The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada
In our inquiry, we have taken note that many Indigenous stories have been erased. In a previous note, I was wondering how many stories there are today about hardships faced by Indigenous people that are not widely available to the public, or are just not sought out for by others. As I was walking around our chosen place, I wondered how to use these stories to create change within education. Within the Calls to Action Document there are many demands to the federal government to redress the legacy of residential school. Although the demands are addressed to the government, we, as future primary teachers, should be aware of the education calls to action and be prepared to advocate for and implement them in any way we can. I am listing them in this post to use for reference:
- We call upon the Government of Canada to repeal Section 43 of the Criminal Code of Canada.
- We call upon the federal government to develop with Aboriginal groups a joint strategy to eliminate educational and employment gaps between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Canadians.
- We call upon the federal government to eliminate the
discrepancy in federal education funding for First
Nations children being educated on reserves and those
First Nations children being educated off reserves. - We call upon the federal government to prepare and
publish annual reports comparing funding for the
education of First Nations children on and off reserves,
as well as educational and income attainments of
Aboriginal peoples in Canada compared with nonAboriginal people. - We call on the federal government to draft new
Aboriginal education legislation with the full
participation and informed consent of Aboriginal
peoples. The new legislation would include a
commitment to sufficient funding and would
incorporate the following principles:
i. Providing sufficient funding to close identified
educational achievement gaps within one
generation.
ii. Improving education attainment levels and success
rates.
iii. Developing culturally appropriate curricula.
iv. Protecting the right to Aboriginal languages,
including the teaching of Aboriginal languages as
credit courses.
v. Enabling parental and community responsibility,
control, and accountability, similar to what parents
enjoy in public school systems.
vi. Enabling parents to fully participate in the education
of their children. vii. Respecting and honouring Treaty relationships.
- We call upon the federal government to provide
adequate funding to end the backlog of First Nations
students seeking a post-secondary education. - We call upon the federal, provincial, territorial,
and Aboriginal governments to develop culturally
appropriate early childhood education programs for
Aboriginal families.
Just from reading this, I feel like as a teacher I should know what Section 43 of the Criminal Code of Canada is; I do not. This serves as a reminder that teachers should make more of an active effort to educate themselves on issues that Indigenous populations face. We should also advocate for items on this list. If more teachers demanded things like protecting the right to indigenous languages, perhaps more opportunities would be made available. Teachers can also strive to incorporate many things from this list in their classrooms. For example, the can enable parents to fully participate in the education of their children. Parents can perhaps be welcomed into the classroom to share their knowledge with the class. We can make an effort to learn about the cultures of Indigenous groups in our area to develop culturally appropriate lessons and unit plans. This document, while not officially a narrative, is built by those whose stories have been erased since colonialism, and as educators, we have a responsibility to do the best we can to listen to those stories.