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'We Are All One People': Aboriginal Ed Without Borders

Student exchanges open eyes to indigenous experience, both shared and contrasting.

Katie Hyslop 7 Feb 2014Tyee Solutions Society

Katie Hyslop reports on education and youth issues for The Tyee Solutions Society.

This article was produced by Tyee Solutions Society in collaboration with Tides Canada Initiatives (TCI), with funding from the Vancouver Foundation. TCI and the Vancouver Foundation neither influence nor endorse the particular content of TSS' reporting. Other publications wishing to publish this story or other Tyee Solutions Society-produced articles, please see this website for contacts and information.

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Lynzii Taibossigai, an Anishnaabe woman from Ontario, learns to cook farine, a popular dish of the Macushi and Wapishiana, as part of an international youth internship in Guyana. Photo provided by Lynzii Taibossigai.

A year ago, Alissa Derrick wasn't coping with grey and chilly Vancouver. In Feb. 2013, along with three other Aboriginal Simon Fraser University students, Griffith was in sunny Brisbane, Australia, attending classes for a week at the city's Griffith University. For the undergraduate pursuing a degree in criminology and First Nations Studies, it was a chance to meet local indigenous leaders, talk with indigenous students and professors, and compare their experience down under to her own in Canada.

It was eye-opening. After finding similarities between her culture and traditions and those of the Aborigine people she met, and comparing their influence on Griffith University's overall culture to First Nations' presence on her own campus, Derrick came away with a new appreciation for the global nature of indigenous struggles.

"It definitely taught me that it's not just in Canada," she said. "Canada's not the only one dealing with difficulties in indigenous representation, justice issues. It's across the world."

For many indigenous Canadian youth, such an opportunity is rare. The first time many leave home, even for a vacation, is to attend post-secondary school; if they live in an urban centre with good college or university choices, they may not ever leave. There are several potential reasons for the lack of foreign exposure, from generational poverty that rules out expensive trips, to the cultural legacy of a repressive section of the the Indian Act, which at one time banned some First Nations people from travelling even short distances to a neighbouring reserve without permission from an Indian Agent.

But things are changing. Post-secondary institutions and governments alike now encourage students to travel, both by assisting Canadians to study abroad and welcoming international students to Canadian schools.

Some indigenous travel programs have started by fluke, after a Canadian institution happened to pair with a school in another country with a strong indigenous population. That was how Derrick's week at Griffith came about, says William Lindsay, director of SFU's Office of Aboriginal Peoples: "It started with a big university-to-university agreement that was signed between SFU and Griffith University, and out of that a sub-agreement was signed involving indigenous exchange."

Ten Aborigine students, Griffith University faculty, and an Aborigine elder attended the agreement's Vancouver signing in Sept. 2011. They spent the next 10 days attending classes at SFU, visiting other campuses including the University of British Columbia and First Nations colleges, meeting members of B.C. First Nations and Metis communities, and touring the region.

Lindsay hopes longer exchanges are coming soon, possibly in the form of a field school being jointly developed by SFU, Griffiths, and the University of Canterbury, in New Zealand. It would offer classes on the preservation of indigenous languages, ethnobotany, and archeology, with the location rotating around the three countries yearly and the other institutions sending students.

But that experience would only be for one semester. Many Canadian universities offer longer-term exchanges for all enrolees, though with no explicit goal of connecting indigenous students. It was through one of those that Cate Pitawanakwat, a now-graduated anthropology and psychology student at UBC, spent a year and a half in Australia studying indigenous culture and politics at two different universities in 2008.

Stereotypes down under

An Ojibwe woman originally from the Great Lakes region, Pitawanakwat had already spent over 20 years visiting different indigenous groups all over Turtle Island -- a term several indigenous nations use for North America -- before attending UBC.

She says many people incorrectly expect all Aboriginal people in Canada to have the same culture, traditions, and experiences. She knew better, but adds that even she was caught off guard by how different First Nations in B.C. were from her own.

"Because my community is one of the largest First Nations in Canada, we never had to struggle in the ways that the individuals here do," she said. "We grew up speaking our language, and here they're fighting for their language, and have to partner with one another because their communities are small. Their largest, they brag about having 800 for their population, and ours is almost 9,000."

The wider cultural diversity of Vancouver had also shaped Pitawanakwat's education. But by the time she applied to study abroad through Go Global, UBC's student exchange program, she hadn't yet left North America. She knew it was time to travel abroad.

Pitawanakwat settled on Queensland University in Brisbane, a smaller school than UBC, so as not to feel "like just a number." She brought gifts from both the Musqueam and Ojibwe peoples for the local First Nations she hoped to meet. But she got early hints that she was a long way from home when after three weeks she still hadn't found anyone to give them to.

"Here," she said of Canada, "I know I can contact any First Nation: I can look at a friendship centre. In Australia, I didn't know how to do that.

"It took me three weeks to find out there was an Aboriginal unit [on the Queensland campus]. It wasn't advertised and I didn't know how to look for it. I put 'indigenous people' in my search on the website and the website wasn't bringing up the Aboriginal unit."

When Pitawanakwat did eventually contact a few local indigenous communities, she said she was treated like family. The reception she received from many non-indigenous peers and professors was quite different. Not only were they unaware of their own university's Aboriginal department, they had stereotypical ideas about indigenous people in North America.

Pitawanakwat introduced herself to every new class that she took in her native language. Her classmates and faculty seemed very interested at first, asking her to do the same for other groups. "I thought it was because they wanted to learn about my culture," she recalled. "But really they just wanted to say, 'Lookit, there's a Red Indian.' And that's what they called me, a Red Indian. And some of the questions. 'Are you an alcoholic?' 'Do you live in teepees?' 'Do you shoot with bow and arrows?' Very stereotypical Hollywood."

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Pitawanakwat found the same "very disrespectful" attitude reflected in the Australian government's treatment of Aborigines. Canada provides some support for Aboriginal languages and cultures; Australia offered no equivalent. Instead, it seemed to her the government did everything in its power not to help the indigenous people.

"If the indigenous people would find a way to challenge the government, the government would change the laws," she said. Until then, Australia's Aborigines shared similar challenges with Aboriginals in Canada, from substance abuse to low graduation rates. "It was very sad to see."

Still the experience proved rewarding overall. "I thought I was reaching the end of my journey for education, and I [saw] I'm just scratching the surface," she said. Currently working as the career and employment resources director at the Victoria Native Friendship Centre, Pitawanakwat's travels have spurred a desire to work abroad: "I want to eventually go international looking at indigenous issues. Before, my views were more local: now I'm looking at a global scale."

Support from governments

Meanwhile, most of Canada's provinces and its federal government are throwing open the country's doors to international students, whose tuition rates are set much higher than domestic students. Canada has set a goal of doubling the number of international youth studying here by 2022. British Columbia has plans to increase its international student population by 50 per cent by 2016. Both governments are also encouraging their own students to seek at least a semester outside of the country by offering scholarships and grants.

Such opportunities can be uniquely valuable for indigenous students, believes Georges Sioui, the leading indigenous scholar on Canadian history from a First Nations' point of view. It's something he first noticed while teaching at the Saskatchewan Federated Indian College (SFIC) -- First Nations University today -- in the early 1990s.

The college's Regina campus was on the grounds of the University of Saskatchewan, and credits could be transferred between them. U of S boasted a significant international student body, including many indigenous Latin Americans who took some SFIC classes. "We had 12 students every year from central and south America and the Caribbean, which was a factor of attractiveness for our own students in Canada," said Sioui, who taught at SFIC at the time. "They knew they could come and be in contact with their relatives in South America and learn from them."

Unexpected lessons

One lesson Sioui shared with his students upended their expectation that colonialism had injured southern indigenous people more than it had those in Canada. The reverse often turned out to be true.

As Sioui sees it, Canada's First Nations get "help" from the federal government in the form of social assistance and dubious deals that trade unfettered access to natural resources on indigenous land for a few jobs. But this "help" has also led to dependence on government dollars, subjection to government restrictions, poverty, poor housing, and unemployment in indigenous communities, as well as substance abuse, mental illness, and violence.

By contrast, while indigenous communities in the south were sometimes attacked by government paramilitaries, they were otherwise left alone to practice their customs and live out their lives as they saw fit. Sioui remembers North American Lakota students saying, "'We started out this course thinking we would be helping our poor relatives in south and central America, but it turns out that they have even more to give us than we have to give them, because we've been spoiled and weakened by all these gratuities and so-called help from our own governments who only want to see us disappear.'"

Independent exchange

The advantages of international learning in an indigenous setting aren't limited to post-secondary students. Lynzii Taibossigai was taking a year off from Laurentian University, where she was studying Spanish, Latin, and Ojibwe, when she was accepted into the Ghost River Rediscovery international youth internship program.

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Ghost Rivers Rediscovery International Youth Intern Lynzii Taibossigai facilitates a leadership activity for students of Bina Hill, an Amerindian school in Guyana. Photo provided by Lynzii Taibossigai.

With five other youth, she spent five months in South America under the program. Taibossigai and another intern spent their time at the Bina Hill Institute for Research, Training, and Development, near the Amerindian village of Annai, Guyana; the other four were split between Brazil and Bolivia.

"My background is in tourism," Taibossigai said. "I have a college diploma for hotel and resort administration. And they're really big on ecotourism down there, so with the help of the director we created an ecotourism class with the students, an introduction to ecotourism, and I taught that from September till end of January."

This was the first that time Taibossigai, a member of the Anishinaabe nation, had left Canada. It was, she admits, a "huge culture shock." "I learned to be so much more grateful and proud of where we come from," she said.

"I think First Nations students in the majority have pretty good opportunities compared to other indigenous people around the world, and I think if they recognize how good we do actually have it here in Canada, that maybe they would be a little bit more grateful."

But the experience also changed her mind about Canadians abroad: specifically Canadian mining practices that directly affected the town where she was working. One of the teachers at Bina Hill lost part of his property to a mining road in front of his house. Students, faculty, and the interns all wrote letters to the Guyanese government asking for a stop to construction, but the road was built. "It was the first time I became ashamed of Canada and being Canadian," Taibossigai said.

Learning from 'the original school'

Now in its 20th year, Ghost River Rediscovery runs camps and internships for indigenous and non-indigenous children and youth. They're modeled, according to founder Michael Lickers, on the even older Rediscovery summer camp that was started on Haida Gwaii in 1978, and where Lickers worked in the early 1990s. Those camps were a response to local indigenous youth's loss of their culture, as well as increasing substance abuse and petty crime among youth of all backgrounds on the island.

Lickers started Ghost River for similar reasons, after job stints as a criminal court worker and working with youth that required specialized care for diagnoses like Attention Deficit Disorder and Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. He bases Ghost River's programming on the principles he learned at Haida Gwaii: understanding ourselves as human beings and where we come from; connecting with our own and others' cultures; and reconnecting with what he calls the "original school" -- the land.

A Mohawk man who grew up in a Canadian military family, Lickers guesses that he'd seen about three-quarters of the world by the age of 16. Now he's made sure that international youth trips and internships to foreign countries are part of Ghost River's programming, unlike some other Rediscovery camps (there are currently 21 in Canada, the U.S. and Thailand).

He finds many similarities in the issues facing Canada's indigenous people and others internationally. He cites the example of the first road built to connect Guyana's capital, Georgetown, to Brazil. A colonialist construction over a northern savannah, the road cut across the territories of 10 different indigenous nations. "That's no different than the first railways coming through, or the first initial contact happening in Canada," said Lickers.

Even Europe's countries have indigenous issues, he notes. Estonia suffered a loss of culture and tradition under Russian control; Austria's original inhabitants struggle to retain their culture and way of life against French, Italian and German influences.

Lickers believes international exposure is a must for any youth interested in future leadership.

Although Taibossigai is interested in doing more travelling, she's currently more focused on leadership. After switching schools and her major, and enrolling in the indigenous environmental education program at Trent University in Peterborough, she's also taken facilitator training with Rediscovery in B.C. Today, when she's not working on finishing her degree, Taibossigai works with groups that organize cultural camps and indigenous and non-indigenous youth exchanges across Canada.

Ghost Rivers has lost its funding from the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) for overseas internships since Taibossigai's internship. The federal government refocused CIDA programs to support trade and investment goals, eliminating its International Youth Program. Funding from the private Ruperts Land Institute continues to support Ghost River's internships for Metis youth in Europe.

Nonetheless, Lickers is saddened at the lost opportunities for youth to visit and learn from other indigenous groups. "I think there should be more opportunity. And if any government people are reading this," he adds, "it would go far and wide to say that Canada's still promoting youth leadership exchanges."

Georges Sioui, who saw the benefit of pan-indigenous student contacts during his days in Saskatchewan, considers them an experience that everyone can learn from. "I was brought up with the belief that we are all one people. We feel very lonesome and powerless when we are just a Huron, just a Cree, just a Nisga, or just a Migmaw," he said. "But when we are able to speak with other First Nations and exchange with them, we become more free and more joyful because we don't feel alone anymore."

Spreading that indigenous sensibility more widely, he suggests, might help "create a better, stronger sensitivity towards the world, and make people realize that we're all inter-related and we're all equal, to admire our differences and be happy when we see someone different." Age-old wisdom for a global era.  [Tyee]

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