Indian School Road

by Chris Benjamin

  During the first workshop, participants were asked to write their life stories in a stream-of-consciousness purge, never removing pen from paper, “for I don’t know how long,” O’Keefe says. They had to read their deepest, darkest memories to strangers, over and over again, until they had each other’s stories memorized, in an emotionally intense atmosphere. But in doing so, they “let some of this stuff go,” and they better understood how even seemingly minor childhood pain haunts you. “Here I am at seventy years old learning this about myself…I slept less and ate more.” The Sisters thought they were doing the workshop to learn how to help Mi’kmaq, but it was themselves the Sisters had to learn about.

  Lancaster was eager for the final session, the chance to sit knee to knee with survivors and express her sorrow for “not knowing what was happening,” for “feeling, as an adult, complicit even in things that happen today.” At the TRC events the Sisters had felt like spectators, and longed for the chance to say how upset, touched, and concerned they were—that they cared. Returning to Spirit gave them that chance. “Some of the women that I met…I knew before, but I never knew they had been to residential school…They never mentioned it,” O’Keefe says. She told these women honestly that when she first came to Nova Scotia she understood Shubenacadie to be nothing more than a boarding school for First Nations children. She’d lived with Sisters who’d taught there and they’d given no indication of anything being amiss there. O’Keefe and Lancaster felt that the TRC session was about truth, but not reconciliation. Returning to Spirit was a step toward true reconciliation.

  The Sisters heard from survivors that they needed to take what they’d learned and tell other Sisters. As a result, they are working with Sister Donna Geernaert to develop an education plan for the Sisters of Charity in Canada and the United States, to help the organization understand its role in the residential schools, the damage done, and its responsibility to reconcile. “Some still are struggling with it, to believe that it happened,” O’Keefe says. “We, out of ignorance, let some awful stuff happen. How do we prevent that happening down the road and what can we do now? How can we be really respectful of the First Nations and their culture?”

  As part of their reconciliation efforts, the Sisters have become involved in programming for First Nations communities. But they are careful to only do so when asked, rather than rush in with their own ideas. They were invited in 2012 to be part of Our Dreams Matter, a national movement for safe, comfortable schools with culturally based education for young Aboriginal people. First Nations schools get less money per student than provincial schools and no funding for “extras” like libraries, computers, or language training. And the unhealthy buildings of the residential school era, caused by Indian Affairs’s penny-pinching, remain a problem. Today, First Nations students deal with mould, rodents, fumes, high carbon dioxide levels, and a lack of heat.

  O’Keefe has attended court dates about Jordan’s Principle, which calls on governments—at any level—to pay for whatever services are needed by an Aboriginal child in crisis, without arguing about whether the federal government or province is ultimately responsible. No child should be a victim of red tape. The principle was unanimously passed in the House of Commons in 2007, but neither the provinces/territories nor the federal government has followed it. In April 2013, Canada appealed a federal court decision enforcing the principle. The Sisters have also supported the Mi’kmaw Native Friendship Centre’s Kitpu program for Mi’kmaw youth in Halifax. When O’Keefe saw on Facebook that the program had lost its funding and workers were scrambling to find new income, the Sisters stepped up. “I just have said I want to support in whatever way I can,” O’Keefe says. “We also write to the Prime Minister or the Minister of Aboriginal Affairs to remind them of the commitment to equity in education and culture and health care.”

  Moving Education

  “Education, which was once used to destroy our culture, is now a tool to empower us.”

  – Survivor testimony at the TRC

  “Indian Control Of Indian Education”

  When the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School closed, there were still nearly eight thousand children in fifty-two remaining residential schools. Another four thousand children attended public schools but boarded in their old residential schools. The residential school system didn’t formally end until 1969. It dwindled over the next two decades until only four federally run schools remained in 1988, but the last one, in Punnichy, Saskatchewan, would remain open until 1996.

  The system was slow to wind down, but that didn’t lessen Indian Affairs’s enthusiasm for integration: it was a more cost-effective way to assimilate Indians. In 1969 the Department went all in on assimilation with its White Paper, an attempted final solution. It would abolish Indian Affairs and the entire reserve system, and eliminate “Indian” as a distinct legal status, cutting the Indians loose and forcing them to make their way—integrate, that is—into mainstream Canadian society. And it would make Indian education a provincial responsibility. Aboriginal peoples strongly resisted every aspect of the White Paper. In Nova Scotia, eleven Mi’kmaw leaders met with Indian Affairs officials for two days in 1970 at the Wandlyn Motel in Rockingham to discuss the idea of “placing Indian education under the jurisdiction of the provincial department of education,” as had already been done in British Columbia, Manitoba, and New Brunswick. At this point, 679 Nova Scotia Mi’kmaw students attended provincial schools. Nationally, nearly 60 percent of Aboriginal students were attending provincial or territorial public schools.

  Noel Doucette attended the meeting as president of the Union of Nova Scotia Indians. Charles Gorman was there as regional superintendent of Indian Affairs. Doucette was concerned by the Mi’kmaw experience in provincial schools so far. He complained that clergy still interfered with curriculum, and that teachers didn’t care about Mi’kmaw students, or worse, were hostile to them, calling them “mentally retarded.” White students called Mi’kmaw students “dirty Indians.” School boards ignored Mi’kmaw parents because “they are not taxpayers.” Doucette wanted more schools on reserves. It seemed integration always meant Mi’kmaw integrating into white society, never the other way. Gorman pointed out the difficulty in getting teachers, who were nearly all white, to work on reserves, where the pay was low. Eskasoni teachers threatened to leave if they didn’t get a raise. There were many challenges with Mi’kmaw education, and neither the federal government nor the provinces seemed up to them.

  Nationally, resistance to the White Paper from Aboriginal communities was fierce enough to kill the proposal within a few years. Its death knell came in the form of a 1972 National Indian Brotherhood (now the Assembly of First Nations) policy paper called Indian Control of Indian Education. John Knockwood and Peter Christmas of the Union of Nova Scotia Indians, and Barry Nicholas of the Union of New Brunswick Indians, played key roles in the development of this paper, which states: “We want education to provide the setting in which our children can develop the fundamental attitudes and values which have an honored place in Indian tradition and culture. We want the behavior of our children to be shaped by those values.” Within months the federal government agreed to transfer management and control of education to First Nations, on their request. But in reality, changes were slow as usual and First Nations often found that the federal and provincial governments went ahead with agreements that overruled their interests. They sometimes blocked curriculum with First Nations perspectives. Indian Affairs provided few resources.

  Almost a decade after Indian Control of Indian Education, Nova Scotia’s minister of education, Terry Donahoe, assessed images of minority groups in the Nova Scotia school curriculum. “To the extent that the school program mentioned Blacks, Acadians, and Native peoples at all, it did so either in a condescending or romanticized way,” he wrote. “And, too often, it left the impression that Blacks, Acadians and Native peoples were no longer significant presences in the life of this province, no
longer groups with justifiable grievances to raise.” Donahoe did not mention the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School, but his assessment of the challenges facing Mi’kmaw learners resonated with the overall integration policy in Canada: they were supposed to be invisible, and their problems supposedly solved. But not surprisingly, most Shubenacadie survivors, and Mi’kmaw students in general, struggled in the public schools.

  Aboriginal leadership argued that it didn’t have to be this way. Letting the provinces take responsibility for the education of culturally distinct people was no better than letting the federal government do it. The provinces were no better equipped to deal with the unique histories and cultures of First Nations—in fact, they had been providing prejudicial curriculum all along and helped create the very learning problems Mi’kmaq were dealing with.

  Mi’kmaw Kina’matnewey (MK)

  “Indigenous peoples have the right to establish and control their educational systems and institutions providing education in their own languages, in a manner appropriate to their cultural methods of teaching and learning.”

  – The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, endorsed by Canada, November 2010

  In 1982 Eskasoni Elementary and Middle School, formerly a federal Indian day school, became the first to come under Mi’kmaw control. Several other schools on reserves followed suit. Wagmatcook First Nation (Cape Breton) started the first band-operated secondary school in Atlantic Canada in 1987. It wasn’t a smooth transition, and even under band control some pre-service teachers complained that the Mi’kmaw school board suppressed the Mi’kmaw language. Since the creation of the Indian Control of Indian Education paper, only two Mi’kmaq from Wagmatcook had graduated from high school. The dropout rate was 96 percent. Parents had had enough, and worked and pushed until they got a band-operated high school. Their progress initiated a slow chain reaction. Eskasoni was next to get a high school. Ten years later, in 1997, after a highly publicized series of violent incidents between white and Mi’kmaw students at Hants County East Rural High School, the school principal sent every Mi’kmaw student home. Even though the latest incident had started when white students bullied a Mi’kmaw boy.

  Jean Knockwood of Indian Brook, an educator, researcher, storyteller, and mother, had had enough of seeing Mi’kmaw youth hurt by racism. She decided to home-school her daughter. Soon other kids from the reserve wanted to join her “facility” and the operation mushroomed into dozens of students in a church basement. Indian Brook had agreed to integration with public schools after Shubenacadie closed, but the discrimination from white students, teachers, and the administration never stopped. It was almost as bad for the children’s self-esteem as Shubenacadie once had been. Mi’kmaw students dropped out regularly, or got suspended.

  Rather than send their children back into what many saw as a racist school system, the Indian Brook First Nation renegotiated its tuition agreement with the school board—it was paying thousands for each of its students per year—stating that if the board wanted First Nations tuition dollars it would have to send teachers to the reserve. The board complied, sending two substitute teachers. Parents gave input on the selection of teachers, who at that time were still mostly white. Parent-teacher meetings were potlucks held during the day so working single parents could go at lunch. Elders visited regularly, facilitating traditional talking circles to work through conflicts, and taught Mi’kmaw language, powwow, drumming, dancing, and beadwork. Mornings began with the “Mi’kmaw Honour Song.”

  The school Jean Knockwood started eventually became L’nu Sipuk Kina’muokuom, or Indian Brook House of Learning. Mi’kmaw teachers right from Indian Brook are common now. But even more significantly, the Indian Brook school eventually became part of a much bigger, band-operated system with thousands of students learning on reserve. It is called Mi’kmaw Kina’matnewey, “the whole process of learning.” Around the same time Jean Knockwood was taking education into her own hands at Indian Brook First Nation, the federal Indian Affairs minister was meeting with Nova Scotia premier John Savage and nine of thirteen Nova Scotia Mi’kmaw chiefs at Chapel Island/Potlotek First Nation. In February 1997 they signed the Mi’kmaq Education Act, which finally put education for kids on reserves fully into Mi’kmaw hands—including at Indian Brook, where the school Knockwood started was thriving.

  The initiative actually goes back as far as 1991, when sexual abuse allegations at Shubenacadie and other residential schools were getting major media coverage. It was then that the Assembly of Nova Scotia Chiefs approached Indian Affairs proposing that a Mi’kmaq Education Authority be established, so that Nova Scotia Mi’kmaq could manage their own education. The authority later changed its name to Mi’kmaw Kina’matnewey, or MK. With education authority in hand, seventy-five MK stakeholders kicked things off with a symposium at the Oak Island Inn and Marina. They were building an education system from scratch. The eyes of Aboriginal educators across Canada were on them, and they had to be successful. How would this thing work? How would it be governed? And what would success look like?

  Wagmatcook Chief Norman Bernard and National Chief Shawn Atleo at the Grand Opening of the new Wagmatcookewey School in 2013. Mi’kmaw Kina’matnewey

  Rita Joe wrote of a related conference held at a school gym in Eskasoni. “A lot of people passed on their concerns about the transfer of jurisdiction,” she wrote. “They were heard by the Saqmows (chiefs) of the Maritimes, by the Indian Affairs officials and by other professionals. I felt so good that we are doing this.” The participants came up with operational plans for each participating community. Most important was perhaps the concept of Mawio’mi, that all adult community members could attend meetings and work together to make decisions—either by vote or consensus.

  There are now eleven band-run schools in Nova Scotia, another twenty or so (it varies from year to year) public schools with MK students, and MK is about the same size as the province’s French school board, says its director of programs John Jerome Paul, a member of the Eskasoni First Nation and former teacher and principal. The change in jurisdiction has had a strongly positive impact. Nova Scotia Mi’kmaw children now stay in school longer and the high school graduation rate is the highest in the country among Aboriginal students. MK provides central education supports, sort of a more hands-off school board. On-reserve schools provide language immersion and Mi’kmaw-centred learning. In all, more than 2,900 students attend these schools and another 1,500 Mi’kmaw students go to public schools in Nova Scotia. Significantly, half the teachers in the MK system are Mi’kmaw. Twenty years ago, there were only a couple of dozen Mi’kmaw teachers in Nova Scotia. Now there are more than 200.

  In the past two decades, more than a hundred Mi’kmaw-speaking students have gone on to complete a bachelor of education degree, mostly from St. Francis Xavier University, which has actively partnered with MK. Most Mi’kmaw graduates of ST. FX are fluent in the Mi’kmaw language. There are now on-reserve, part-time education degree programs available, with certificates in Mi’kmaw learning styles. Mi’kmaw language and culture are strongly encouraged here, and class discussions happen in English and Mi’kmaw. And that’s the key. Mi’kmaw role models and mentors are as important as Mi’kmaw control of the education system. Culture permeates the building, in visible forms—such as drumming and dancing groups—but also in teaching styles. Teachers speak with pride of learning “the Mi’kmaw way.” That is, how to take care of each other. Students who can afford it take turns bringing in snacks for everyone else. Discipline sometimes takes the form of a talking circle, expressing feelings about being teased and the power of words to hurt or help. One teacher told MK researchers that her desks are always placed in a circle.

  Teachers also focus on Aboriginal content in the books they use and scrutinize Canadian history carefully. As one teacher told MK researchers, “When we talked about the Holocaust, I explained to my students that thousands and thousands of Nat
ive people also died because of genocide, but it isn’t as publicly known.” Some teachers encourage group work because they’ve observed that Mi’kmaw students tend to work better that way. Holistic thinking and storytelling are also encouraged, as is attacking essays from the middle and working backward and forward to conclusions and introductions—because the world doesn’t actually work in straight lines. The traditional Mi’kmaw science is often discussed and taught—blended with the western science the curriculum still demands. One teacher spoke of an experiment using traditional medicine to inhibit bacterial growth. One class went moose hunting to learn traditional skills and make careful observations in nature. The learning is often hands-on.

  The 2012 graduating class of Chief Allison Bernard Memorial High School celebrates academic success. Mi’kmaw Kina’matnewey

  MK has made tremendous and quick progress. But Mi’kmaw students still face barriers to academic success that most students don’t have to deal with. In the provincial schools, 44 percent of Mi’kmaw students say their schools lack interest in meeting their needs; their teachers expect or want them to fail. These challenges are much less common in band-operated schools, but 54 percent of students in those schools say they lack the resources they need to succeed. And yet, many are succeeding, at least to the point of graduating high school. An even greater challenge awaits those hoping to move on to community college or university.