our 25 community respondents, They do not understand us because they are white (15; F).
“Based on your experience, do you think
teachers ‘understand’ Aboriginal students?” They have different views on life and different attitudes. They have a
different upbringing (17; M).
Just over 3 in 4 (77.3%) said no. Teachers
“don’t understand the issues we’re dealing Not really, because they are white (16; F).
with”. In particular, “...many [Aboriginal] stu-
Some of them try to, but not really. Only a few teachers would under-
dents live in poverty and how can teachers
stand. If they grew up on a reserve they might understand better (18; M).
understand poverty when they themselves
have never experienced it?” Teachers make no conscious attempt to learn about Aboriginal culture.
(16; M).
These comments suggest to us that there is
*F is female; M is male.
a divide, or ‘disconnect’, on cultural and
class grounds, between Aboriginal students
and their largely white, middle class teach-
ers. As many Aboriginal students and com- How well would you say Aboriginal students get along
munity members see it, even though many with teachers?
teachers are trying, Aboriginal students and
teachers occupy two different worlds, sepa- Not very well. Aboriginal students don’t talk to the teachers; they just
rated by lines of culture and class. This is go to class and get it over with (16; F).
suggested by comments in response to the Not that great. I never saw an Indian talk to a white teacher.
question, “How well would you say Regardless of who they are, white teachers help white kids all the time
Aboriginal students get along with teach- (16; M).
ers?” (See sidebar).
Most of them get frustrated with the constant put-downs, and eventu-
We also asked the 50 school leavers about ally just pack it in (18; M).
their relationships with their teachers. For *F is female; M is male.
those not now in school, we asked about their
relationships with the teachers they had
when they were in school. As was the case for students still in school, the results were mixed
(see Table Eight).

Table Eight: Responses to Questions About Relationships With Teachers By School Leavers Not
Now in School
Male Female Total
1. Percentage who said ‘very well’, or ‘OK/average’, to the question,
“When you were in school, how well would you say you got along
with your teachers?” 92.9% 100% 95.8%
2. Percentage who said yes to the question, “Were your teachers

supportive of you and your work in school? Did they encourage you,
or praise you when you did well? 78.6 100 87.5
3. Percentage who said yes to the question: “Do you think they cared
about how well you did in school?” 71.4 80 75
4. Percentage who said yes to the question:“Do you feel that your
teachers understood you?” 64.3 20 45.8
5. Percentage who said yes to the question: “Did they understand

Aboriginal students?” 71.4 20 50
For the first three questions, results are strongly positive for both men and women. Most respon-
dents, and especially the women, believe that they got along well with their teachers when they were
in school, and that their teachers cared about how well they did and were supportive of their efforts.
However, as was the case with the students, half or fewer of the respondents believed that teachers
understood them in particular, or understood Aboriginal students more generally, and as was also
the case with the students, a particularly low proportion of female respondents believed that teach-
ers understood them in particular, or understood Aboriginal students more generally. And like the
students, some of the comments made by those not now in school suggest that there is a divide on
cultural/class/experiential grounds, between Aboriginal students and non-Aboriginal teachers. Their
life experience puts a distance between them. One 34 year old female respondent said: “They didn’t
grow up like me, so they couldn’t understand what I was going through”, and a 33 year old woman
added: “I couldn’t be open to them, or tell them anything....I didn’t have anyone to tell all my prob-
lems”.
We asked similar questions of school leavers who are now enrolled in adult learner centres, and
the responses were dramatically different (Table Nine).
Table Nine: Responses to Questions About Relationships With Teachers By School Leavers Now
Enroled in Adult Learner Centres
Male Female Total
1. Percentage who said ‘very well’, or ‘OK/average’, to the question,
“How well would you say you got along with your teachers now?” 100% 100% 100%
2. Percentage who said yes to the question, “Are your teachers supportive
of you and your work in school?” 100 100 100
3. Percentage who said yes to the question: “Do you think they care
about how well you did in school?” 90 100 96.2
4. Percentage who said ‘better’ to the question,“How would you say

going to school here compares with when you previously went to
school? Is it better? Worse? About the same?” 90 93.8 92.3

The responses in Table Nine show that the students whom we interviewed who are in adult
learner centres have positive feelings about their teachers, and prefer the adult learner cen-
tres to the high schools they previously attended. Their comments suggest that the reason
for this is the close personal attention they receive from teachers, and the respectful and
flexible manner in which they are treated by teachers. Repeatedly these students said things
about their teachers like: “I’m able to talk with them, even about things not related to
school”; “they take time to get to know you”; “they treat you like an adult”; “they treat me
with respect”; “the teachers here have a little more understanding and patience. They take
time to listen to us”.
The responses by Aboriginal students at adult learner centres, particularly when compared
with the responses of Aboriginal students at inner city high schools, suggest the possibility that
the adult learner centres have found ways of bridging the cultural/class/experiential divide
referred to earlier. We believe that these tenta-
tive findings warrant further study.
Should there be more Aboriginal teachers?
We also asked questions about Aboriginal Why/why not?
teachers. First, when we asked students, “Have
you had any Aboriginal teachers here in Able to relate to me because they are from the same background (16;
F).
Winnipeg?”, the answers were striking. One in
three students have not had a single Definitely, so they can actually understand where some students are
Aboriginal teacher in Winnipeg. These are coming from (16; M).
students in Winnipeg’s inner city! And a high
To make Aboriginal students feel more comfortable (15; F).
proportion of them have attended many
schools, and have thus been exposed to a great It would probably make a big difference (17; M).
many teachers. If we add to those who have *F is female; M is male.
had no Aboriginal teachers, those who said
they have had only one or two, the proportion
rises to more than half (57.8%). When we asked, “Should there be more Aboriginal teachers?”,
all but two (95.6%), said yes, many in an emphatic and enthusiastic way. When we asked why
they thought there should be more Aboriginal teachers, many of their answers seem to confirm
our hypothesis that there is a significant cultural/class/experiential divide between Aboriginal
students and a largely non-Aboriginal teaching force (see sidebar).
We asked school leavers about Aboriginal teachers, and the responses are shown in Table Ten.
Table Ten: Responses to Questions About Aboriginal Teachers,

by School Leavers
Adult Learner Not in School
Percentage Who Answered in the Affirmative Male Female Male Female

1. Did you have any Aboriginal teachers when you
went to school here in Winnipeg?” 79%* 40% 10% 19%
2. “Did it/would it make a difference to you?” 64 70 80 20
3. “Should there be more Aboriginal teachers?” 86 90 90 100
* This percentage is as high as it is because severl of these respondents attended Children of the Earth, Winnipeg’s Aboriginal High
School.

These responses to questions about Aboriginal teachers are similar to those by current high
school students to the same questions. Most significantly, when we asked, “Should there be
more Aboriginal teachers?”, all but four answered yes, some emphatically.
We asked the community respondents,“Do you think it would make a difference if there were more
Aboriginal teachers?” All but two (92%) said yes. More Aboriginal teachers, they said, would con-
tribute to overcoming the distance between schools and Aboriginal students and their families, and
would make both students and parents feel more comfortable in the schools. Many added, however,
that it is not just a matter of putting more Aboriginal teachers in the classroom, as important as this
would be. It is also that Aboriginal teachers must understand Aboriginal history and culture, and
must understand what it is to be poor and Aboriginal in Winnipeg’s inner city. And for this to be the
case requires changes in the teacher training process. Several of the community respondents referred
to what they considered to be the inadequacies of teacher training at the University of Manitoba and
the University of Winnipeg Faculties of Education. Not only do these faculties produce relatively few
Aboriginal teachers, but also the education that is provided to prospective teachers includes almost
no Aboriginal history and culture. It continues to be, some argued, a Eurocentric education.
Based on these findings we include in our recommendations, later in this report, some specif-
ic observations about the need to produce more Aboriginal teachers, and to produce more
teachers—Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal—with a firm grasp of what it is to be an Aboriginal
person in Winnipeg’s inner city today, and a thorough understanding of the history and cul-
ture of Aboriginal people.
1.9 Curriculum
We asked students and school leavers for their perceptions of the curriculum at their schools/for-
mer schools, and we asked community respondents for their perceptions of the curriculum more
generally, and their answers are consistent with their comments about Aboriginal teachers.
For the students, when we asked, “Does your school offer any courses on Aboriginal history or
culture?”, just over one-half (51.1%) answered yes. When we asked, “Does that matter to you?”,
85% said yes, and when we asked, “Do you think that matters to other Aboriginal students?”,
all but one, 97.6%, said yes. When the same questions(but in the past tense) were asked of the
school leavers not now in school, the proportion responding in the affirmative was 58.3% for
the first question, 66.7% for the second, and 100% for the third. We asked the same three ques-
tions of those students now enrolled in adult learner centres. All but one (96.2%) said yes to
the first question and all but two (92.3%) said yes to the second question. Every student said
yes when asked, “Do you think that matters to other Aboriginal students?” (See Table Eleven).
In short, of the 97 Aboriginal high school students and school leavers interviewed, 96 (98.97%)
answered in the affirmative when asked whether they thought that more Aboriginal content in
the curriculum matters to Aboriginal students.
Table Eleven: Responses to Questions About Aboriginal Curriculum

Percentage Who Responded High School Not Now in Adult Learner
in the Affirmative Students School Centre
1. Does/did your school offer any courses that are/were particularly
relevant to Aboriginal students, like Aboriginal history or culture? 50 58.3 96.2
2. Does/did that matter to you? 87.2 66.7 92.3
3. Do you think it matters to other Aboriginal students? 97.6 100 100

In examining these responses, several things
stand out. First, it appears that Aboriginal stu- Does your school offer any courses on Aboriginal his-
dents want such courses, and they say such tory or culture?; Does that matter to you?; Do you
courses matter to them and to other think it matters to other Aboriginal students?
Aboriginal students. Second, many of the Most Native students don’t know anything about their history and are
respondents refer to the lack of knowledge of willing to learn about their own culture (17; M).
Aboriginal culture and languages among
Aboriginal youth, and their desire to know I’m really into my culture and finding out more about my culture and
teachings (17; F).
more about themselves and their culture and
history. Given issues related to identity and My mother never taught me and the course [at COTE] taught me to be
self-esteem, which we believe to be the prod- proud of myself and my history (23; F).
ucts of colonialism and the internalization of
Most Aboriginal students don’t know their language or history (18; F).
colonial oppression which we will discuss in
Part Two of the paper, this seems to us to be There is so much to the Aboriginal culture that they just do not learn
especially important. Third, we note that at home or on the street that certain things have to be taught in the
Aboriginal students consider some cultural classroom (18; M).
programs offered in some schools to be lip- They have a course related to Native Studies, but I think it’s crap as all
service or window-dressing. A pow-wow club they do is teach how to make dream catchers. They should have more
after 3:30 or a sharing circle every now and meaningful courses on how Aboriginal people lived and contributed to
then does not, it appears, satisfy what we society (17; M).
believe to be the genuine craving of many
To me it doesn’t really matter, but to other Aboriginal students it is
Aboriginal youth to “know themselves”.
very important (21; M).
We asked our community respondents this
They did the sharing circle, but only once or twice a year to get every-
question: “Based on what you know about one involved (18; M).
school in Winnipeg School Division No. 1,
would you say there is sufficient Aboriginal At [an inner city high school] there was no mention of Aboriginal cul-
content in the curriculum?” These community ture (24; M).
respondents should have considerable knowl- *F is female; M is male.
edge of the curriculum, since more than three-
quarters of them have children or grandchil-
dren attending school in Winnipeg School
Division No. 1, and 40% are themselves involved in education. Not a single respondent said yes.
Five said they believe improvements are being made, two said they did not know, and the rest,
72%, said no, there is not sufficient Aboriginal content in the curriculum. Some felt very strong-
ly about this issue. “Don’t get me going on that!”, said one. Some acknowledged the work that
has been done in Winnipeg School Division No. 1 on curriculum development, reflecting the
view of senior administrators and trustees at WSD No. 1 that the division has taken many steps
in this regard. But our community respondents said that what has been done is not enough.
One problem pointed to is that the Aboriginal content in the curriculum is not mandatory. It
is there, but it does not have to be taught. As one respondent put it: “There’s so much good
stuff there, it just needs to be used”. It is difficult for many teachers to use the Aboriginal con-
tent in the curriculum when Aboriginal history and culture have not been a part of their own
education. This is a function, in part, of what is taught at the University of Manitoba and
University of Winnipeg Faculties of Education, as will be discussed in Part Two of this paper.
Several community respondents also added that it is not enough for the Aboriginal content to
be an “add-on”. As one put it, reflecting some of the students’ comments: “Schools should not
bring out the ‘Indian stuff ’ once a year and say this is curriculum. All it does is feed into the
stereotyping of Aboriginal people”. They argue that knowledge of Aboriginal history and cul-
ture has to be infused throughout the curriculum. It has to be something that all students are
exposed to, as part of the ‘normal’ process of attending a Winnipeg high school.

When we asked our community respondents, “Do you think that a curriculum with more
Aboriginal content would make a difference?”, every respondent (100%) said yes. Some point-
ed to the effect that learning about their own history and culture had on them. “It was like a
light went on”, said one community member, describing when she was first exposed to
Aboriginal history. A second respondent pointed to the psychological effect that learning about
one’s own history and culture can have on a student, and did so by reference to a term, “con-
scientization”, used by the Brazilian educator, Paulo Friere ( Friere, 1970; 1981). Friere argued
that a people who have been colonized and oppressed are psychologically liberated when they
learn their history from their own perspective. This is of great importance for Aboriginal stu-
dents in Winnipeg, many of whom have internalized the colonial oppression of Aboriginal
people. The National Indian Brotherhood spoke to this issue more than 30 years ago, saying:
“Unless a child learns about the forces which shape him: the history of his
people, their values and customs, their language, he will never really know
himself or his potential as a human being.... The Indian child who learns
about his heritage will be proud of it....The present school system is cultural-
ly alien to Native students. Where the Indian contribution is not entirely
ignored, it is often cast in an unfavourable light....Courses in Indian history
and culture should promote pride in the Indian child, and respect in the non-
Indian student” (Kirkness, 1992, p.34).
Our respondents have overwhelmingly expressed a desire for such courses.
1.10 School Climate

When we asked our student respondents about the ‘school climate’ in their school, the
responses were positive, but mixed. When we asked, “Do you think your school cares about
Aboriginal students”, more than 2 in 3 (69.8%) said yes; when we asked, “Do Aboriginal and
non-Aboriginal students do things together, or do they stay apart”, more than 3 in 4 (76.2%)
said they do things together; and when we asked, “Are you proud of your school?”, almost 3
in 4 (71.4%) said yes. This latter finding is especially significant because the same question
was asked in the Winnipeg School Division No. 1 S4 (Grade12) Survey, 2001/02, and in that
case 64.1% said yes.
However, the proportion of Aboriginal students who responded yes to the question, “Do you
feel that Aboriginal students in your school are treated with respect?” is much lower, just over
half (53.2%). This pattern is consistent with students’ responses to questions about teachers.
And some of those who answered yes, Aboriginal students are treated with respect, gave the very
reasons that were used by other students to criticize their schools. For instance, one 18 year old
female student said “Yes, Aboriginal Day and pow wows”, while an 18 year old male student at
the same school said “...the pow wow club they have now is a total farce”. Our interpretation of
this is that some Aboriginal students are happy if they see that their school is trying, even if only
in a surface way, while others decry these initiatives as surface attempts and call for a meaning-
ful treatment of Aboriginal history and culture. This interpretation is also reflected in some of
the comments by students about curriculum, as shown in the sidebar on page 21.
We asked our community respondents, “Based on your experience, do you feel that
Aboriginal students feel comfortable and welcome in school?” Only one said yes; 70 % said
no; the remainder said it depends on the school. One respondent, a former inner city teacher,
said that “based on my experience in inner city schools, there are great efforts to make stu-
dents feel welcome”. We believe this to be the case. Many teachers and schools are trying hard,
and Aboriginal students recognize this. How else could one explain the fact that a higher pro-
portion of Aboriginal student respondents (71.4%) than of students who responded to the

Winnipeg School Division No. 1 Grade 12 Survey (64.1%) are proud of their school? Yet the
proportion of Aboriginal students who feel that they are treated with respect is significantly
lower, as is the proportion of Aboriginal students who believe that teachers understand
Aboriginal students. The problem, we believe, is the existence of a cultural/class/experiential
divide between Aboriginal students and primarily white middle class teachers and institu-
tions. The result is that despite the great efforts made to make Aboriginal students feel wel-
come, most community respondents believe that Aboriginal students are made to feel “...that
they don’t belong there”.
1.11 Racism
We asked students, “What do you think racism is?” Every student responded with a ...almost one-third of
description of what we would consider to be overt racism. They said they consider the Aboriginal high
racism to be “calling others down” because of the belief that one group is better than
another, or one group being biased against another, or discrimination, or hating oth- school students that
ers because they are different, or not treating people fairly because they are different. we interviewed said
There are less overt forms of racism, including institutional racism, and we will say yes when asked if
more about those later. But when asked what they consider racism to be, the students
that we interviewed described variants of overt racism.
there is much racism
in their schools
We then asked students, “Would you say there is much racism in your school?” Just
under 70% said no. However, 31.8% , or just under one in three, said yes. We consider
it to be significant and worrisome that almost one-third of the Aboriginal high school students
that we interviewed said yes when asked if there is much racism in their schools, particularly
when the kind of racism that they are referring to is the kind that is right out in the open. Some
of the comments made by students are especially troublesome. One 17 year female student said:
“I see it all the time so I’ve learned to shake it off ”. Another 17 year old female student said:
“Mostly just white people with Aboriginal students. They call them down by saying ‘squaw’”. An
18 year old male student said: “They expect me to come to school with a feather in my head”.
Lest this comment about the feather seem far-fetched, one of our community respondents
described to us a recent incident with his 8 year old daughter at a St. Vital school. She came
home saying that the next day they were going to be learning about Aboriginal people in school
and everyone was to come dressed as an Indian. His daughter was perplexed, and concerned.
“How do Indians dress?”, she asked her Aboriginal parents. She went the next day, dressed as
she normally dresses—ie., the way Aboriginal people dress—and in the company of her father.
He reported to us that most of the children in the class had feathers in their hair.
Another community respondent told us of a case involving her daughter’s elementary school
teacher in a central Winnipeg school proposing to have the students in the class perform the
play Peter Pan. Our respondent informed the teacher that she considered the choice of play to
be inappropriate because of its stereotypically negative portrayal of Aboriginal people. The
teacher was taken aback, having never thought of the problem.
Was this parent over-reacting? We do not think so. Tatum describes a US study of preschool-
ers’ perceptions of Native Americans. When asked to draw a picture of an Indian:
“Almost every picture included one central feature: feathers. They had all
internalized a picture of what Indians were like. How did they know? Cartoon
images, in particular the Disney movie Peter Pan, were cited by the children as
their number one source of information. At the age of three, these children
already had a set of stereotypes in place” (Tatum, 1999, p. 4).
These stereotypes are deeply rooted in the dominant culture, as has been seen above by some
of the names that Aboriginal students report having been called.

When we asked how racism affects them, students made comments that are particularly reveal-
ing. For example, one student said: “It gets me pissed off. But I know better. Drugs are for stu-
pid people” (18; M). The implication that some Aboriginal students find solace from such
overt forms of racism in self-destructive behaviour, like drugs, is clear.
When we interviewed Aboriginal people who have previously left school and are not now in a
formal educational setting, the answers revealed a still stronger presence of overt racism in the
schools, and a very adverse reaction by Aboriginal students. We asked: “Did you experience any
instances of racism in your school?” Almost 6 in 10 (58.3%) said yes, and most of those who
said no had attended Children of the Earth, R.B.Russell (where most of the students are
Aboriginal), and Songe’dwin, the off-site program of Niji Mahkwa school for selected
Aboriginal high school students. Similarly, only one (3.8%) of those students in an adult learn-
er centre reported having experienced racism there. The comments made by school leavers
about their experience in high school are disturbing (see sidebar).
It seems clear to us that in the schools in Winnipeg’s inner city there is a good deal of overt
racism, particularly in the form of stereotyping and name-calling. Some Aboriginal students,
especially those who are light-skinned and who do not appear to be Aboriginal, may not see it,
or may experience it differently. Some students simply ignore it or shrug it off and move on.
But many Aboriginal students feel these racist barbs deeply. In many cases these students react
against, or resist, these expressions of racism. They get into fights—numerous students and
school leavers and at least two community respondents mentioned fighting by Aboriginal stu-
dents as a response to overt instances of racism—and then come to be seen as troublemakers,
with various negative consequences following
from that. One school leaver, speaking at a
Did you experience any instances of racism in your focus group, referred to the constant name-
school? calling and stereotyping—there is “lots of
it”— by saying: “You’ve got to learn to walk
Some students would make racial comments like ‘squaw’ or ‘dirty
away from it or you’re going to be fighting all
Indian’. It made me feel like not wanting to come to school. The com-
ments brought me down and [made me] ashamed of who I was (21; F;
your life”.
not now in school). In other cases students resist simply by leav-
They were racist and I became a rebel and fought back. I became a ing. This came out clearly in focus groups
bully....they would make whooping actions and sounds (33; F; not now with students and school leavers. One partic-
in school). ipant—a University of Winnipeg student who
happened to sit in on this focus group—
I experienced a lot of racism. I was always called terrible names. It described attending numerous Winnipeg
really hurt me....made me feel small. Made me ask myself, ‘What is schools, being subjected to name-calling at
wrong with me’ (18; M; not now in school).
each of them, being placed in special educa-
I felt it [the racism] really sharp....Would get butterflies inside. tion programs, and repeatedly leaving schools
Couldn’t wait to get out of that school (24; M; not now in school). in anger and frustration. Another described
The non-Aboriginals would call us ‘wagon-burners’ and ‘Red Injuns’ and
attending four Winnipeg high schools, some
‘squaw’. That was when I got into trouble because I would fight of them for just a couple of days because
them....I dropped out of school. I felt that that school would never “that’s how bad it is”. Overt racism exists in
change and that the non-Aboriginals would always get their way (21;F; Winnipeg’s inner city high schools, and it is
not now in school). hurtful to many Aboriginal students, and it
must surely exacerbate the cultural/class/
When I was growing up there was a lot of racism in the areas I grew
experiential divide that separates many
up in, especially East Kildonan and St. Vital. Students picked on us,
Aboriginal students from the process of for-
called us names (20; M; adult learner centre).
mal education.
*F is female; M is male.
Some, perhaps many, of these students are not
failing; they are choosing, for perfectly under-

standable reasons, to reject school. Indeed, as we will argue later, we believe that a good Institutional racism
deal of the Aboriginal experience in school can best be explained as various forms of takes many forms. It
resistance to an institution seen by them in many ways to be alien to their experience.
is, most obviously,
But there are deeper and more subtle forms of racism in inner city high schools,
and in society generally. It was our community respondents who pushed us into a
the overwhelming
consideration of this less immediately visible but probably more pervasive racism. predominance of non-
We asked our community respondents, “In your opinion, is racism a factor for Aboriginal personnel
Aboriginal students in school?” Every respondent (100%) replied in the affirma-
working in the educa-
tive. Some referred to stereotyping and name-calling, and provided additional
examples, but most said things like: “Many people do not know that they are tional system—even
racist”; and what exists is a “sometimes unconscious racism”; and “the face of in those inner city
racism is very subtle now”, it is “well-masked”. Some of our students saw this as schools where
well. One said: “It is hidden so people can’t see it.” And the participants in a focus
group that we organized with directors of adult learner centres also emphasized Aboriginal students
the prevalence of what they called “subtle racism” in Winnipeg high schools. One comprise a very high
referred to a racism “...so subtle that it’s hard to point to or articulate”, but as proportion of the
another respondent put it, “we are very sensitive to racism....we read these things”
(May 23, 2002). It is this more subtle form of racism, usually called institutional total student body.
racism, that our community respondents emphasized in their comments to us.
Institutional racism takes many forms. It is, most obviously, the overwhelming predom-
inance of non-Aboriginal personnel working in the educational system—even in those
inner city schools where Aboriginal students comprise a very high proportion of the
total student body. An Aboriginal student entering a Winnipeg inner city high school
and seeing that almost none of the teaching and administrative staff are Aboriginal is
likely to feel that the school is an alien institution. Another example is the use of stan-
dardized testing, which takes no account of cultural differences.
Racism is often, however, less visible. For example, it is the lower expectations held of
Aboriginal as compared to non-Aboriginal students. A recent study of the way in which
teachers in a Winnipeg inner city high school interact with Aboriginal and non-
Aboriginal students concluded that teachers have lower expectations of Aboriginal stu-
dents (Yatta Kanu, personal communication, June 5, 2002. See Kanu, 2002). It may be
that this is unconscious. It is an example
of institutional racism (see sidebar).
“In a 1986 study 500 Grade 5 teachers received a student profile of a
Another example is the “buried stereo- ten-year-old boy that described him as being sometimes disruptive in
types” that many non-Aboriginal people class but not behaviour disordered. He was two to three years behind in
carry in their heads—buried in the sense language and mathematics, but he was not learning disabled. Attached
that they may be sub-conscious, or in the to the profile was a questionnaire consisting of nine items. Samples of
sense of what one community respondent the questions are: “Do you , the teacher, have the resources you need to
described as “preconceived ideas about meet the needs of this child? does your school have the necessary
our abilities”. This may lead to streaming resources to meet the needs of the child? will this student graduate?
Aboriginal students into non-academic would you have the support of the parents? should this child be trans-
ferred to a special program’? Only the ethnicity of the child was changed:
programs or too quickly pushing them
25 percent of the 500 teachers received a profile describing the student
into special education, which may also be as Caucasion, 25 percent as Asian, 25 percent as East Indian and 25 per-
an expression of institutional racism. A cent as Native Indian. Of the returned questionnaires, the majority of the
recent textbook on education and multi- responses were positive when ethnicity was given as Causcasion or Asian
culturalism argues that: while the majority of responses were negative when ethnicity was given
as Native Indian” ( Williams, 2000, p. 142)

“...teachers are often not aware of the different ways in which they treat stu-
dents, they may reflect the systemic discrimination of society and school cul-
tures. Studies have shown that subtle and overt forms of discrimination result
from teachers’ attitudes because their lack of information leads them to make
inappropriate assumptions about children of different racial groups. If they
operate within a framework of stereotypes, teachers may equate minority stu-
dents and poor performance, with the result that these students are over-rep-
resented in special education and lower-ability groups” (Gnosh, 2002, p.100).
Another example of institutional racism is the continued use of textbooks that assume subjects
from the dominant culture, and thus construct Aboriginal people as the ‘other’. For example, a
textbook might say that ‘we’ settled the West in the late 19th century, thus making Aboriginal
students the ‘other’. Such constructions are common. Another is the high financial cost of par-
ticipating in some extra-curricular activities: choirs and bands at some schools, for example,
take trips, but parents are required to contribute considerable sums—in some cases that we
know of, in the hundreds of dollars—to enable their children to participate. Yet another is the
way in which non-Aboriginal people judge Aboriginal people, without any real knowledge of
our country’s history of colonialism and of the cumulative disadvantages that weigh on
Aboriginal people as the result of colonialism. The cultural/class divide that separates
so many schools and teachers from so many Aboriginal students is invisible to many,
The cultural/class and can lead to a ‘blame the victim’ response—a form of institutional racism.
divide that separates We believe, based on our interviews, that these forms of institutional racism are per-
so many schools and vasive in Winnipeg’s inner city high schools, as they are in society generally. Much of
teachers from so it is not being done intentionally or even consciously. But it is there, and it is a signif-
icant part of the explanation for why so many Aboriginal students are not thriving in
many Aboriginal stu- the school system. And we believe that if non-Aboriginal teachers and administrators
dents is invisible to were to grapple openly with the problem—name it, describe it, come to accept and to
many, and can lead to understand its prevalence—they could eliminate much or perhaps most of it. But
racism is such an ugly word that when an Aboriginal person says something is racist,
a ‘blame the victim’
the tendency is to retreat, to go on the defensive, to deny the racism. As one commu-
response—a form of nity respondent put it: “People are really uncomfortable when you talk about racism.
institutional racism. Their own personal beliefs get challenged”. And their power gets challenged, much in
the way that the power of men, for example, was and is challenged by women who talk
about sexism. The result is that it is very difficult to find a safe and constructive space
in which to struggle through this complex and subtle issue, and for some there is a reluctance
to do so, because they benefit from and are comfortable within the currently structured dom-
inant culture. And so long as that is the case, the problem persists, and indeed worsens. And so
we see that 75% of our community respondents do not believe that teachers expect Aboriginal
students to succeed in school, and 70% of community respondents do not think that
Aboriginal students “feel welcome and comfortable in school”, and 77% do not believe that
teachers ‘understand’ Aboriginal students, and 100% believe that racism is a factor for
Aboriginal students in school. Uncomfortable and difficult though it may be, this problem of
racism in the schools and in the educational system more broadly must be confronted.
We asked community respondents, “Overall, how would you say that schools meet the needs
of Aboriginal students?”. Just over one-half (55.6%) said that they believe that schools deserve
an “F” (For a similar conclusion, see Richards, 2001, p. 32). They said things like: Overall the
system has failed our kids; I would give the system a grade of F—failed; The schools have failed
our children; I would say that the system has failed many kids; I feel that the system has failed
our students; I feel that schools have in many ways failed our students; Generally speaking I
would give them an F—failed. The 55.6% goes to 83.3%, if we include those who said they feel

the school system is not meeting or cannot meet the needs of Aboriginal students, or is not
doing very well or is doing poorly. We consider it important to recall that the community
respondents who are making this rather harsh judgement are Aboriginal people who have very
high levels of educational achievement, most of whom have children and/or grandchildren in
the school system, many of whom are themselves working in the school system or working
directly with Aboriginal youth. There is a cultural/class/experiential divide between schools
and Aboriginal students, and a part of the problem is various subtle and often unintentional
forms of racism, and this is adversely affecting Aboriginal students’ chances of succeeding in
school.
1.12 Aboriginal students and part-time jobs

We think this cultural/class/experiential divide may also have an effect on Aboriginal youth
finding jobs. We asked Aboriginal students who are still in high school, “Did you have a job
during the school year?” Just over 1 in 3 (36.2%) answered yes. By comparison, according to
the Winnipeg School Division No. 1 S4 (Grade 12) Survey, 2001/02, the proportion of Grade
12 students in the Division who responded to the survey who held a job during the school
year was more than twice as high(76.3%). This is consistent with findings for the province
as a whole. For the age cohort 15-19 years, twice as many Aboriginal as non-Aboriginal
respondents ( 66.1% compared to 33.4%) reported having no work experience (Canada and
Manitoba, 2002). Further, when we asked “Do many Aboriginal students hold jobs during
the school year”, just over one-half of the students (52.2%) said yes, but among the males, 7
of the 14 who said yes qualified their answers by saying “but not many”, or “just a few”. We
know, too, from the Youth in Transition survey, that in Canada as a whole, those who gradu-
ate from high school are more likely to have held a paid job during their final year than those
who do not graduate (Bowley and McMullen, 2002). The lower proportion of Aboriginal
students working is likely partly attributable to the fact that they include students in grades
9, 10 and 11, as well as grade 12. However, there is more to the issue than this, and we con-
sider our findings to be revealing.
The lower proportion of Aboriginal students holding jobs during the school year ...a very high propor-
appears to be at least partly attributable to their attitudes about themselves and about
tion of Aboriginal
the labour market. We found that some of the students claimed not to know how to
get a job, or claimed not to have the skills necessary to get a job. This is especially youth (aged 15-24)
notable given that these students are relatively successful academically, and have high in Winnipeg’s inner
expectations and aspirations. Others claimed that they tried to get a job but were frus- city are unemployed
trated in their attempts, or believed that few employers hire Aboriginal people. They
made comments like: “most Aboriginal students don’t know how to get jobs, don’t or not in the labour
know what is involved in getting a job”; “I don’t have work skills”; and “there are not market at all.
too many places that seem to hire Aboriginal students”.
It is likely that such beliefs are reinforced by what these students see around them in Winnipeg’s
inner city. We know that a very high proportion of Aboriginal youth (aged 15-24) in Winnipeg’s
inner city are unemployed or not in the labour market at all. In 1996 the unemployment rate in
Winnipeg was 7.9%. In Winnipeg’s inner city it was 15.4%. Among inner city youth the unem-
ployment rate was 18.9%, and for inner city Aboriginal youth it was 35.1%. The same pattern
prevails for labour force participation rates, which measure the proportion of those who are
working or actively looking for work. In 1996 the labour force participation rate in Winnipeg
was approximately 67%. In the inner city it was 58.4%. And for Aboriginal youth in the inner
city it was 40.1% (Luzubski, Silver and Black, 2000, pp.31-35). In short, only 4 in 10 Aboriginal
youth in the inner city were in the labour force, and of these more than one-third were unem-
ployed. The vast majority of Aboriginal youth were therefore not working for wages.

1.13 The struggle to survive
Conditions are harsh for many Aboriginal families in Winnipeg’s inner city. One inner city
community worker said, referring to many inner city Aboriginal youth, that based on her expe-
rience, “basically they’re surviving”. Conditions at home are such that kids may be pulled out
of school to look after younger siblings or to do laundry or other chores because Mom is
‘swamped’. Housing problems mean that rates of mobility are extremely high, so that children
are constantly leaving one school for another. Drinking and drugs are sometimes a response by
the adults in a household, and when day-to-day life simply gets too chaotic and overwhelm-
ing, “school is the first thing to go, it’s a pressure they can do without”. At the focus group meet-
ing for community respondents one person said: “Their survival is where they’re at, never
mind learning”. Another respondent said: “The main reason is poverty; it really affects their
stress level”. And how can a young person dream of a better future when dealing with such
home circumstances? It’s “hard to dream”, one community respondent said, when you are
focused on survival. “There’s so much of a survival mentality that it disables you from dream-
ing”, said another community respondent who works with young Aboriginal girls. We believe
these comments reflect the experiential divide that separates many Aboriginal students from
their largely non-Aboriginal, middle class schools.
1.14 Resisting school

Drawing upon a significant body of U.S. literature (for example, Ogbu, 1978; Fordham and
Ogbu,1986) which shows that many African-American high school students who succeed in
school are accused by their peers of “acting white”, and are ostracized for it, we asked students
the following question: “Have you ever heard of Aboriginal students who do well in school
being teased or rejected by other Aboriginal students?” Just over 4 in 10 (41.3%) said yes, and
one-third (33.3%) of the school leavers not now in school said yes to the same question. Many
of those who said yes said they hear such comments frequently. This came out very clearly in
focus group sessions with Aboriginal students and school leavers--- Aboriginal students who
do well in school will get a hard time from their peer group. One community respondent active
in the inner city said: “Within the community [there is] lots of joking if somebody’s trying to
better themselves....they’re trying to be white, that’s a real common thing that I hear”. Another
said: “Many Aboriginal youth think it’s a ‘white’ thing to get an education”. Many Aboriginal
students feel they have to pull away from their communities and give up something of them-
selves in order to succeed in school, and doing so is painful. One student at a focus group said:
“I sacrificed my language, I sacrificed my family, just to get to where I am now”, adding “It’s a
price we all have to pay”. One of our community respondents, speaking at a focus group meet-
ing, described himself getting sick and angry when, as an adult, he took a University English
course. At first he could not understand why, and then he realized it had its roots in his early
education experience: “I was beaten into speaking English”, and angry at having to give up his
culture. We believe that many Aboriginal students are not prepared to pay this price. So at a
conscious or perhaps sub-conscious level, they ‘choose’ not to succeed in school. They reject
school. It is a form of resistance.
There is a cultural/class/experiential divide between many Aboriginal students, and largely
white, middle class schools and teachers. Many Aboriginal students are responding by simply
rejecting school, and in some cases may even be putting pressure on other Aboriginal students
to do likewise. This is an issue less of ‘failing’ in school, than of ‘choosing’ not to succeed in a
school which feels, and often is, alien.

1.15 Summary of our findings from the interviews
What stands out in the responses by Aboriginal people to our questions about their experience
in school is the existence of what we have identified as a cultural/class/experiential divide
between Aboriginal students and their families on the one hand, and the school system on the
other. In many, perhaps most, cases the life experiences and the values of Aboriginal students
and their families, differ significantly from what they experience in the schools, which are run
largely by white middle class people for the purpose of advancing the values of the dominant
culture. The same argument has been made by Jean Anyon in her powerful study of an inner
city school in Newark, New Jersey. Anyon argues that the divide “...makes the middle class cur-
riculum and language alien to them....The concentration of minority poor in city neighbour-
hoods has contributed to the extreme separation in US society between black and white, poor
and more affluent” (Anyon, 1997, p. 95). Gnosh (2002, p.95) adds: “...groups outside the main-
stream live in a different world from those on the inside and are not socialized with the values,
beliefs, and aspirations for school learning that are common to school culture”.
Most Aboriginal students currently in school spoke positively about their teachers and their
schools, and we think that, generally speaking, this reflects well on teachers and schools. But
when asked whether teachers understood Aboriginal students, or whether they believed that
Aboriginal students are treated with respect in their schools, their responses are much more
mixed. The issue of respect is significant. As one Aboriginal respondent said to us, what
Aboriginal people mean by respect is the “recognition of people’s inherent equality”. In
Professor Yatta Kanu’s research in a Winnipeg inner city high school—one of those schools
from which we selected interviewees—she found that: “All the research participants
[Aboriginal students] identified ‘respect’ as the most important dimension of the teachers’
interpersonal state” (Kanu, 2002, p.16). Celia Haig-Brown found the same in her study of 16
Aboriginal students in a Regina inner city high school, where “all the students identified
‘respect’ as ‘the number one rule’ for successful interactions among teachers, staff and students
in the school” (quoted in Kanu, 2002, pp.16-17). Approximately one-half of our high school
respondents do not feel that their school treats Aboriginal students with respect, and do not
feel that teachers understand Aboriginal students, and we believe that their comments about
this are consistent with our view that there exists a cultural/class/experiential divide
between Aboriginal students and inner city high schools. This appears to be the case
elsewhere in Canada as well. A recent BC study, for example, found that in focus groups There is a cultural/
with Aboriginal people: “Most groups perceived a cultural divide between a largely class/experiential
Euro-centric work force in the education system, and the needs and aspirations of
Aboriginal people. They believe that such a lack of understanding contributes in no divide between many
small measure to the adjustment problems faced by many Aboriginal students in Aboriginal students,
school” ( British Columbia, 2001, p. 43). The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples and largely white,
concluded that for Aboriginal youth, “Education as they experience it is something
removed and separate from their everyday world, their hopes and dreams. This sense of
middle class schools
distance between learning in the school and the world around them does not have to and teachers.
exist” (Canada, 1996, Vol. 3, p.482).
This view is reinforced by what we consider to be the shockingly high incidence in inner city
high schools of overt forms of racism—name-calling and stereotyping, for example—and the
more institutionalized forms of racism identified especially by our community respondents. It
is reinforced by the surprisingly high proportion of Aboriginal students who, despite attend-
ing many inner city schools, have either never had an Aboriginal teacher or have had only one
or two out of many teachers. The face that most schools present to Aboriginal students is quite
literally, not Aboriginal. Aboriginal students experience the divide between who they are and
what the schools are on a daily basis, and although some of them learn to navigate their way

through the system, much of what they experience is negative, as if the divide were a hierarchy
in which Aboriginal people are seen to be at the bottom, and are treated accordingly—with
what many of them take to be a lack of respect, and even, in far too many cases, with negative
stereotyping and name-calling.
Aboriginal students fight back, in some cases as we have frequently been told, quite literally.
They resist an institution which many of them see as being, in important and tangible ways,
quite alien to them. That resistance, we believe, takes many forms: acting out in ways that
take the form of disciplinary or academic ‘problems’; rejecting school by dropping out
entirely; ostracizing those who ‘succeed’ in school on the grounds that this implies aban-
doning Aboriginal ways and ‘acting white’. We will return to this theme in Part Two of the
paper.
The response by non-Aboriginal authorities to the cultural/class/experiential divide has
always been, and continues to be, assimilation. It has been, and is, the attempt to force
Aboriginal people to abandon their culture and to assimilate into, to adopt, the dominant
culture. Schools have always played a central role, perhaps the central role, in this assimila-
tion strategy. As Aboriginal scholar Marie Battiste has put it: “No force has been more effec-
tive at oppressing First Nations cultures than the education system”(Battiste, 2000, p.163).
But Aboriginal people have steadfastly resisted attempts at assimilation, and in doing so have
resisted the education system as an agent of assimilation.
We think it is essential to understand Aboriginal students’ performance in school in this con-
text. There is a cultural/class/experiential divide between them and the schools; they experi-
ence that divide daily in a host of ways; and many respond to that divide—consciously or
unconsciously—by resisting, and often rejecting, the school system.
This is not the way in which this issue is generally understood. It is generally under-
Aboriginal students stood as being a problem of Aboriginal students failing in school, of their having a
dropout rate double that of non-Aboriginal students. But framing the issue as being
experience the divide Aboriginal students’ failures in school leads inexorably to ‘deficit’ thinking—ie.,
between who they are that Aboriginal students have a deficit, that the problem is the Aboriginal students.
and what the schools What follows is that it is the Aboriginal students who need ‘fixing’, and this
inevitably leads back to the thinking that drove the residential schools—the solu-
are on a daily basis, tion, as believed and acted upon then, is to “...raise them to the level of the
and although some of whites”(Haig-Brown, 1988, p.25). The logic of such thinking is that Aboriginal cul-
them learn to navigate ture is inferior, and Aboriginal people must be raised to the level of the superior
culture. This approach has simply not worked. Aboriginal people do not and will
their way through the
not accept these racist assumptions. They resist such assumptions, and thus resist
system, much of what schools. We will return in Part Two of this paper to a more detailed discussion of
they experience is this interpretation.
negative... What Aboriginal people have said to us about the educational system is not that
Aboriginal people should be forced to change in order to ‘succeed’ in school, but rather
that schools and the educational system generally should change in order to better
reflect the demographic and cultural reality of our community—a demographic and cultural
reality that is particularly pronounced in Winnipeg’s inner city, which is the focus of our study,
but is by no means confined to the inner city. Students, school-leavers and community respon-
dents were close to unanimous in calling for more Aboriginal teachers and more Aboriginal
content in the curriculum. They are saying, yes, there is a cultural/class/experiential divide
between us and the school system, and that divide should be bridged, but it should be bridged
not by forcing us to become more like you, but rather by changing the educational system to
more accurately reflect the demographic and cultural reality of our city—a city with a large and
rapidly growing Aboriginal population, most of whom want an education and the benefits that

come with an education, but are simply not willing to give up what it means to be Aboriginal in
order to get it.
All of this can best be understood by considering the extent to which colonialism has
shaped, and continues to shape, the experience of Aboriginal people in Canada. What Aboriginal peo-
Aboriginal peoples’ resistance to schools is rooted in their resistance to colonialism. ple have said to us
about the educational
system is not that
Aboriginal people
should be forced to
change in order to
‘succeed’ in school,
but rather that schools
and the educational
system generally
should change in order
to better reflect the
demographic and cul-
tural reality of our
community.

Part Two
2.1 Colonialism and education
Since the Europeans’ arrival in North America, Aboriginal people have been subjected to a
process of colonialism. They were dispossessed of their lands, pushed onto reserves, subjected
to the colonial control of the Indian Act, forced into residential schools. Colonialism involved
the deliberate attempt to destroy Aboriginal peoples’ economic and political systems and their
cultures and religions, and to replace them with European institutions and values. This was,
and for many Canadians still is, justified on the grounds that European institutions and cul-
tural and religious values were and are superior to those of Aboriginal people. The resultant
colonial ideology is all-pervasive. As Metis scholar Howard Adams puts it:
“The characteristic form of colonialism then is a racial and economic hierar-
chy with an ideology that claims the superiority of the race and culture of the
colonizer. This national ideology pervades colonial society and its institutions,
such as schools, cultural agencies, the church and the media....the ideology
becomes an inseparable part of perceived reality” (Adams, 1999, p. 6).
Aboriginal people themselves may come to believe the all-pervasive notion that they are cul-
turally inferior. This is common amongst oppressed people. “In fact, this process happens so
frequently that it has a name, internalized oppression” (Tatum, 1999, p.6). Or as Howard Adams
puts it, many Aboriginal people “...have internalized a colonized consciousness” (Adams, 1999,
Introduction). The results are devastating:
“Once Aboriginal persons internalize the colonization processes, we feel con-
fused and powerless.... We may implode with overwhelming feelings of sad-
ness or explode with feelings of anger. Some try to escape this state through
alcohol, drugs and/or other forms of self-abuse” (Hart, 2002, p. 27).
The link to educational attainment is clear:
Aboriginal people start to believe that we are incapable of learning and that
the colonizers’ degrading images and beliefs about Aboriginal people and our
ways of being are true (Hart, 2002, p.27).
A vicious cycle is created: the assumption of Aboriginal peoples’ cultural inferiority, initially
advanced as a means to justify the European domination of North America, becomes inter-
nalized by Aboriginal people themselves; in response, many Aboriginal people lash out in self-
abusive ways; such behaviour then reinforces in the minds of the colonizers the assumptions
of Aboriginal inferiority that lie at the heart of the colonial ideology. The more:
“... Aboriginal people move further into internalizing the colonization
processes, the more we degrade who we are as Aboriginal people. All of these
internalized processes only serve the colonizers, who then are able to sit back
and say ‘see, we were right’. In colonizers’ eyes, the usurpation is justified”
(Hart, 2002, p. 28).
Education has historically played a central role in this process. The residential school was an
“instrument of colonization” (Milloy, 1999, 254), rooted in the assumption of Aboriginal cul-
tural inferiority. Aboriginal children were torn from their parents, and submitted to a deliber-
ate and systematic attempt to strip them of their culture and their Aboriginal identity. The

process began when they arrived at the residential school, as described in this example refer-
ring specifically to the children of Cree families:
“The transformation of Cree children began the moment of their arrival in
the schools. Their identities were immediately physically altered as each child
underwent a disrobing and received a thorough scrubbing and a haircut.
Each child was then dressed in near-identical, European-Canadian-style, uni-
form-looking clothing that served to further strip any outward appearances
of indigenous forms of individuality and cultural identity. Newly registered
children were given Christian names, and the use of their traditional lan-
guages was forbidden. Behaviour was controlled by the application of
numerous regulations, the regimentation of daily routines, and the adminis-
tration of forms of punishment that were often unduly harsh, even for the
standards of the time. Parents were discouraged from visiting their children
to prevent their children from lapsing into traditional behaviour and to dis-
courage homesickness” (Pettipas, 1994, p 80).
The point was to destroy Aboriginal cultures, “ to kill the Indian in the child” (Milloy, 1999,
42), not only by what was done in the residential schools to Aboriginal children, but also by
excluding the family and community as the means by which to pass on the culture.“Through
this system, the traditional role of the parents, relatives, and elders as producers and transmit-
ters of culture and ideology was undermined” (Pettipas, 1994, 215). As one school leaver said
to us at a focus group meeting, after saying that his wife and her entire family attended resi-
dential schools: “They took a lot of things from us”. It was, as Milloy has described it, “...an act
of profound cruelty rooted in non-Aboriginal pride and intolerance and in the certitude and
insularity of purported cultural superiority” (Milloy, 1999, p. 302). Manitoba’s Aboriginal
Justice Inquiry called it: “a conscious, deliberate and often brutal attempt to force Aboriginal
people to assimilate”, and noted that now, “for the first time in over 100 years, many families
are experiencing a generation of children who live with their parents until their teens” (quot-
ed in Aboriginal Healing Foundation, May 2002, p. 2). The result was a “...loss of parenting
skills through the absence of four or five generations of children from Native communities,
and the learned behaviour of despising Native identity....”(Milloy, 1999, p. 299).
The residential schools were, for almost all Aboriginal children, horrific places. In addition to
the loneliness that children would naturally suffer when separated from their families and
communities, and the deliberate and relentless attempts to deny them their language, culture
and spiritual beliefs, many suffered from hunger, overwork, and shockingly high rates of dis-
ease and death. In 1903 Saturday Night mag-
azine reported that: “Even war seldom shows
as high a percentage of fatalities as does the January 7, 1998, the Honourable Jane Stewart, Minister of Indian
education system we have imposed on our Affairs, announced a Statement of Reconciliation to all Aboriginal peo-
ple for the abuses in the residential schools:
Indian wards”, and Duncan Campbell Scott,
head of the federal Indian Department from “Sadly our history with respect to the treatment of Aboriginal people is
1913 to 1932, reported that “fifty percent of not something in which we can take pride....One aspect of our relation-
the children who passed through these ship with Aboriginal people that requires particular attention is the res-
schools did not live to benefit from the edu- idential school system. This system separated many children from their
cation which they had received therein” parents and communities and prevented them from speaking their lan-
(Milloy, 1999, pp. 91 and 51). guages and from learning about their heritage and cultures. In the
worst cases, it left legacies of personal pain and distress that continue
Those few who survived and managed to to reverberate in Aboriginal communities. To those of you who suffered
graduate rarely got jobs anyway. this tragedy at residential schools, we are deeply sorry”.(Aboriginal
“Employment was not readily available: Healing Foundation, May, 2002, p. 9).
indeed, one agent informed the Department:

‘Race prejudice is against them [the graduates] and I am afraid it will take time....’” (Milloy,
1999, 158). Another account reports the same: “For the students who did manage to complete
their school terms, there was little to look forward to either in white society or on their home
reserves. Because of the poor quality of education and the racial prejudice of white employers,
there were few employment opportunities for graduates beyond the seasonal casual jobs
already open to their parents” (Pettipas, 1994, p. 81). Schooling, for most Aboriginal people,
produced little other than pain, in return for which it produced no long-term gain. School was
a losing proposition.
The result, the only rational result, has been a legacy of ill-feelings directed by Aboriginal peo-
ple at the Canadian educational system. Nor is this simply an artifact of a distant past. The res-
idential school experience “...is an intergenerational experience, one that didn’t stop with one
student, but affected every generation and each of us in the Indian community at a profound
and personal level” (Deiter, 1999, 5).
“Because so many generations attended residential schools they have affected
all First Nations individuals. For example, even though I was raised in the city,
all my family members, including my parents, my grandparents, uncles, and
aunts on both sides of the family attended these schools. Most of my friends
also attended the schools, including my husband and cousins. As well, all of
the people whom my parents associated with during my formative years were
residential school survivors” (Deiter, 1999, p. 23).
This is consistent with what we found in our interviews of current Aboriginal students, more
than one-half of whom have at least one parent or grandparent who attended residential
school. It is also consistent with the personal experience of three of the four authors of this
paper, two of whom are themselves residential school survivors.
The result has been, in some cases, that the negative experiences associated with school are
passed on from generation to generation:
“Individuals who were subjected to the church-run residential school system
would, in all likelihood, view formal education as having very little relevance
to them, and indeed, may have grown to fear and despise this method of learn-
ing as a result. Transmission of such fear and loathing for education may also
create the same opinions in offspring and thus attitudes become intergenera-
tional” (Brade, 2001, p. 58).
It is important, we think, to recognize that the response to the residential schools by Aboriginal
students was not passive acceptance. On the contrary, there was resistance, frequent multi-
faceted resistance, and this active opposition to the imposition of an alien, European-based
educational system has also become part of the legacy of the residential schools, passed on
from generation to generation. As one Aboriginal author observes, based on her interviews
with residential school survivors: “I believe the resistance stories that have filtered through
these interviews embody the spirit and courage of the children who attended these schools.
The resistance was so constant that many of the acts were not even recognized by the intervie-
wees themselves” (Deiter, 1999, p. 71). These stories of resistance included, for example, a 1962
riot by Aboriginal students at the Edmonton Indian Residential School over living conditions
and the treatment of the students (Deiter, 1999, p.4; see also Grant, 1996, pp. 216-220). The
stories:
“...included runaway boys trapping food to supplement their meagre meals
and girls climbing out of third-storey windows to freedom. They were burn-
ing schools and defiantly challenging their oppressors. There were also the
passive, subversive methods of resistance. In the early part of this century, a

sign language developed that became a standardized method of communica-
tion for all schools across the country. The elements of these resistance stories
are as poignant as any story of resistance by an oppressed people. What makes
these stories and the people who lived them even more courageous was that
these acts of resistance were carried out by children” (Deiter, 1999, p. 73).
There is a long and honourable history of oppressed peoples resisting the control of their cap-
tors (van Onselen, 1976, and Genovese, 1974). Canada takes pride, for example, in being the
destination of many African-American slaves who were fleeing their captors by taking the
‘underground railway’ in search of freedom. But Canada’s police force relentlessly hunted
down Aboriginal children who had escaped their residential school captors. And Beatrice
Culleton has vividly described how Aboriginal children who are wards of the state are captured
and taken back to their foster homes by the RCMP (Culleton, 1984). This description of a run-
away being returned to a residential school from which he had fled sounds similar to what we
know of courageous slaves who faced the dangers of running for their freedom.
“He was eleven years old when he ran away. When he was caught, he was
escorted back to the school by the RCMP on the train in handcuffs. The penal-
ty for runaways was either a strapping, having your head shaved, or both. It was
common practice to have the RCMP bring back runaways”(Deiter, 1999, p. 74).
The same was the case in the USA. Referring to Aboriginal resistance to residential schools
there, one author says: “While some cooperated with the educational programs, others resist-
ed. In the latter instance, arson, running away from school, and subtle forms of passive resis-
tance all proved effective” (Adams, 1988, p.27, fn. 80).
The resistance by Aboriginal children and youth to their being held captive in white-controlled
schools is a part of an honourable tradition of courage and determination, and ought to be cel-
ebrated as such. It, too, is part of the legacy of the residential school system.
Nor, we believe, is the resistance confined to the past. It resonates today in the resistance of
Aboriginal children and youth to schools which do not sufficiently reflect and honour their
culture. We believe that many Aboriginal students today continue to resist the imposition upon
them of a white-controlled school system which they experience as alien to their values and
beliefs. That resistance, that refusal to be ‘educated’ when being educated means giving up so
much of themselves, is expressed in a variety of ways, many of which are not immediately
apparent as forms of resistance, nor even consciously undertaken as forms of resistance. The
resistance may take the form of a simple disengagement from school, or may be “...masked as
attendance problems, acting out, discipline, or even learning problems” (Fine, 1994, 177). We
believe that in many cases Aboriginal children are not so much failing in school, as choosing,
consciously or unconsciously, not to succeed in school.
In a well-known paper in the Harvard Educational Review, Signithia Fordham makes this case
with respect to African-American students in
the USA. “At the heart of this paper is the
“The major issues we face now are survival—how to live in the modern
struggle that Black adolescents face in having world. Part of this is how to remain Indian, how to assimilate without
to ‘choose’ between the individualistic ethos ceasing to be an Indian....Indians remain Indian, and against pretty
of the school—which generally reflects the good odds....Their languages are being lost at a tremendous rate,
ethos of the dominant society—and the col- poverty is rampant, as is alcoholism. But still there are Indians, and
lective ethos of their community”. This, the traditional world is intact. It’s a matterof identity....I continue to
Fordham hypothesizes, applies to all subordi- think of myself as Indian....I think this is what most Indian people are
nated peoples: “...the desire to succeed—as doing today. They go off the reservation, but they keep an idea of
defined by the dominating population— themselves as Indians. That’s the trick” ( Momaday, 1991 p. 438).
causes subordinated peoples to seek social

distance from the group with which they are ethnically or racially identified”. This is consis-
tent with our findings—Aboriginal people experiencing the pain of being separated from
their communities as the price of their individual ‘success’ in school—as reported earlier (see
p. 29). She argues, as we do, that changes must be made to the educational system so that suc-
cess means that Blacks can “...succeed as a people, not just as individual Blacks” (Fordham,
1988, p.55). This can only be done if succeeding in school does not mean denying one’s cul-
ture (See sidebar, p. 35). Schools must therefore be decolonized.
What Aboriginal people want, and what is clearly expressed in our interview results, has been
stated repeatedly for at least three decades by Aboriginal people. In their seminal work in 1972,
the National Indian Brotherhood, forerunners of the Assembly of First Nations , said this:
“What we want for our children can be summarized very briefly: to reinforce their Indian iden-
tity [and] to provide the training necessary for making a good living in modern society” (NIB,
1972, p.3). The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples said the same. Aboriginal people
want education “...to prepare them to participate fully in the economic life of their communi-
ties and in Canadian society”, and at the same time, “...education must develop children and
youth as Aboriginal citizens, linguistically and culturally competent to assume the responsibil-
ities of their nations...” (Canada, 1996, 433-45).
Our educational system as currently structured is not doing this. It is not that Aboriginal students
are failing. It is that the system is not meeting their needs as described above. The system is still
a colonial system. Aboriginal educator Marie Battiste calls it racist, a form of cultural racism:
“Cognitive imperialism, also known as cultural racism, is the imposition of one worldview on a
people who have an alternative worldview, with the implication that the imposed worldview is
superior to the alternative worldview”(Battiste, 2000, p.193). A current textbook on multicultur-
al education advances the same view: “...in practice, the knowledge being disseminated is skewed
toward perpetuating the worldview and interests of the dominant group in power. That is, our
institutions and educational system tend to propagate a worldview that is predominantly
Eurocentric, Judeo-Christian, middle-class, white, and male” (Gnosh, 2002, p. vii). This has a
damaging effect on students, including Aboriginal students, who do not fit this profile:
“If a school curriculum denigrates one’s ancestors, religion, and contributions
to the history of the human race, and denies one’s full dignity—that is, if it
teaches the superiority of one segment of a democratic society over others—
it is damaging to the minds and spirits of all children: those taught that their
cultures are secondary and those given the false security of believing they are
creators of culture. An equitable curriculum must affirm all people as creators
of culture and honor the multiplicity of human efforts to come to terms with
living on earth” (Kohl, 1994, p.95).
The well-known Aboriginal educator, Verna Kirkness, argues similarly that the abandonment
of the residential schools and the integration of Aboriginal students into the regular school sys-
tem has not worked. She argues that: “ This program has not been one of true integration
where the different cultures are recognized; rather it has been a program of assimilation where
First Nation students are absorbed into the dominant society” (Kirkness, 1992, p. 14). The
schools continue to be colonial in character, and to express colonial power relations: “Since
colonial education includes the active construction of power relations of domination and sub-
ordination, it also always involves control of the schooling process by the dominating culture,
in this case a white dominating culture. This domination is represented visually to students
and the community in the fact that teachers and administrators are primarily white” (Carlson,
1997, p. 144). And Aboriginal students resist.
The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples described the continued colonial character of
our schools, and the impact this has on Aboriginal people. “In public schools, the absence of

support for Aboriginal identities is overwhelming: no Aboriginal high school teachers; only a
limited curriculum dealing with contemporary Aboriginal languages, cultures, history and
political issues; an emphasis on intellectual cognitive achievement at the expense of spiritual,
social and physical development; and the marginalization of youth in decision-making about
their education”. The result is that: “...the schooling system typically erodes identity and self-
worth. Those who continue in Canada’s formal education system told us of regular encounters
with racism, racism expressed not only in interpersonal exchanges but also through the denial
of Aboriginal values, perspectives and cultures in the curriculum and the life of the institution”
(Canada, 1996, p.434). Tatum argues similarly, defining racism as: “A system of advantage
based on race”. As such, it is more than a simple and simplistic expression of prejudice:
“...racism, like other forms of oppression, is not only a personal ideology based on racial prej-
udice, but a system involving cultural messages and institutional policies and practices as well
as the beliefs and actions of individuals. In the context of the United States, this system clear-
ly operates to the advantage of Whites and to the disadvantage of people of colour”(Tatum,
1999, p.7). The same can be said of Aboriginal people in Canada, and in Canadian schools.
The impact of such a school system in terms of students’ identity and self-worth has been
described by Beverly Tatum in her powerful analysis of the experience of African-American
students in a US school system that does not positively reflect who they are. Her analysis
applies to Aboriginal students in Winnipeg. Tatum examines the process of ‘racial identity
development’, seeking “an understanding of racial identity, the meaning each of us has con-
structed or is constructing about what it means to be a white person or a person of colour in
a race-conscious society”. She adds: “It is because we live in a racist society that racial identity
has as much meaning as it does” (Tatum, 1999, p. xviii. See also Carter, 1997, p.198). “Why do
black youths, in particular, think about themselves in terms of race? Because that is how the
rest of the world thinks of them. Our self-perceptions are shaped by the messages that we
receive from those around us”(Tatum, 1999, p.53-54). When young people ask, “Who am I?
The answer depends in large part on who the world around me says I am. Who do my parents
say I am? Who do my peers say I am? What message is reflected back to me in the faces and
voices of my teachers, my neighbours, store clerks? What do I learn from the media about
myself? How am I represented in the cultural images around me? Or am I missing from the
picture altogether?” (Tatum, 1999, p.18).
In the case of Aboriginal people, they are often missing or largely missing from the picture.
A recent, detailed study of the representation of Aboriginal people in the media, for exam-
ple, found that in the Winnipeg Free Press, and on the major television channels available in
Winnipeg during prime time viewing hours, and on televised news coverage, Aboriginal
people are represented far less than their proportion of Winnipeg’s and Manitoba’s popula-
tion would warrant, and when they are present in the media, they are often portrayed in a
negative manner (Mackenzie, forthcoming). We believe that the message that is reflected
back to Aboriginal people by the media, is similar to the message reflected back to Aboriginal
students when they walk into Winnipeg inner city high schools—namely that Aboriginal
people are present as teachers and administrators and office staff and custodial staff in num-
bers far less than their share of the population. The result is that schools look and feel like
alien places to Aboriginal students.
If the educational system is not de-colonized, then we believe that Aboriginal people will con-
tinue to resist. The resistance, as argued earlier, will take many different forms, including
‘behavioural problems’, to which schools respond in a variety of ways, including placing stu-
dents in special education programs. A recent study for the Department of Education in
British Columbia, titled Over-Representation of Aboriginal Students Reported With Behaviour
Disorders, observed that:

“Over-representation of Aboriginal students in populations of students with
special needs has been well documented both in research literature and in the
data collected by the Ministry of Education of British Columbia in its student-
level data collection system. This over-representation is greatest in the area of
behaviour disorders where the reported incidence among Aboriginal students
in British Columbia is approximately 3.5 times that of the general K-12 stu-
dent population” (British Columbia, 2001, p.1).
Many of our interviewees made reference to disciplinary problems leading them or other
Aboriginal students they knew to be placed in a ‘special education’ class, or what several
referred to as the ‘rubber room’. This phenomenon was also referred to by the student and
school leaver focus groups. The results are likely to be devastating in the long run.
“The segregation of students in special education classes has lifetime conse-
quences for students. Not only are they likely to remain branded as under-
achievers permanently, but that stigma affects their self-concept and identity,
which, in turn, may be expressed through socially unacceptable behaviour”
(Gnosh, 2002, p. 73).
Resistance to a colonial educational system will also continue to take the more mundane form
of continued higher than average rates of ‘failure’ and ‘dropping out’. In many, perhaps most,
of these cases, what is expressed in the dominant discourse as ‘failure’ or ‘drop-out’, would
more usefully be thought of as the continuation of a long history of Aboriginal people resist-
ing a colonial educational system which denigrates and seeks to eliminate their culture.
This resistance to school has been documented over and over again in the US. It often takes the
form of an active refusal to learn. Tatum, for example, referring to Black youth, says that:
“...the anger and resentment that adolescents feel in response to their growing
awareness of the systematic exclusion of Black people from full participation
in US society leads to the development of an oppositional social identity. This
oppositional stance both protects one’s identity from the psychological assault
of racism and keeps the dominant group at a distance” (Tatum, 1999, p. 60.
See also, Massey and Denton, 1993, pp. 8,13,167).
Similarly, Herbert Kohl, in an article titled I Won’t Learn From You: Confronting Student
Resistance, describes this phenomenon as being an active and deliberate process of ‘not-learning’:
“To agree to learn from a stranger who does not respect your integrity causes
a major loss of self. The only alternative is to not-learn and reject their
world”(Kohl, 1994, pp. 134-135).
It is our view that this is precisely what many Aboriginal students are doing. Fordham and
Ogbu describe a similar process, saying that Black and Latino youth, for example:
“... regard certain forms of behaviour and certain activities or events, symbols,
and meanings as not appropriate for them because those behaviours, events,
symbols and meanings are characteristic of white Americans. At the same time
they emphasize other forms of behaviour as more appropriate for them
because they are not a part of white Americans’ way of life. To behave in the
manner defined as falling within a white cultural frame of reference is to ‘act
white’ and is negatively sanctioned”(Fordham and Ogbu, 1986, p. 181).
This, they argue, applies to school:
“...the perceptions and interpretations are a part of a cultural orientation
toward schooling which exists within the minority community and which

evolved during many generations when white Americans insisted that minori-
ties were incapable of academic success, denied them the opportunity to suc-
ceed academically, and did not reward them adequately when they succeeded”
(Fordham and Ogbu, 1986, p. 183).
This analysis can be seen as linked to the internalization of colonialism, described earlier:
“White Americans traditionally refused to acknowledge that black Americans
are capable of intellectual achievement, and ...black Americans subsequently
began to doubt their own intellectual ability, began to define academic success
as white people’s prerogative, and began to discourage their peers, perhaps
unconsciously, from emulating white people in academic striving, ie., from
‘acting white’” (Steinberg, 1996, p. 160).
Steinberg (1996, p.160) added: “We heard variations on the ‘acting white’ theme many, many
times over the course of our interviews with high school students”. McWhorter, writing from
a much more conservative perspective, says much the same: “Centuries of abasement and mar-
ginalization led African Americans to internalize the way they were perceived by the larger
society, resulting in a postcolonial inferiority complex” (McWhorter, 2001, p. 27). And this
links to the school:
“Students whose lives are not affirmed by the establishment seem intuitively
not to accept hegemonic content and methods of instruction. They often
resist, consciously or unconsciously, covertly as well as overtly (Friedel, 1999,
p. 153).”
The same is certainly the case for Aboriginal students. As one scholar recently put it:
“For most Indian students , now as in the past hundred years, Indian educa-
tion means the education of Indians by non-Indians using non-Indian meth-
ods. Far too few Indian students have contact with Indian educators who are
attuned to their culture and who can serve as models of educational achieve-
ment....The failure of non-Native education of Natives can be read as the suc-
cess of Native resistance to cultural, spiritual, and psychological genocide”
(Hampton, 1995, pp.6-7).
John Bryde described this process as one of “...a general and intangible passive resistance...”
(Bryde, 1970, p. 20). Graveline calls it “everyday resistance” (Graveline, 1998, p. 22). There is a
case to be made for seeing this resistance as an admirable thing. Herbert Kohl, in describing it,
quoted Martin Luther King Jr., on being ‘maladjusted’—on the importance of not adjusting
oneself to racism and discrimination, to which we would add, the importance of not adjusting
oneself to an educational system which disrespects one’s culture:
“Modern psychology has a word that is probably used more than any other
word. It is the word ‘maladjusted’. Now we all should seek to live a well-adjust-
ed life in order to avoid neurotic and schizophrenic personalities. But there are
some things within our social order to which I am proud to be maladjusted
and to which I call upon you to be maladjusted. I never intend to adjust myself
to segregation and discrimination. I never intend to adjust myself to mob rule.
I never intend to adjust myself to the tragic effects of the methods of physical
violence and to tragic militarism. I call upon you to be maladjusted to such
things” (quoted in Kohl, 1994, p.129).
Aboriginal students are ‘maladjusted’ in this rational and admirable way, and we should stop
trying to change them, and start adjusting—de-colonizing—our educational system.

Though relatively few Aboriginal students might define it as such, the school system continues
to be part of the colonial apparatus, and continues to embody the assumptions of Aboriginal
cultural inferiority that are the bedrock of the colonial ideology. Many students have internal-
ized those colonial values. Professor Yatta Kanu, who has studied teacher-Aboriginal student
interactions in an inner city classroom, says of the Aboriginal students: “They are still living
the experience of colonialism” (Kanu, personal communication, June 5, 2002). It is simply a
part of the fabric of our culture, so all-pervasive that we take it to be ‘natural’. Thus we come
full circle, to the interpretation advanced by Howard Adams, cited above: “This national ide-
ology pervades colonial society and its institutions, such as schools, cultural agencies, the
church and the media....the ideology becomes an inseparable part of perceived reality”
(Adams, 1999, p. 6).
As an “inseparable part of perceived reality”, this colonial ideology with its built-in
The colonial assump- assumptions about cultural superiority and inferiority is not generally seen by non-
Aboriginal people. It is a taken-for-granted, assumed part of what is taken to be ‘real-
tion of Aboriginal cul- ity’. The same is the case, for example, with what an African-American scholar calls
tural inferiority still cultural racism---- it is just there, so all pervasive that it may not be seen: “ Cultural
pervades our institu- racism—the cultural images and messages that affirm the assumed superiority of
tions, and has in fact Whites and the assumed inferiority of people of colour—is like smog in the air.
Sometimes it is so thick it is visible, other times it is less apparent, but always, day in
been internalized and day out, we are breathing it in”(Tatum, 1999, p.6). The same is the case with the
by many Aboriginal colonial ideology. Non-Aboriginal people seldom see it. It is not, for example, some-
people themselves... thing that is taught in schools, nor is it part of the general discourse of day-to-day life.
As Aboriginal scholar Michael Hart puts it: “...the colonizer has no idea about the real-
ity of the oppressed. It is not incorporated as part of any curriculum; nor is it truly rec-
ognized as part of Aboriginal students’ experiences”(Hart, 2002, p. 29). Instead of seeing
poverty and violence and suicide, as well as Aboriginal students’ experiences in school, as a
function of the collective, historical and contemporary experience of Aboriginal people with
colonialism, “Amer-Europeans reinterpret these understandings through an ahistorical , reduc-
tionist stance; they break the issues down to an individual’s problem and ignore the historical
roots...” (Hart, 2002, p. 30).
The result, we hypothesize, is that many Aboriginal students are, quite naturally, disengaged
from the school system, and some, perhaps many, carry on the tradition of active resistance to
a white-controlled school system with its colonial assumptions of Euro-Canadian cultural
superiority.
Colonialism is at the root of the problem. The colonial assumption of Aboriginal cultural infe-
riority still pervades our institutions, and has in fact been internalized by many Aboriginal
people themselves, and it finds expression in self-destructive acts that serve to reinforce and
justify, in the minds of those who do not understand the history of colonialism, the deeply-
rooted assumption of Aboriginal inferiority.
The solution, it follows, is to de-colonize ourselves. Aboriginal scholars and community lead-
ers are “... demanding a ‘de-colonization of Aboriginal education’” (Binda, 2001; Kirkness,
1998). For this to happen, our school system must abandon the assumption, implicit in so
much that is taught in our schools, that Aboriginal culture is inferior. It is the schools, histor-
ical purveyors of the myth of Aboriginal cultural inferiority, which must now become truly
multicultural. “Education systems must teach the people’s own histories, ways of knowing and
learning, languages, literature, arts and sciences....” (Hart, 2002, p.33).
But for this to happen much will have to change, not only in our schools, but also in those
institutions—our faculties of education—where students are taught to be teachers. For as
Michael Hart(2002, p.34) observes, and as numerous of our community respondents stated in

similar language: “If resistance and decolonization involves coming to know ourselves, our his-
tories and our worldviews, how can we expect to develop this knowledge by relying upon the
very people, regardless of their altruism, who oppress these aspects of our being?” What this
means in practical terms is more Aboriginal teachers, and in particular, more Aboriginal teach-
ers able to teach in a decolonized fashion. This is what our respondents called for.
However, as we will show in the next section, despite the need and the demand for more
Aboriginal teachers, the means by which to produce them is not now in place, nor is there plan-
ning underway to rectify this problem.
2.2 Aboriginal teachers and teacher training

There is a clearly expressed demand from the Aboriginal community for more Aboriginal
teachers. This came out clearly in our interviews, with well over 90% of those interviewed say-
ing that they think there should be more Aboriginal teachers and that more Aboriginal teach-
ers would make a difference. The Hawthorne report of 1966 stressed the importance of more
Aboriginal teachers. In 1972 the National Indian Brotherhood, in the seminal Indian Control
of Indian Education, called for more Aboriginal teachers. The Report of the Task Force on Race
Relations to the Board of Trustees of Winnipeg School Division No. 1, in July 1989, called for
“...extraordinary measures... to address the historical blocks which have discriminated against
Aboriginal peoples in their attempts to educate their children”, and the Task Force “...agreed
that special initiatives should be undertaken to hire Aboriginal peoples” (Winnipeg, July 1,
1989, pp. 21 and 23). The 1996 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples observed that “The
training of Aboriginal teachers has been a top priority for Aboriginal people since the 1960s
when they began to lobby for programs that would bring Aboriginal people into the class-
room” (Canada, 1996, Vol. 3, p. 491). The RCAP referred to jurisdictions that had established
targets for the hiring of Aboriginal teachers, and to the requirement in Saskatchewan for the
establishment of an action plan in Aboriginal education, including measures to hire more
Aboriginal teachers, in those school divisions where 5 % or more of the population is
Aboriginal, and recommended more governmental financial support to post-secondary insti-
tutions for existing and new Aboriginal teacher education programs (Canada, 1996, Vol. 3, pp.
491 and 493. See also Kirkness, 1992, p.4).
Any call for more Aboriginal teachers would certainly apply to Winnipeg, which has more
Aboriginal people than any other Canadian city, and would particularly apply to Winnipeg’s
inner city, where 60% of Winnipeg’s Aboriginal people reside. Winnipeg School Division No.
1 has tried to respond to the demand for more Aboriginal teachers and more Aboriginal staff.
In fact, the Division considers itself to be a leader in Canada in responding to the needs of
Aboriginal students. The Division has taken a number of important steps. These include the
establishment of an Aboriginal high school, Children of the Earth, and an Aboriginal elemen-
tary school, Niji Mahkwa; the establishment of several alternative school settings intended to
assist Aboriginal students to remain in school, including Wi Wabagooni, an off-site program
of Victoria Albert school for grades 3-6, Songide’ewin Alternative Program, an off-site pro-
gram of Niji Mahkwa for Aboriginal high school students, and Eagles Circle, an off-site pro-
gram of Hugh John MacDonald school for 25 Aboriginal students; the development of an
accelerated program to get more Aboriginal teachers into administrative positions in schools;
the hiring of Aboriginal Support Workers attached to 12 inner city schools, each on a half-time
basis, to bridge the divide between schools and community and to encourage parental involve-
ment; the preparation of considerable curriculum material with Aboriginal content; since
1994/95 the funding of two Aboriginal Curriculum Development positions to develop addi-
tional units with Aboriginal content; and the hiring of an Aboriginal consultant (Schubert,
April 1, 2002). It is notable that Winnipeg’s Aboriginal community mounted a determined and

very effective campaign for educational improvements in the late 1980s-early 1990s, as a result
of which many of the changes enumerated above were made.
However, Aboriginal people are still significantly under-represented in the School Division’s
overall staff, and especially in its teaching staff. In 1999-2000, out of a total of 2023 teachers in
Winnipeg School Division No. 1, only 112, or 5.6%, were Aboriginal (Schubert, April 1, 2002,
pp. 1 and 2). Winnipeg School Division No. 1 estimates that 25% of its students are Aboriginal,
and as observed earlier, this proportion is growing. Thus in cultural terms, the teaching staff
does not at all reflect the students being taught. For the number of Aboriginal teachers to be
proportionate to the number of Aboriginal students three years ago, in 1999-2000, Winnipeg
School Division No. 1 would have needed approximately 400 more Aboriginal teachers than
were working in the Division at that time.
There is, in principle, an opportunity now to rectify the under-representation of Aboriginal
teachers in Winnipeg School Division No. 1. As of 1999-2000, more than one-third (36%) of
the teachers in Winnipeg No. 1 were over 50 years of age (Leadership in Education
Accountability Dialogue, 2001), and so there is likely to be significant demand in the near
future to replace large numbers of retiring teachers. This would be an excellent opportunity to
change the face of the teaching staff in the Division to more closely resemble the student body,
by hiring a large number of Aboriginal teachers.
Regrettably, this is not likely to happen. To our knowledge there is no plan in place to pro-
duce the large numbers of Aboriginal teachers that are needed. A major part of the problem
lies with the Faculties of Education at the University of Manitoba and the University of
Winnipeg, although in fairness they are aware of the problem but unable to respond ade-
quately for want of financial resources. We examined the Faculties of Education at Brandon
University, the University of Manitoba and the University of Winnipeg, in order to deter-
mine the extent to which their programs are geared to producing Aboriginal teachers, and
more broadly, the extent to which these programs reflect the needs of Aboriginal people.
What we found is cause for concern.
There are teacher education programs at both Brandon University (BU) and the University of
Winnipeg (UW) which are aimed, in large part, at producing Aboriginal teachers.
At BU there is the Brandon University Northern Teacher Education Program (BUNTEP), and
the Program for the Education of Native Teachers (PENT). Approximately 90% of the gradu-
ates of BUNTEP, and all of the graduates of PENT, are Aboriginal. The number of students in
BUNTEP varies from year to year, but generally the number of students in each year of the pro-
gram is from 200 to 350, while in PENT there are generally about 150 students at any given
time. These are community-based programs, that is, they deliver teacher training to northern
Manitobans and especially northern Aboriginal people in the communities where the students
reside. BUNTEP has had programs in a large number of northern Manitoba communities
since it began in 1974, and together with PENT has produced more than 750 teachers, most of
them Aboriginal (McAlpine, 2001, p.110). PENT is aimed at Aboriginal people already work-
ing in schools as para-professionals. It combines 50 months of internship in the schools where
they are working, with summer courses at BU. “As students progress through the program, they
are expected to assume greater responsibilities for planning and teaching. PENT students start
by teaching small groups, and then progress to teaching entire classes” (BU Faculty of
Education website). A model that enables Aboriginal teaching assistants to gain credits for their
practical experience in the schools ought to be considered for Winnipeg, and we will return to
this in our recommendations. However, as effective as BUNTEP and PENT may be in produc-
ing Aboriginal teachers, it does not help Winnipeg, because few of their graduates come to
Winnipeg to teach. The overwhelming majority of these teachers, almost all, take up teaching
positions in northern or rural Manitoba communities.

In Winnipeg, the UW runs the inner city teacher education program at the Winnipeg
Education Centre (WEC). This program, delivered partly off-campus, is aimed at students who
are at least 21 years of age, who are representative of the inner city population, and who need
academic, personal and financial support in order to complete a university teacher education
program. The program is effective. But it is so small that it cannot possibly meet the demand
for Aboriginal teachers. The annual intake is generally 18 to 20 students. In some years the pro-
portion who are Aboriginal may be as high as 60-70%. The retention rate is high. But even if
we were to assume a 100% retention rate and a student body 70% of whom are Aboriginal, this
would only produce approximately 14 new Aboriginal teachers per year, which is just over one-
half of one percent of the 2023 teachers employed in Winnipeg School Division No. 1 alone in
1999-2000. Three years ago, in 1999-2000, WSD No. 1 would have needed an additional 400
Aboriginal teachers to make the proportion of teachers who were then Aboriginal equivalent
to the proportion of students who were then Aboriginal. At its current maximum rate of
approximately 14 new Aboriginal teachers per year, it would take WEC almost 30 years to turn
out 400 Aboriginal teachers, and by then the proportion of students who are Aboriginal will be
closer to 50% than 25%. In short, the Winnipeg Education Centre, effective and important
though it is, cannot by itself and at its current size, produce nearly enough Aboriginal teachers
to increase the proportion of teachers in Winnipeg who are Aboriginal to the extent that is
needed.
The major Faculties of Education, in terms of student numbers, are at the University of
Manitoba and the main campus of the University of Winnipeg. The Faculty of Education at the
UM has almost 1300 students if full-time and part-time, undergraduate and graduate students
are included, and the Faculty of Education at the UW has approximately 1000 students.
However, the numbers of Aboriginal students training to be teachers at the two main campus-
es is minuscule. At the UM, where a new Dean has recently been appointed, we were told that
when the university’s Aboriginal Student Liaison conducted incoming Aboriginal students on a
campus tour, the Faculty of Education was not included, because “there is nothing in the build-
ing for them” (Wiens, May 8, 2002). The incoming Dean, John Wiens, has told us that he very
quickly noticed that Aboriginal people had “no kind of visible presence” in the Faculty of
Education. As a result, he has taken a number of steps. He has established a Dean’s Aboriginal
Student Recruitment Task Force; is seeking to hire two Aboriginal faculty members (there are
currently no permanent, full-time Aboriginal teaching staff in the UM Faculty of Education);
and has written to the Minister of Education seeking approval to make Native Studies a ‘teach-
able’ subject, so that students with an academic knowledge of Aboriginal issues, and hopefully
more Aboriginal students, would enter the Faculty of Education. At present, however, there are
few Aboriginal students in the Faculty of Education, there has been no plan in recent years to
recruit Aboriginal students to the Faculty of Education, there are no permanent Aboriginal fac-
ulty members in the Faculty of Education, and there are almost no courses offered in the Faculty
with an Aboriginal focus. There is a community-based education program leading to a B. Ed.
run in several northern communities by the UM Continuing Education, but like BUNTEP and
PENT at Brandon University, it produces teachers, including Aboriginal teachers, who end up
working in northern Manitoba, not in Winnipeg. At the moment, the UM Faculty of Education
is contributing almost nothing to solving the problem of the shortage of Aboriginal teachers in
Winnipeg. It is to be hoped that the initiatives being taken by the new Dean, together with his
stated commitment (Wiens, May 8, 2002) to have one in six or one in five of the Faculty of
Education student body be Aboriginal students in five or perhaps ten years time, will bear fruit.
The University of Winnipeg Faculty of Education has an inner city mandate. The Faculty is
doing a great deal of innovative work in preparing students to teach in the inner city. There are
several courses offered with specifically inner city content. Every student must complete at least
one student placement in an inner city school or a school with inner city characteristics. There

are opportunities for students to participate in various inner city community outreach pro-
grams run by faculty members. And, remarkably, every single faculty member has contributed
to a soon-to-be-released book on inner city education. This is a faculty with energy and a com-
mitment to inner city education.
However, the Aboriginal content in the program is sorely absent, despite the obviously high
and growing proportion of inner city students who are Aboriginal, and despite the
Manitoba is consider- Faculty’s inner city mandate. In the 22 pages given over to describing the UW Faculty
of Education program in the 2002-2003 University of Winnipeg Academic Calendar,
ably behind other, the word ‘Aboriginal’ is mentioned but once. This is in the title of a new course called
neighbouring prov- “Aboriginal Issues in Education”, offered in the Sociology Department and available as
inces in putting in an option to Education students. There are two optional courses in Aboriginal lan-
guages, one in Cree and one in Ojibwa. There are no required courses with a focus that
place the means by is exclusively or even primarily Aboriginal. There are multicultural courses, but these
which to produce are not the same at all as courses with a focus on Aboriginal content. Nor are there any
Aboriginal teachers. courses on racism, or anti-racist education. There are no permanent, full-time
Aboriginal faculty members on staff. There are very few Aboriginal students among
the Education student body (two of the University’s Aboriginal Student Advisors told
us in May, 2002, that they knew of either 6 or 7 Aboriginal students in the Faculty of
Education), there is no specific program in place for recruiting Aboriginal students to the
Faculty of Education, and no spaces in the Faculty are reserved for Aboriginal students. These
are serious shortcomings for a Faculty of Education with an inner city mandate.
The Faculty of Education observes that their finances are stretched to the limit, simply in
keeping together the program that is already in place, and this is no doubt true. Further, if
additional Aboriginal students were to be recruited to the Faculty of Education, the infra-
structure that would be needed to provide supports to these students is simply not adequate.
There is a very fine Aboriginal Student Services Staff (as is the case at the University of
Manitoba), but their numbers are small, the demands on their time are already difficult to
manage, and many of the important initiatives that they are undertaking or planning to
undertake for the purpose of providing needed supports to Aboriginal students are funded by
‘soft money’, or are as yet not funded at all. Unlike the University of Manitoba and Brandon
University, the University of Winnipeg does not receive Access funding from the provincial
government, despite the Faculty of Education’s inner city mandate. It is clear that the
University of Winnipeg Faculty of Education is not contributing to solving the problem of the
shortage of Aboriginal teachers in Winnipeg.
This is a failing, at both the UM and the UW Faculties of Education, which simply must be
addressed. To do so will require action by these academic bodies. But it will also require gov-
ernments to take the initiative in developing a plan to produce Aboriginal teachers, and to
make available the funding to make this possible.
Manitoba is considerably behind other, neighbouring provinces in putting in place the means
by which to produce Aboriginal teachers.
The University of Saskatchewan’s College of Education offers four programs designed to edu-
cate Aboriginal teachers: the Northern Teacher Education Program (NORTEP); the
Saskatchewan Urban Native Teacher Education Program (SUNTEP); the Northwest
Territories Teacher Education Program (NWTTEP); and the Indian Teacher Education
Program (ITEP). The latter program, to take one example, has approximately 200 students
enrolled, and accepts 55 new students per year. In June of 2002, in addition to the 55 new stu-
dents enrolled, the program turned away 250 fully qualified prospective students due to lack
of space. This suggests that there are steps that can be taken that will generate a significant
supply of prospective Aboriginal teachers. In addition, 100% of the professors and instructors
in the ITEP are Aboriginal.
The University of Regina, in cooperation with the Saskatchewan Indian Federated College
(SIFC), offers a B. Ed. Indian Education Program. The SIFC -Indian Education Statement says:
“The SIFC Indian Education program...provides schemes of study in which the
uniquely imaginative aspects of First Nations culture are integrated with the
pedagogical concerns of modern practice. In pursuing a degree with our depart-
ment, students receive a wide ranging university education valuable to the First
Nation holistic perspective. At the same time students acquire skills needed to
contribute to society as professionals in the area of Indian Education”.
Numerous courses with a specifically Aboriginal focus are offered, and in addition the program
offers a course called “Institutional Racism”. According to the course description, this course
deals with “...how institutional racism affects schooling practices”, and in the course “different
forms of racism are presented and analyzed”. The SIFC B.Ed. program had about 80 students
in total in 2000, 80% of whom were Aboriginal, and 70% of the teaching staff are Aboriginal.
Aboriginal Education programs are offered elsewhere in Canada. Lakehead University runs a
Native Teacher Education Program (NTEP). Courses with Aboriginal content are offered in
order “to make teachers in training more aware of the particular circumstances of Aboriginal
students...” (NTEP website). In the 2001/02 academic year there were 49 students in the NTEP,
and in the Faculty of Education as a whole 62 of the 635 students, or 9.8%, were Aboriginal.
Of the total staff of 30 in the Faculty of Education, 4 professors and 4 additional staff mem-
bers were Aboriginal. The University of British Columbia has a Native Indian Teacher
Education Program (NITEP), with an off-campus component for the first three years of the
five year program. It is an elementary education program only. Aboriginal studies courses are
offered throughout the five year program. McGill has a large program; St. Francis Xavier and
the University of New Brunswick have Aboriginal Education programs; Brock University offers
a Native Teacher Education Program, and also a Bachelor of Education in Adult Education,
one of the two streams of which is an Aboriginal stream designed by Aboriginal educators for
Aboriginal teachers of adults and currently the only one of its kind in North America. Each of
these programs offers numerous courses with a specifically Aboriginal content.
Unfortunately, with respect to the preparation of Aboriginal teachers to teach in Winnipeg, the
city with the highest Aboriginal population in Canada, not nearly enough is being done to pro-
duce the very large numbers of Aboriginal teachers that are needed.
It is not just prospective Aboriginal teachers who need to be exposed to a curriculum that reflects
the realities of Aboriginal peoples. Even if a major initiative is launched immediately to produce
more Aboriginal teachers for Winnipeg, as we would hope will be the case, their numbers will
grow relatively slowly and in the meantime the vast majority of teachers who are teaching
Aboriginal children will continue to be non-Aboriginal people. Non-Aboriginal teachers need
more exposure to the realities of Aboriginal life than they are currently getting in their teacher
training programs. The social and economic structure of Manitoba is such that most white teach-
ers will have had little direct exposure to Aboriginal people, and even those who are teaching
Aboriginal students are likely to have little direct exposure outside the classroom to Aboriginal
people. This case has been made with respect to White teachers and African-Americans in the
USA, and we believe the argument advanced applies to Winnipeg and Aboriginal people:
“Most white teachers were raised and educated in predominantly white com-
munities. Their firsthand knowledge of communities of color and their cul-
tures and histories are quite limited. The secondhand information they have
received through textbooks, media and friends and family has often been dis-
torted by the negative, stereotypical attitudes about people of color which are
so pervasive in American culture” (Lawrence and Tatum, 1997, p.333).

Professor Yatta Kanu of the University of Manitoba Faculty of Education has studied teacher-
student interactions, and particularly teacher-Aboriginal student interactions, at one of the
Winnipeg inner city high schools whose students were included in our interviews. Kanu
observes that: “The vast majority of teachers in these schools belong to the dominant main-
stream culture. The lack of Aboriginal cultural knowledge among these teachers has generally
resulted in pedagogical and interaction patterns that have resulted in negative learning experi-
ences for Aboriginal students” (Kanu, 2002, p. 3). Kanu adds:
“The inspiration for this study arose from my experience as a teacher educa-
tor consistently observing pre-service teachers from dominant Euro-
Canadian culture in high school classrooms in Winnipeg using teaching
processes and curriculum materials that either ignored the Aboriginal stu-
dents in their classrooms, or encouraged minimal participation from them.
From personal conversations I had with a number of these pre-service teach-
ers, I learned that they did not possess the cultural knowledge needed to adapt
classroom materials and processes to ensure meaningful participation for the
Aboriginal students in their classrooms”.
A current textbook on multicultural education, written by the Dean of the Faculty of
Education at McGill University, says the same: “The curriculum initiatives in the school system
are important, but no amount of curriculum material can make a significant difference if
teachers do not have the knowledge and the proactive attitude necessary to change the status
quo” (Gnosh, 2002, p. 87). There are teachers in Winnipeg’s inner city who have this knowl-
edge and this attitude. But they do not have the knowledge by virtue of their teacher training.
The education that prospective teachers are getting at Manitoba Faculties of Education is not
adequately preparing them to teach Aboriginal children, despite the Royal Commission on
Aboriginal Peoples’ observation that: “... it is incumbent upon teacher education programs to
provide the sort of teacher preparation which teachers need in order to work successfully with
Aboriginal students in Canada’s public schools” (Canada, 1996). Failure to provide such an
education for prospective teachers runs the risk of the reinforcement in the classroom of
negative stereotypes:
“...teachers are often not aware of the different ways in which they treat stu-
dents, they may reflect the systemic discrimination of society and school
cultures. Studies have shown that subtle and overt forms of discrimination
result from teachers’ attitudes because their lack of information leads them
to make inappropriate assumptions about children of different racial
groups. If they operate within a framework of stereotypes, teachers may
equate minority students and poor performance, with the result that these
students are over-represented in special education and lower-ability groups”
(Gnosh, 2002, p. 100).
The Aboriginal students, school leavers and community members whom we interviewed
were unmistakeably clear in saying that they believe there should be more Aboriginal
teachers in Winnipeg high schools. However, the means by which to produce more
Aboriginal teachers, and especially to produce enough Aboriginal teachers to enable
Winnipeg schools to reflect the student body they serve, are simply not in place. Nor are
most non-Aboriginal teachers-in-training being sufficiently exposed to the Aboriginal
class and cultural realities that they will experience as teachers, particularly teachers in
Winnipeg’s inner city. Nor is there a plan in place to achieve these objectives. These fail-
ings in our teacher education programs must be rectified. We will make recommendations
to this end in the final section of this paper.

2.3 Aboriginal curriculum
Those we interviewed—students, school leavers, community members—were almost unani-
mous in expressing the opinion that more Aboriginal content is needed in the curriculum, and
that it would make a significant difference to Aboriginal students. Some steps have been taken
in this direction, especially by Winnipeg School Division No. 1, as described earlier. But there
are problems. Too often Aboriginal content is treated as an add-on, and amounts to little more
than lip-service, as was stated emphatically by some of our respondents. There is evidence that
this is the case generally, ie., that Aboriginal content tends to take the form of “add-on activi-
ties” (Banks, 1994). And where new Aboriginal content has been developed, it is not sufficiently
used, because its use is voluntary and because most teachers are not sufficiently knowledgeable
about Aboriginal cultures to be able to use it.
The goal must be, as stated by the Aboriginal Teachers Circle, “...the total integration of
Aboriginal perspectives in all areas of the curriculum” (Fitznor, 1997). This is a challenging
goal. It means acknowledging the legitimacy and the significance of Aboriginal culture, and
moving it from the margins to the centre of the curriculum. This is an argument that has been
advanced with respect to African-American and Hispanic students in the USA, an argument
rooted in changing demographic realities:
“...the populations of America’s subordinated groups are changing the cultur-
al landscapes of our urban centres. According to recent demographic projec-
tions, Blacks and Hispanics will constitute a decided majority in nearly one-
third of the nation’s 50 largest cities...and Blacks alone will be the major group
in at least nine major cities....In this case, populations traditionally defined as
the Other are moving from the margin to the centre and challenging the eth-
nocentric view that people of colour can be relegated to the periphery of
everyday life” (Giroux, 1992, p. 111).
For this to happen, the dominant culture would have to give up something. As Noley has put it:
“A movement toward a ‘common culture’ should mean that all groups would
sacrifice a part of their cultures in order to meet all others at some point at
which new norms would be established. What has occurred, however, is that
small groups have been compelled to discard many aspects of their cultures in
order to conform to a European-American mainstream....Schools clearly have
been the instruments of assimilation in the twentieth century, and this is what
American Indian people have nearly unanimously rejected” (Noley, 1994, p. 78).
Gnosh makes the same argument, from a multicultural perspective:
“...multicultural education must be seen to be radically different from a frame-
work in which students of difference equate the school curriculum and culture
with the dominant culture privilege....This implies that the curriculum, meth-
ods of teaching and evaluation, and norms and standards of excellence must
incorporate the worldviews, histories, and experiences of all children—domi-
nant and minority—rather than only the dominant” (Gnosh, 2002, p.3).
This would mean, for example, fully integrating Aboriginal novelists, dramatists, and poets into
the English literature curriculum; including Aboriginal perspectives and issues in the history
and social studies curriculum—treaties, the Indian Act, residential schools, Oka, as well as the
‘living culture’ of Aboriginal people in Winnipeg today ( for example, projects involving oral
histories of Aboriginal communities) ; including Aboriginal perspectives on the relationship
between humans and the environment in science and geography classes; and making use of
elders-in-the-schools programs, Aboriginal artists-in-the-schools programs, Aboriginal guest

speakers, and Aboriginal films and film-makers. The possibilities for enriching the curriculum
through the use of Aboriginal content and through the use of Aboriginal individuals drawn
from the community are almost endless, but doing so requires teachers who are familiar with
and comfortable with Aboriginal culture and Aboriginal people. Many Aboriginal people feel
this is not now the case. As one of our community respondents put it at a focus group meeting,
the school system “doesn’t even have a first clue of who we are as a people”. We were told of a
case in a suburban Winnipeg high school, for example, at which some non-Aboriginal parents
complained because a well-known book by an established Aboriginal author was being studied
in English class. These parents insisted that the book, which is certainly appropriate for study in
English classes, was not literary, and that such books should be confined to the school’s Native
Studies course. The divide separating the cultures has to be bridged:
“The central challenge of educators is to find ways to build bridges of under-
standing between the often separate realities of Native people and mainstream
society....Society in general does not know the historical perspective behind
today’s social reality....[similarly] many Native people know little about their
own history and culture” (Douglas, 1987, p. 181).
It is possible to do this. Kohl points, for example, to Portland, Oregon, where:
“...the entire school district has adopted an Afrocentric, multicultural curricu-
lum that treats the history and culture of the United States from the perspec-
tive of all the peoples that made our nation. This is not merely a minor change
in focus, but a fundamental rethinking about what we tell our children about
who we are as a society” (Kohl, 1994, p.109).
Verna Kirkness argues that this is not what has been done in Canada. The integration of
Aboriginal students into mainstream schools “...has not been one of true integration where the
different cultures are recognized; rather it has been a program of assimilation where First
Nation students are absorbed into the dominant society” (Kirkness, 1992, p.14). This strategy
does not work. “Integration viewed as a one-way process is not integration, and will fail. In the
past, it has been the Indian student who was asked to integrate, to give up his identity, to adopt
new values and a new way of life. This restricted interpretation of integration must be radical-
ly altered if future education programmes are to benefit Indian children” (Kirkness, 1992,
p.51). In 1988 the Assembly of First Nations completed a three volume study of Aboriginal
education, called Tradition and Education: Towards a Vision of our Future. Kirkness notes that
“One of the most revealing facts found in the study was that after 16 years, many of the edu-
cational shortcomings identified in 1972 were still in existence. It pointed out that education
programs to which Indians are exposed are predominantly assimilationist in the curriculum,
learning materials, pedagogy, learning objectives and in the training of teachers and educa-
tional administrators” (Kirkness, 1992, p. 20). The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples,
as already noted, found the same to be the case when they reported in 1996, and our respon-
dents tell us that this continues to be the case today, in late 2002.
If as a society we were to re-think our schools, and commit ourselves to doing more than what
we have just barely begun to do in the way of making them into places where Aboriginal peo-
ple and Aboriginal cultures are experienced and celebrated, if we were to make our communi-
ty’s Aboriginal reality part of the air that we breathe in our schools, the results would be dra-
matic. When students from marginalized cultures see themselves and their values positively
represented in the school, the impact is exceptional. Beverly Tatum, for example, observes that:
“Time and again in the research interviews I conducted, Black students lamented the absence
of courses in African American history or literature at the high school level and indicated how
significant this new learning was to them in college, how excited and affirmed they felt by this
newfound knowledge” (Tatum, 1999, p. 66). This has been the case, as reported to us, for many

Aboriginal people in Winnipeg who have attended university and studied Aboriginal The presence of sig-
history and culture. For many Aboriginal people, one of the authors of this study nificant numbers of
included, it is only when they get to university that they have the chance to be exposed
to their history and culture and to the impact of colonialism. Learning about who they Aboriginal teachers in
are, and how they came to be where they are today as the result of colonialism, is a lib- the schools, and the
erating and empowering experience. This is the argument advanced so brilliantly by infusion or total inte-
Paulo Friere. But not all Aboriginal people make it to university, and high schools
should be doing for many Aboriginal students what certain university courses do for gration of Aboriginal
a few. This is a process of de-colonization, by which Aboriginal students come to know history and culture in
and to value themselves as Aboriginal people. This should be happening in our the curriculum, would
schools: “If children are taught to understand and value their culture, they will value
themselves as human beings” (McCaskill, 1987, p. 168).
have a huge impact on
Aboriginal students.
The presence of significant numbers of Aboriginal teachers in the schools, and the
infusion or total integration of Aboriginal history and culture in the curriculum,
would have a huge impact on Aboriginal students. They would see the world differently.
Teaching from an Aboriginal cultural perspective “...creates a different view of the world as
compared with an emphasis on white Anglo-American Protestant culture”. It “...will complete-
ly change a student’s view of the world” with the result that “...you see the movies differently,
you see other people differently, you read books differently...in fact, nothing is as it was before
your consciousness” (Spring, 1997, 114).
But now, Aboriginal people are scarcely present in the curriculum. They are largely invisible.
Battiste (2000, p.198) quotes Adrienne Rich in Invisibility in Academe: “When someone with
the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of
psychic disequilibrium as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing”. In the Canadian edu-
cational system today, Aboriginal people continue to be invisible. As Verna Kirkness describes
it: “The materials and subjects used for teaching are largely designed for and by non-
Aboriginal persons, with little or no regard for the cultures, histories and realities of Aboriginal
life” (Kirkness, 1992, p. 94).
If we were to make the changes needed—including changes in curriculum and in teacher train-
ing—to achieve “the total integration of Aboriginal perspectives in all areas of the curriculum”,
as the Aboriginal Teachers Circle has called for, it is not only Aboriginal students who would
benefit. The recognition and respectful treatment of Aboriginal culture would unleash an out-
burst of creativity in a city that will, in this century, increasingly become an Aboriginal city.
Winnipeg could become a city unique in the world, a city characterized by a new and dynam-
ic culture that includes, as a central and positive element, the Aboriginal cultures and peoples
that are now so marginalized, and so frequently denigrated, in our communities and in our
schools. Achieving this goal requires making bold changes in our school system and our
teacher training institutions.

Part Three
3.1 Conclusions
The demographic data presented early in this paper provide evidence that dramatic shifts are
underway in the socioeconomic structure and character of our city, and we believe that edu-
cation will play a crucial role in determining whether we are successful in negotiating these
shifts and upheavals. A recent Saskatchewan study, which calculated that by the year 2016,
almost one-half (46.4%) of school-aged (5-17 years) children in the province will be
Aboriginal, concluded that:
“...the present era represents the birth pangs of an entirely new society,
because it is witness to a kind of renegotiation of relations between the defin-
ing peoples. Further, it can be argued that the principle context of this new
contact period is that of education. The role of the school, humble as this
might sound, could not therefore be cast in a more dramatic light....The role
the school plays will determine the future and destiny of our province.....An
opportunity of greatest significance lies before us—nothing more and noth-
ing less than the forging of a new society” (Tymckak, 2001, p.25).
The same can be said, we believe, for Manitoba and specifically for Winnipeg. Indeed, these
shifts in demographic realities are taking place in many large cities across North America, where
people of European descent have become or are becoming a minority. These demographic shifts
have enormous implications for education—for how we construct the curriculum, how we
train teachers, and who gets trained to be a teacher, for example. Giroux, writing about the USA,
argues that “... the cultural landscapes of our urban centres...” are changing such that those peo-
ples previously seen as ‘the other’ and confined to the margins of everyday life are moving to the
centre (Giroux, 1992, p. 111). Schools must reflect these real-world changes.
In Winnipeg this means that schools must become more Aboriginal. We believe that this means
very significant changes to the educational system as a whole. In our recommendations we will
emphasize those changes in the educational system having to do especially with who is teach-
ing and what is taught. These are changes, we believe, that are achievable within a reasonable
time frame. But our immediate focus on teachers and curriculum should not be seen as
detracting from our view that it is the system as a whole that needs to change to reflect chang-
ing demographic and cultural realities.
Many of the recommendations that we believe flow from our findings require action on the
part of the provincial government, given that the provinces have the constitutional responsi-
bility for education. Therefore, although our study focussed on Aboriginal students in
Winnipeg inner city high schools, at least some of our recommendations have to be couched
in terms of the province as a whole.
Our recommendations arise directly from what we have been told by Aboriginal high school
students and school leavers and community members in the interview questionnaires and the
focus groups, and are supported, we believe, by the considerable body of literature that now
exists on Aboriginal education. Before setting out our recommendations, we want to make two
preliminary observations.
First, there are four areas, in addition to those included in our recommendations, where we
believe, based on our findings in this study, important changes could and should be made. We

are not including these in our recommendations because we want to focus on the recommen-
dations that we believe to be of the highest priority. Nevertheless, we want to make very brief
mention of these four areas because we believe they are worthy of further investigation and con-
sideration. The first is the importance of those schools with significant numbers of Aboriginal
students making extra, innovative efforts to reach out to Aboriginal parents, including efforts
that reach the community as a whole, like community feasts, and including strategies that have
been tried elsewhere that involve teachers going into the community to meet with parents in the
parents’ homes. The second is the importance of adult learner centres, given that Aboriginal
people are more likely than non-Aboriginal people to return to school after the usual high
school age, and given what appears to us, from our cursory observations of adult learner cen-
tres in the course of conducting this study, to be the high degree of effectiveness of at least some
of these institutions. The third is the possibility of developing a community economic develop-
ment strategy around inner city schools, by attaching to such schools early childhood education
programs like Aboriginal Head Start, literacy programs for parents, and high quality after school
programs, each with a hiring strategy aimed at employing more Aboriginal people. There is very
strong evidence that these programs are educationally effective, and there is especially strong
evidence that educational attainment is strongly correlated with socioeconomic status, and thus
jobs. The fourth is the importance of developing the programs needed to enable more
Aboriginal high school students than is now the case to find part-time jobs while still in school,
given the evidence that Aboriginal students are much less likely to be employed while at school
than non-Aboriginal students, and that many Aboriginal students would like to be employed
but are having difficulty getting a first foot in the door in the labour market. It is our opinion
that each of these four areas is important from an Aboriginal educational attainment point of
view, and each is worthy of further investigation.
Second, the three broad recommendations that we do make—to turn out a great many more
Aboriginal teachers, to add a considerable additional amount of Aboriginal content to the
teacher training programs, and to integrate much more Aboriginal content into the existing
high school curriculum—are listed as three separate recommendations, but are much better
thought of as three inter-related parts of an integrated strategy, the ultimate goal of which is
broad systemic change. Producing more Aboriginal teachers is useful in itself, but is much
more effective if these Aboriginal teachers have come through a teacher training program
which has provided them with an understanding of colonialism and the Aboriginal experience,
and is much more effective if the curriculum these teachers are working with is infused with
Aboriginal content. Similarly, infusing the high school curriculum with Aboriginal content is
useful in itself, but is much more effective if those who teach it are knowledgeable about
Aboriginal matters, and is more useful still if the number of teachers who are Aboriginal is pro-
portionate to the number of students who are Aboriginal. Thus we see these three recommen-
dations as an integrated package, and we see them as the achievable starting points for signif-
icant systemic change, the outcome of which would be an educational system in which
Aboriginal cultures and people are fully acknowledged, respected, and represented.
We wish to add that we know that there have been many studies of Aboriginal education in the
past, and relatively little action has resulted. The Auditor-General of Canada, for example,
when reporting recently on the state of Aboriginal education in Canada, said the following:
“According to one First Nations organization, education for First Nations has
been studied for over 20 years. This includes at least 22 studies between 1991
and 1999 in one departmental region....None of the study reports that came
to our attention was accompanied by a departmental implementation plan
that identified how and by whom the necessary remedial action would be
taken” (Canada, 2000, pp. 4-9, 4-10).

It is not within our mandate to identify how and by whom the necessary remedial action will
be taken. It is, however, our task to set out what we believe, in broad terms, to be the necessary
remedial action. In the following recommendations we seek to do that, by setting out the pack-
age of changes that we think, based on our interviews and the existing literature, is of the high-
est order of priority, and is the most likely to be achievable within a reasonable time frame.
3.2 Recommendations
In our discussions with the Aboriginal people whom we interviewed, many offered some vari-
ant of the view that ‘the whole educational system needs to change’. We believe that there is a
sense in which this is true. The educational system is not now meeting the needs of large num-
bers of Aboriginal students, and therefore it needs to be changed. The specific recommendations
that follow are, in our view, the steps that are most likely to be achievable in the immediately
foreseeable future, and that are most likely to lay the foundation for the kind of long-term sys-
temic change that is needed if the educational needs of Aboriginal people are to be met. These
changes must be implemented with the full participation of the authentic Aboriginal leadership,
as has been recommended by the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry and the Royal Commission on
Aboriginal Peoples.
RECOMMENDATION #1: The Centre for Urban Aboriginal Education

We recommend:
a. That in order to assist in the process of ensuring the timely implementation of these rec-
ommendations, and to ensure that the Aboriginal community has the organizational
means by which to promote its educational interests and aspirations, there be established
in Winnipeg a Centre for Urban Aboriginal Education.
b. That the Centre for Urban Aboriginal Education be:
i. an independent body;
ii. governed by the Aboriginal community;
iii. provided with a secure financial base;
iv. mandated to provide leadership and organizational capacity for the Aboriginal
community in the on-going process of effecting positive changes to the educational
system.
RECOMMENDATION #2: Aboriginal Teachers

We recommend:
a. That the provincial government, working closely with the Aboriginal community,
immediately prepare and implement a plan designed to produce enough Aboriginal teach-
ers that in 10 years from now, the proportion of teachers in all Winnipeg and all Manitoba
school divisions who are Aboriginal will be at least equivalent to the proportion of stu-
dents in those school divisions who are Aboriginal.
b. That the plan include at least the following measures:
i. That a specific and significant proportion of the spots in each year’s incoming class in the
Faculties of Education at the University of Manitoba and the University of Winnipeg be
allocated to Aboriginal students. A version of this is done in the Faculty of Social Work at
the University of Manitoba, where 25% of incoming students each year must be Aboriginal,
or immigrants, or people with disabilities. It is done at the Winnipeg Education Centre as
well, where the incoming class must reflect the population of Winnipeg’s inner city.

ii. That increased, targeted funding be made available to the Faculties of Education specifi-
cally to enable them to put in place the supports that would be needed to meet the acade-
mic needs of a significantly increased number of Aboriginal students. Aboriginal student
counselling and advising services are already stretched to the limit at the two universities, so
that to enable more Aboriginal students to graduate as teachers, more Aboriginal student
services staff would be needed. For the University of Winnipeg Faculty of Education, this
might best be done by extending the already proven Access model to the University of
Winnipeg, since the UW does not now have specific funding for Access programming. The
Access model is intended to provide access and necessary supports to those students—
Aboriginal students included—who have historically been structurally excluded from uni-
versity.
iii. That increased, targeted funding be made available to the Faculties of Education specif-
ically to enable them to put in place the kind of aggressive recruitment strategy that would
be needed to encourage much larger numbers of Aboriginal students to embark upon
careers in education. This would require that Aboriginal staff from the two Faculties of
Education or from Aboriginal Student Support Services go into rural and city high schools
and elementary schools to talk about the value of teaching as a career, and the opportuni-
ties available for Aboriginal students in education. It may also require the development of
various strategies—mentoring, for example, or ‘laddering’ from job to job—to prepare
Aboriginal people in the community to qualify for admission to Faculties of Education.
iv. That a program be devised which would enable Aboriginal people now working as
teaching assistants to earn credits toward a Bachelor of Education degree based on
their work in classrooms as teaching assistants. This would shorten the time during
which classes would have to be taken at the Faculties of Education at the University of
Manitoba or the University of Winnipeg, and would be likely to increase the number
of Aboriginal people who would seek to graduate as teachers.
RECOMMENDATION #3: The Training of Teachers

We recommend:
a. That the provincial government make available to the Faculties of Education at the University
of Manitoba and the University of Winnipeg sufficient additional, targeted funding to enable
those faculties to make the changes in their course offerings and the additions to their staff that
are necessary for the specific purpose of ensuring that all prospective teachers who are trained
in Manitoba are familiar with the colonial experience of Aboriginal people in Canada.
b. That the funding be targeted in such a way as to enable the Faculties of Education to do,
at a minimum, the following:
i. To hire additional staff to teach courses in Aboriginal history, culture and spiritual-
ity, and in colonialism and racism, with the very strong preference that these addi-
tional staff members be Aboriginal people.
ii. To design courses in Aboriginal history, culture and spirituality, and in colonialism
and racism, and in anti-racist education.
c. That all prospective teachers seeking certification to teach in Manitoba be required to
have taken at least one course in the Faculty of Education with specifically Aboriginal con-
tent, as recommended by the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples.
d. That targeted funding be made available to all Manitoba school divisions specifically to
enable them to provide a wide variety of professional development opportunities for exist-
ing teachers to become more aware of Aboriginal issues.

RECOMMENDATION #4: The High School Curriculum
We recommend:
a. That the high school curriculum in Manitoba, and in particular in those school divi-
sions with a significant Aboriginal student population, be thoroughly revamped in a
way consistent with the recommendation of the Aboriginal Teachers Circle: “The total
integration of Aboriginal perspectives in all areas of the curriculum” (Fitznor, 1997).
b. That this include at least the following:
i. Significant changes to the English, Social Studies and Science curriculums such
that Aboriginal content be totally integrated, and such that the use of Aboriginal
content be mandatory for teachers rather than optional as is now the case.
ii. The addition of more courses with specifically Aboriginal content: Aboriginal
History, Aboriginal Culture, Aboriginal Literature, and Aboriginal People and the
Colonial Experience, for example.
iii. The development of Elders-in-the-schools programs in those schools with sig-
nificant numbers of Aboriginal students.
iv. The development of Aboriginal artists-in-the-schools programs in those
schools with significant numbers of Aboriginal students.
v. The development of anti-racist courses.
page 54 | Aboriginal Education in Winnipeg Inner City High Schools

References
Abele, Frances, Caarilyn Dittburner and Katherine (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1987).
Graham. “Towards a Shared Understanding in the
Policy Discussion About Aboriginal Education”, in Barnett, W. Steven and Sarane Spence Boocock (eds.),
Marlene Brant Castellano, Lynne Davis and Louise Early Care and Education For Children in Poverty:
Lahache (eds), Aboriginal Education: Fulfilling the Promises, Programs, and Long-Term Results (Albany,
Promise (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2000). N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1998).
Aboriginal Healing Foundation. The Healing Has Begun. Battiste, Marie and Jean Barman (eds). The Circle
An Operational Update From the Aboriginal Healing Unfolds: First Nations Education in Canada
Foundation, May, 2002. (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1995).
Adams, David Wallace. “Fundamental Considerations: Battiste, Marie(ed). Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and
The Deep Meaning of Native American Schooling, Vision (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2000).
1880-1900”, Harvard Educational Review, 58, 1, Feb. Battiste, Marie. “Maintaining Aboriginal Identity,
1988, pp. 1-28. Language, and Culture in Modern Society”, in Battiste
Adams, Howard. Tortured People: The Politics of (ed), 2000.
Colonization, Revised Edition (Penticton, BC: Theytus Binda , K.P. with Sharilyn Calliou (eds). Aboriginal Education
Books Ltd., 1999). in Canada : A Study in Decolonization (Mississauga,
Ambert, Anne-Marie. The Web of Poverty: Psychosocial Ontario: Canadian Educators’ Press, 2001).
Perspectives (New York: The Haworth Press, 1998). Binda, KP. “Native Diaspora and Urban Education:
Anderson, Sherry. Aboriginal High School Graduates: An Intractable Problems”, in K.P. Binda with Sharilyn
Investigation of Contributing Factors to Academic Calliou (eds). Aboriginal Education in Canada : A
Achievement, Master of Education Thesis, University Study in Decolonization (Mississauga, Ontario:
of Manitoba, 1995. Canadian Educators’ Press, 2001).
Anyon, Jean. Ghetto Schooling: A Political Economy of Blank, Rebecca M.. It Takes a Nation: A New Agenda For
Urban Educational Reform (New York: Teachers Fighting Poverty (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
College Press, 1997). Press, 1997).
Assembly of First Nations. Breaking the Silence: An Bowlby, Jeffrey W. and Kathryn McMullen. At a
Interpretative Study of Residential School Impact and Crossroads: First Results for the 18 to 20- Year-old
Healing as Illustrated by the Stories of First Nations Cohort of the Youth in Transition Survey, Human
Individuals, 1994. Resources Development Canada and Statistics
Canada, January 2002.
Armstrong, Robin, Jeff Kennedy and Peter R. Oberle.
University Education and Economic Well- Being: Indian Brade, Cassandra R.M.. The Relationship Between
Achievements and Prospects (Canada. Indian and Participation in Aboriginal Cultural Activities/
Northern Affairs Canada, 1990). Languages and Educational Achievement for Native
Canadians: An Analysis of the 1991 Aboriginal Peoples
Backes, John S. “The American Indian High School Survey (Winnipeg: Master of Science Thesis, 2001).
Dropout Rate: A Matter of Style?” Journal of American
Indian Education, May 1993. Brady, Patrick. “Native Dropouts and non-Native
Dropouts in Canada: Two Solitudes or a Solitude
Banks, J.A. Multicultural Education: Theory and Practice Shared?”, Journal of American Indian Education,
(Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1994). Winter 1996.
Barman, Jean, Yvonne Hebert and Don McCaskill (eds.), Braroe, Niels Winther. Indian and White: Self Image and
Indian Education in Canada, Volumes 1 and 2

the Interaction in a Canadian Plains Community Canada. Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal
(Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, Peoples, Volume 3, Gathering Strength (Ottawa:
1975). Minister of Supply and Services Canada, 1996).
British Columbia Ministry of Education. “An Evaluation Canada. HRDC, and Manitoba, Aboriginal Affairs
of First Nations Education in North Okanagan- Secretariat. Aboriginal People in Manitoba, 2000.
Shuswap SD 83” (http://www.bced.gov.bc.ca/abed/ (Canada and Manitoba, 2002).
readings/sd83/interv.htm)
Carlson, Dennis. “Stories of Colonial and
British Columbia. Department of Education, Aboriginal Postcolonial Education” in Michelle Fine, Lois
Education Branch and Special Programs Branch. Weis, Linda C. Powell and L. Mun Wong(eds). Off
Over-Representation of Aboriginal Students Reported White: Readings on Race, Power and Society (New
With Behaviour Disorders, A Report to the Ministry of York: Routledge, 1997).
Education, British Columbia, April, 2001.
Robert T. Carter. “Is White a Race? Expressions of White
British Columbia. Department of Education, Aboriginal Racial Identity”, in Michelle Fine, Lois Weis, Linda C.
Education Branch. “Additional Considerations Powell and L. Mun Wong(eds). Off White: Readings on
Arising From the Report on the Over-Representation Race, Power and Society (New York: Routledge, 1997).
of Aboriginal Students Reported With Behaviour
Castellano, Marlene Brant, Lynne Davis, and Louise
Disorders” (Nov, 2001).
Lahache (eds). Aboriginal Education: Fulfilling the
British Columbia. Ministry of Education, Native Promise (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2000).
Education Branch. Native Indian Education Projects
Catterall, James. On the Social Costs of Dropping Out of
and Programs in B.C. Schools (Victoria, BC: Ministry
School, Stanford Education Policy Institute,
of Education, 1989).
December 1985.
Brown, Joletta. BEMA Training and Management
City of Winnipeg Community and Race Relations
Consulting Group Inc. Children of the Earth High School
Committee. Brief Presented to the Royal Commission
Formative Review 1993-94, Final Report, prepared for
on Aboriginal Peoples, June 3, 1993, Winnipeg.
the Winnipeg School Division No 1, June 1994.
Clarke, Ardy Sixkiller. “The American Indian Child:
Bryde, John F. The Indian Student: A Study of Scholastic
Victims of the Culture of Poverty or Cultural
Failure and Personality Conflict (Vermilion, South
Discontinuity”, in Ronald W. Taylor and Margaret C.
Dakota: Dakota Press, 1970).
Wang (eds.), Social and Emotional Adjustment and
Burns, George E. “Inclusiveness and Relevance in First Family Relations in Ethnic Minority Families
Nations/Public Education System Schooling: It’s All (Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates,
About Praxis of Aboriginal Self-Determination in the 1997), pp.63-81.
Tuition Agreement Education Field”, Canadian
Cleary, Linda Miller and Thomas D. Peacock. Collected
Journal of Native Studies, xx, 1, 2000, 139-180.
Wisdom: American Indian Education (Boston: Allyn
Cajate, Gregory. Look to the Mountain: An Ecology of and Bacon, 1998).
Indigenous Education (Durango, Colorado: Kivaki
Coles, Gerald, Reading Lessons: The Debate Over Literacy
Press, 1994).
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1998).
Canada. HRDC and Statistics Canada. At a Crossroads:
Courchene, Mary. “Children of the Earth High School:
First Results for the 18 to 20 Year Old Cohort of the
Making Education Relevant and Meaningful to
Youth in Transition Survey, 2002.
Aboriginal Students”, in Fitznor, 1997, pp. 51-61.
Canada. Report of the Auditor General of Canada, April, 2000.
City of Winnipeg Community and Race Relations
Canada. House of Commons. Sharing the Knowledge: The Committee. Brief Presented to the Royal Commission
Path To Success and Equal Opportunities in Education, on Aboriginal Peoples, June 3, 1993, Winnipeg.
Report of the Standing Committee on Aboriginal Affairs
Culleton, Beatrice. In Search of April Raintree (Winnipeg:
and Northern Development, Sub-Committee on
Pemmican Publishers, 1984).
Aboriginal Education, June 1996.

Cummins, Jim. “Empowering Minority Students: A Frideres, J.B. and W.J. Reeves. “Indian Education: An
Framework for Intervention”, Harvard Educational Alternative Program”, in Sonia Morris, Keith McLeod
Review, 71,4,Winter 2001, 649-675. and Marcel Danesi (eds), Aboriginal Languages and
Education: The Canadian Experience (Oakville,
Danziger, Sheldon H., Gary D. Sandefur and Daniel H.
Ontario: Mosaic Press, 1993).
Weinberg(eds.) Confronting Poverty: Prescriptions For
Change (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Friedel, Tracy. “The Role of Aboriginal Parents in Public
Press, 1994). Education: Barriers to Change in an Urban Setting”,
Canadian Journal of Native Education, 23, 2, 1999, pp
Deiter, Constance. From Our Mothers’ Arms: The
139-158.
Intergenerational Impact of Residential Schools in
Saskatchewan (Toronto: United Church Publishing Friere, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York:
House, 1999). Herder and Herder, 1970).
Deyhle, Donna and Karen Swisher. “Research in Friere, Paulo. Education for Critical Consciousness (New
American Indian and Alaska Native Education: From York: The Continuum Publishing Company, 1981).
Assimilation to Self-Determination”, in Review of
Genovese, Eugene. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves
Research in Education, 22, 1997, pp. 113-194.
Made (New York: Pantheon, 1974).
Douglas, Vernon R. “The Education of Urban Native
Ghosh, Ratna. Redefining Multicultural Education, Second
Children: The Sacred Circle Project” in Barman,
Edition (Nelson: 2002)
Jean, Yvonne Hebert and Don McCaskill (eds.),
Indian Education in Canada, Volumes 1 and 2 Giroux, Henry. Post Modernism, Feminism and Cultural
(Vancouver: University of British Columbia Politics; Redrawing Educational Boundaries (Albany:
Press, 1987). State University of New York Press, 1991).
Feagin, Joe R. Racist America: Roots, Current Realities and Henry Giroux. Border Crossings: Cultural Workers and the
Future Reparations (New York: Routledge, 2000). Politics of Education (NY: Routledge, 1993).
Fine, Michelle, Lois Weis, Linda C. Powell and L. Mun Giroux, Henry. “Educational Reform and the Politics of
Wong(eds). Off White: Readings on Race, Power and Teacher Empowerment”, in Kretovics, Joseph and
Society (New York: Routledge, 1997). Edward J. Nussel. Transforming Urban Education
(Needham Heights, Massachusetts: Allyn and
First Nations Education Council, School District No. 73
Bacon, 1994).
(Kamloops/Thompson).“Improving School Success
For First Nations Students”, First Nations Education Godfrey, John, Gary Partington, Kaye Richer and Mort
Study (http://www.bced.gov.bc.ca/abed/readings/iss Harslett. “Perceptions of Their Teachers by Aboriginal
/toc.htm) Students”, Issues in Educational Research, Volume 11,
2001.
Fitznor, Laara (ed), Education as a Healing Practice, 1995
Conference at the RRCC sponsored by the Aboriginal Goulet, Linda. “Two Teachers of Aboriginal Students:
Teachers’ Circle (Winnipeg: Occasional Joint Effective Practice in Sociohistorical Realities”.
Publication, Department of Educational Canadian Journal of Native Education 25, 1, 2001, pp.
Administration and Foundations, Faculty of 68-84.
Education, University of Manitoba, 1997).
Graveline, Fyre Jean. Circle Works: Transforming
Fordham, Signithia. “Racelessness as a Factor in Black Eurocentric Consciousness (Halifax: Fernwood
Students’ School Success: Pragmatic Strategy or Publishing, 1998).
Pyrrhic Victory?”, Harvard Educational Review, 58, 1,
February 1988, pp. 54-84. Haig-Brown, Celia. Resistance and Renewal: Surviving the
Indian Residential School (Vancouver: Tillicum
Fordham, Signithia and John Ogbu “Black Students’ Library, 1988).
School Success: Coping With the ‘Burden of ‘Acting
White’”, The Urban Review, Vol. 18, No. 3, 1986, pp. Hart, Michael. Seeking Mino-Pimatisiwin: An
176-206. Aboriginal Approach to Helping (Halifax: Fernwood
Publishing, 2002).

Hesch, Rick. “Teacher Education and Aboriginal Address to University of Saskatoon, Feb. 27, 1985.
Opposition” in Battiste, Marie and Jean Barman (eds).
Kohl, Herbert. I Won’t Learn From You (New York: The
The Circle Unfolds: First Nations Education in Canada
New Press, 1994).
(Vancouver: UBC Press, 1995).
Kohl, Herbert. “I won’t Learn From You: Confronting
Hess, Frederick M., Spinning Wheels: The Politics of Urban
Student Resistance”, in Rethinking Our Classrooms:
School Reform (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings
Teaching For Equity and Justice (Milwaukee:
Institute, 1999).
Rethinking Our Schools, 1994).
hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the
Kozol, Jonathan. Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s
Practice of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 1994).
Schools (New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1991).
Heather, Hunter, “In the Face of Poverty: What a
Kretovics, Joseph and Edward J. Nussel. Transforming
Community School Can Do”, in Jim Silver (ed.),
Urban Education (Needham Heights, Massachusetts:
Solutions That Work: Fighting Poverty in Winnipeg
Allyn and Bacon, 1994).
(Winnipeg and Halifax: Canadian Centre for Policy
Alternatives-Mb. and Fernwood Publishing, 2000). KSI Research International Inc. Understanding the Early
Years: Early Childhood Development in Winnipeg
Hudson, Pete and Brad McKenzie.“Child Welfare and Native
(School Division No. 1), Applied Research Branch,
People: The Extension of Colonialism”, The Social
Strategic Policy, Human Resources Development
Worker/Le Travailleur Social,Vol. 49, No. 2, Summer 1981.
Canada, November 2001.
Hull, Jeremy. Aboriginal Post-Secondary Education and
Lawrence, Sandra M. and Beverly Daniel Tatum. “White
Labour Market Outcomes, Canada, 1996 (Ottawa:
Educators as Allies: Moving From Awareness to
Department of Indian Affairs and Northern
Action”, in Michelle Fine, Lois Weis, Linda C. Powell
Development, 2000).
and L. Mun Wong (eds) Off White: Readings on Race,
Hull, Jeremy. “Socioeconomic Status and Native Power, and Society (New York: Routledge, 1997).
Education in Canada”, Canadian Journal of Native
Leadership in Education Accountability Dialogue. A
Education, 17,1,1990,1-13.
Discussion Paper Regarding a Framework For An
Jeffries, Rhonda, Mary Nix and Carson Singer. “Urban Urban Aboriginal Education Strategy, Winnipeg,
American Indians ‘Dropping’ Out of Traditional High November, 2001.
Schools: Barriers and Bridges to Success”, The High
Lee, Jodi. Understanding the Early Years: Results of the
School Journal, Feb/March, 2002.
Community Mapping Study for the Children in
Kanu, Yatta. “In Their Own Voices: First Nations Students Winnipeg (School Division No 1), A Project of the
Identify Some Cultural Mediators of Their Learning in Applied Research Branch Human Resources
the Formal School System”, Alberta Journal of Development Canada, November 2001.
Educational Research, Vol. XLV111, No. 2, 2002, pp. 1-24.
Lezubski, Darren. Note on Aboriginal Youth Educational
Kirkness, Verna J. “Aboriginal Education in Canada: A Attainment Levels, Social Planning Council of
Retrospective and a Prospective”, Our Schools, Our Winnipeg, July, 1999.
Selves, Vol. 10, No.3, April 2001, pp. 97-121.
Lezubski, Darren. Aboriginal Population: Winnipeg
Kirkness, Verna J. “Native Indian Teachers: A Key to Census Metropolitan Area, 1971-2006, Social Planning
Progress,” in Canadian Journal of Native Education, Council of Winnipeg, 1998.
23, 1, 1999, pp. 57-63.
Lezubski, Darren, Jim Silver and Errol Black. “High and
Kirkness, Verna J. First Nations and Schools: Triumphs Rising: The Growth of Poverty in Winnipeg’s Inner
and Struggles (Toronto: Canadian Education City”, in Jim Silver (ed). Solutions That Work: Fighting
Association, 1992). Poverty in Winnipeg (Halifax and Winnipeg:
Fernwood Books and Canadian Centre for Policy
Kirkness, Verna J. Evaluation Report of Indians in Federal and
Alternatives-Manitoba, 2000).
Provincial Schools in Manitoba (Ottawa: DIAND, 1978).
Littlebear, Leroy, “Jagged Worldviews Colliding”, in
Kirkness, Verna J. “Indian Teachers—A Key to Progress”,

Battiste, Marie(ed). Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Bilingual Programme Pilot Project: A Student
Vision (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2000). Evaluation, December, 1975.
Locust, Carol. “Wounding the Spirit: Discrimination and Manitoba. Report of the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry of
Traditional American Indian Belief Systems”, Harvard Manitoba, Associate Chief Justice A.C. Hamilton and
Educational Review, 58, 3, August, 1988, pp. 315-330. Associate Chief Judge C.M. Sinclair, 1991.
Lofthouse, Norma. Effective Schools Research: A Review of Manitoba. Department of Health. The Health of
the Literature, Aboriginal Education Branch, Ministry Manitoba’s Children, by Brian Postl, 1995.
of Education, BC., May, 1999.
Massey, Douglas and Nancy Denton. American
Longboat, Diane. “First Nations Control of Education: Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the
The Path to our Survival as Nations”, in Barman, Jean, Underclass (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University
Yvonne Hebert and Don McCaskill (eds.), Indian Press, 1993).
Education in Canada (Vancouver: University of
McAlpine, Lynn. “Teacher Training for the New
British Columbia Press, 1987).
Wilderness: Quantum Leaps”, in Binda , K.P. with
Machamer, Ann Marie and Enid Gruber. “Secondary Sharilyn Calliou (eds). Aboriginal Education in
School, Family, and Educational Risk: Comparing Canada : A Study in Decolonization (Mississauga,
American Indian Adolescents and Their Peers”,The Ontario: Canadian Educators’ Press, 2001).
Journal of Educaitonal Research, July/August, 1998,
McCain, Margaret and J. Fraser Mustard, Co-Chairs.
vol. 91, no 6.
Reversing the Real Brain Drain, Early Years Study, Final
Mackay, Ronald and Lawrence Myles. Native Student Report, April, 1999.
Dropouts in Ontario Schools (Toronto: Ontario
McCaskill, Don. “Revitalization of Indian Culture: Indian
Ministry of Education, 1989).
Cultural Survival Schools”, in Barman, Jean, Yvonne
Mackay, Ron and Lawrence Myles. “A Major Challenge Hebert and Don McCaskill (eds.), Indian Education in
for the Education System: Aboriginal Retention and Canada (Vancouver: University of British Columbia
Dropout”, in Marie Battiste and Jean Barman (eds). Press, 1987).
The Circle Unfolds: First Nations Education in Canada
McCluskey, Ken W., Philip A. Baker, Mike
(Vancouver, UBC Press, 1995).
Bergsgaard, and Andrea McCluskey. Creative
Mackenzie, Michael. “Missing From the News ”, in Problem Solving in the Trenches: Interventions
Manitoba Alternatives, Vol.2, #4, 2002. With At-Risk Populations. The Creative Problem
Solving Group, Buffalo New York, Monograph
Mackie, Robert (ed.). Literacy and Revolution: the
#308, February, 2001.
Pedagogy of Paulo Friere (London: Pluto Press, 1980).
McLaren, Peter. “Culture or Canon? Critical Pedagogy
Maeroff, Gene. “Withered Hopes, Stillborn Dreams: The
and the Politics of Literacy”, Harvard Educational
Dismal Panaroma of Urban Schools”, in Kretovics,
Review, 58, 2, May, 1988, 213-34.
Joseph and Edward J. Nussel. Transforming Urban
Education (Needham Heights, Massachusetts: Allyn McPartland, James M.. “Dropout Prevention in Theory
and Bacon, 1994). and Practice” in Robert J. Rossi, (ed). Schools and
Students at Risk (New York Teachers College Press,
Manitoba. Aboriginal and Northern Affairs. Education
1994).
and Training As the Bridge to Employment , April, 2001.
McWhorter, John, Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black
Manitoba Education and Training. Native Education. A
America (New York: Perennial, 2001).
Parents’ Guide to Help Children Succeed: Seeking A
Balance. 1993. Meier, Deborah. The Power of Their Ideas: Lessons For
America From a Small School in Harlem (Boston:
Manitoba. Native Affairs Secretariat. Manitoba Northern
Beacon Press, 1995).
Affairs. Profile of Manitoba’s Aboriginal Population, 1995.
Melnechenko , Lorri and Dr. Helen Horsman. Factors
Manitoba. Native Education Branch, Manitoba
That Contribute to Aboriginal Students Success in
Department of Education. The Manitoba Native

School in Grades Six to Nine. Prepared for Ceremonies on the Prairies (Winnipeg: The University
Saskatchewan Education, December, 1998. of Manitoba Press, 1994).
Miller, J.R.. Shingwauk’s Vision: A History of Native Ponting, J. Rick. “Public Opinion on Canadian Aboriginal
Residential Schools (Toronto: University of Toronto Issues, 1976-98: Persistence, Change, and Cohort
Press, 1996). Analysis”, Canadian Ethnic Studies, XXX11, No. 3,
2000, 44-75.
Milloy, John A. National Crime: The Canadian
Government and the Residential School System, Ponting, J. Rick. First Nations in Canada: Perspectives on
1879-1986 (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Opportunity, Empowerment, and Self- Determination
Press, 1999). (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1997).
Miron, Louis F.. “Postmodernism and the Politics of Poonwassie, D.H. “Parental Involvement as Adult
Racialized Identities”, in Rodolfo D. Torres, Louis F. Education: A Microstrategy for Change”, in Binda ,
Miron, and Jonathan Xavier Inda (eds), Race, Identity K.P. with Sharilyn Calliou (eds). Aboriginal Education
and Citizenship: A Reader (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell in Canada : A Study in Decolonization (Mississauga,
Publishers, 1999), pp. 79-100. Ontario: Canadian Educators’ Press, 2001).
Momaday, N. S., “Confronting Columbus Again”, in P. Regnier, Robert. “The Sacred Circle: An Aboriginal
Nabokov (ed.), Native American Testimony: A Approach to Healing Education at an Urban High
Chronicle of Indian-White Relations From Prophecy to School”, in Marie Battiste and Jean Barman (eds). The
the Present, 1492-1992 (New York: Viking, 1991). Circle Unfolds: First Nations Education in Canada
(Vancouver, UBC Press, 1995).
Montgomery, Alesia F. and Robert J. Rossi “Becoming at
Risk of Failure in America’s Schools”, in Robert J. Richards, John. Neighbours Matter: Poor Neighbourhoods
Rossi (ed). Schools and Students at Risk (New York: and Urban Aboriginal Policy (Ottawa: C.D. Howe
Teachers College Press, 1994). Institute, Commentary, No. 156, November, 2001).
Morrisette, Vern, Brad McKenzie and Larry Morrisette. Ross, David, and Paul Roberts. Income and Child Well-
“Towards An Aboriginal Model of Social Work Being: A New Perspective on the Poverty Debate
Practice: Cultural Knowledge and Traditional (Ottawa: CCSD, May 1999).
Practices,” in Canadian Social Work Review, 10, 1,
Ross, David. Education as an Investment for Indians on
1993, pp 91-108.
Reserves: The Causes of Their Poor Education Levels
National Indian Brotherhood. Indian Control of Indian and the Economic Benefits of Improving Them (Ottawa:
Education (1972). Canadian Council on Social Development, 1991).
Noley, Grayson. “The Cultural Context of American Indian Robinson-Zanartu, Carol and Juanita Majel-Dixon.
Education and its Relevance to Educational Reform “Parent Voices: American Indian Relationships with
Efforts”, in Robert J. Rossi (ed). Schools and Students at Schools”, Journal of American Indian Education, Vol.
Risk (New York: Teachers College Press, 1994). 36, #1, Fall 1996, pp. 33-54.
Ogbu, John, “Origins of Human Competence: A Rossi, Robert J.(ed). Schools and Students at Risk (New
Cultural-Ecological Perspective”, Child Development, York: Teachers College Press, 1994).
52, 1981, 413-429.
Rumberger , Russell W. and Katherine A. Larson.
Ogbu, John. Minority Education and Caste: The American “Keeping High-Risk Chicano Students in School” in
System in Cross-Cultural Perspective (New York: Rossi , Robert J.(ed). Schools and Students at Risk
Academic Press, 1978). (New York: Teachers College Press, 1994).
Page, Benjamin I. and James R. Simmons. What Rutstein, Nathan. The Racial Conditioning of our Children
Government Can Do: Dealing With Poverty and (Albion, Michigan: The National Resource Center for
Inequality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). the Healing of Racism, 2001).
Pettipas, Katherine. Severing the Ties That Bind: Sanders, Carol. “‘Hidden messages’ hinder fight against
Government Repression of Indigenous Religious poverty”, Winnipeg Free Press, April 29, 2002.

Saskatchewan. Department of Education. Indian and were afraid to ask)”, Reading Research Quarterly, 33,
Metis Education Advisory Committee. Partners in 1998, pp.338-355.
Action. Regina: Saskatchewan Education Department,
Statistics Canada. Leaving School: Results From a
December, 1991.
National Survey Comparing School Leavers and
Schaefer, Dennis, Regina’s Hidden Youth: Final Report, High School Graduates 18 to 20 Years of Age,
prepared for the Saskatchewan Instructional September 1993.
Development and Research Unit, July 1999.
Steinberg, Laurence. Beyond the Classroom: Why School
Schissel, Bernard. The Roots of Disadvantage: The Reform Has Failed and What Parents Need To Do (New
Differential Effects of Poverty on Rural and Urban York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).
Youth (Prepared for The Centre For Rural Studies and
Tatum, Beverly Daniel. Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting
Enrichment, St. Peter’s College, Muenster,
Together In The Cafeteria? (New York: Basic Books, 1999).
Saskatchewan, November 1997).
Tatum, Beverly Daniel. “Talking About Race, Learning
Schubert, Jan. Letter to Jim Silver, April 1, 2002.
About Racism: The Application of Racial Identity
Shkilnyk, Anastasia M. A Poison Stronger Than Love: The Development Theory in the Classroom”, Harvard
Destruction of an Ojibwa Community (New Haven Educational Review, 62, 1, Spring, 1992, pp. 1-24.
and London: Yale University Press, 1985).
Taylor, Donald M., Martha B. Crago and Lynn McAlpine.
Silver, Jim (ed). Solutions That Work: Fighting Poverty in “Toward Full Employment in Native Education:
Winnipeg (Halifax and Winnipeg: Fernwood Books and Unanticipated Challenges”, in The Canadian Journal
Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives-Manitoba, 2000). of Native Studies, xxi, 1 (2001) pp. 45-56.
Sloane-Seale, Atlanta, Lori Wallace and Benjamin Levin. Tymckak, M. Task Force and Public Dialogue on the Role of
“Educational Achievements and Labour Market the School. School Plus: A Vision for Children and
Outcomes of Students in the University of Manitoba Youth: Toward a New School, Community and Human
Access Program”, The Canadian Journal of Native Service Partnership in Saskatchewan. Final Report to
Studies, XX, 2, 2000, 347-370. the Minister of Education, Government of
Saskatchewan, February 28, 2001.
Smith, Graham Hingangaroa. “Maori Education:
Revolution and Transformative Action”, Canadian Union of New Brunswick Indians. A Study of Problems
Journal of Native Education, 24, 1, 2000. Encountered By Indian Youth of New Brunswick in
Obtaining an Education, August, 1972).
Social Planning Council of Winnipeg. The Impact of
Rented Housing Conditions on the Academic Valaskakis, Gail Guthrie. “Telling our own Stories: The
Performance of Elementary School Children in Two Role, Development, and Future of Aboriginal
Inner City School Catchment Areas in Winnipeg Communications”, in Marlene Brant, Lynne Davis and
(Dufferin and William Whyte), A Report Prepared for Louise Lahache (eds). Aboriginal Education: Fulfilling
the City of Winnipeg’s Community and Race the Promise (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2000).
Relations Committee, October, 1990.
Van Onselen, Charles. Chibaro: African Mine Labour in
Soldier, Lee Little.“Is There An ‘Indian’ in Your Classroom?”, Southern Rhodesia, 1900-1933 (London: Pluto
Phi Delta Kappan, Vol. 78, No. 8, April 1997. Press, 1976).
Spring, Joel. Deculturalization and the Struggle for Weis, L. (Ed) Class, Race and Gender in American Education
Equality: A Brief History of the Education of (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988).
Dominated Cultures in the United States, 2nd Edition
White, K. R. “The Relation Between Socioeconomic sta-
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997).
tus and Academic Achievement”, Psychological
Stahl, S.A., Duffy-Hester A.M. and Stahl, K. A. Bulletin, 91, 1982, 461-481.
“Everything You Wanted to Know About Phonics (but
Williams, Lorna. “Urban Aboriginal Education: The
Vancouver Experience”, in Castellano, Marlene Brant,
Lynne Davis, and Louise Lahache (eds). Aboriginal

Education: Fulfilling the Promise (Vancouver: UBC Press,
2000).
Wilson, William Julius. When Work Disappears: The World of the
New Urban Poor (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996).
Winnipeg. The Report of the Task Force on Race Relations to the
Board of Trustees of the Winnipeg School Division No. 1, July
1989.
The Winnipeg School Division No. 1 Urban Aboriginal Educational
Advisory Committee Sub-Committee Report, Louise
Chippeway, Chairperson, September 10, 1992, “Employment
and Education Equity Policy”.
Wood, Peter and W. Charles Clay. “Perceived Structural Barriers
and Academic Performance Among American Indian High
School Students”, Youth and Society, Vol. 28, No. 1, September
1996, 40-61.
Zigler, Edward and Susan Muenchow. Head Start: The Inside Story
of America’s Most Successful Educational Experiment (New
York: Basic Books, 1992).

Aboriginal Education in Inner City Winnipeg High Schools

Cargado por

Copyright:

Formatos disponibles

Aboriginal Education in Inner City Winnipeg High Schools

Cargado por

Información del documento

Descripción original:

Derechos de autor

Formatos disponibles

Compartir este documento

Compartir o incrustar documentos

Opciones para compartir

¿Le pareció útil este documento?

¿Este contenido es inapropiado?

Copyright:

Formatos disponibles

Aboriginal Education in Inner City Winnipeg High Schools

Cargado por

Copyright:

Formatos disponibles

Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives-

1.1 Purpose of the study 4

1.3 Aboriginal educational attainment 7

1.4 Methods by which we selected those whom we interviewed 9

1.5 A profile of those we interviewed 10

High school students 10

1.6 Parental Support 14

1.7 Goals and Expectations 16

1.8 Relationships with teachers 16

1.10 School Climate 22

1.12 Aboriginal students and part-time jobs 27

1.13 Employment expectations and school performance 28

1.14 The struggle to survive 28

1.15 Resisting school 29

1.16 Summary of our findings from the interviews 29

2.1 Colonialism and education 32

2.2 Aboriginal teachers and teacher training 41

2.3 Aboriginal curriculum 47

Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives | page 1

Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives | page 3

page 4 | Aboriginal Students in Winnipeg Inner City High Schools

1.2 The size and growth of the Aboriginal

Table One: The Growth of Manitoba’s Aboriginal Population, 1981-1996

1986 93,450 8.7

1991 116,200 10.6

1996 128,680 11.7

Source: Canada and Manitoba, 2002, p. 14.

Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives | page 5

Table Two: Aboriginal People in Winnipeg, 1951-1996

1961 1082 872

1971 4940 3858

1981 16,575 11,635

1991 35,150 18,575

1996 45,750 10,600 (5 years only)

Source: Statistics Canada, various years.

As of 1996, Aboriginal people constituted 7% of Winnipeg’s population. More than one-third,

page 6 | Aboriginal Students in Winnipeg Inner City High Schools

1.3 Aboriginal educational attainment: The proportion of

Table Three: Proportion of Aboriginal Youth (ages 15-24) Attending

National Average 50.4

Source: Canada and Manitoba, 2002, p.57.

Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives | page 7

Table Four: Proportion of Aboriginal Youth Neither Attending School Nor

Saskatchewan 26.3 35.3

Quebec 21.5 32.0

B.C. 16.2 27.2

Ontario 16.0 25.3

Source: Canada and Manitoba, 2002, pp 58-59.

page 8 | Aboriginal Students in Winnipeg Inner City High Schools

1.4 Methods by which we selected those whom

Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives | page 9

1.5 A profile of those we interviewed

page 10 | Aboriginal Students in Winnipeg Inner City High Schools

Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives | page 11

Table Six: School Leavers, By Sex and by Current Educational Status

page 12 | Aboriginal Students in Winnipeg Inner City High Schools

range 16-61 yrs 18-38 yrs 16-33 yrs 19-54 yrs

Time of leaving school:

median age 16/17 16/17 17 16