Post-Secondary
The mountain Mi’kmaw learners are climbing in the lingering and wide wake of the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School, even decades on, is steep. MK has made incredible progress in a short time—more than five hundred Mi’kmaw students went to post-secondary school in 2012, an increase of 25 percent from the previous year. But only one university in Nova Scotia, Cape Breton University, has more than 2 percent Aboriginal students. In all, 12 percent of Nova Scotia Mi’kmaq between the ages of twenty-five and sixty-four have a degree, compared to 20 percent for the general population of Nova Scotia. Because of MK’s success, the number of Mi’kmaw high school graduates eligible for university or community college goes up every year. But so do the costs of tuition and living expenses. Meanwhile, the amount of money Aboriginal Affairs provides for post-secondary education remains virtually flat. In all, there are about three hundred Mi’kmaq who currently qualify for post-secondary education but can’t afford it. By comparison, about four hundred enrolled in university or college, and about one hundred graduated from post-secondary institutions in 2012.
Much like the residential schools, the federal government’s refusal to invest more in Aboriginal education is hurting Aboriginal students. Even those who receive federal funding struggle to keep up with the high cost of education. Most Aboriginal students whose education is funded by Aboriginal Affairs fall a few thousand dollars short of actual tuition and living expenses. And in a move reminiscent of the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School, no funding is given for multiple visits home during the school year. Most Mi’kmaw families lack the financial resources to make up the shortfall, which makes even taking out student loans seem an insurmountable, long-term financial hardship. In 2002 Mi’kmaw and Wolastoqiyik (Maliseet) students at universities and colleges in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia told researchers with Atlantic Policy Congress and Indian Affairs that post-secondary financial support was insufficient and out of touch. Now, a decade later, a lack of funding remains the single biggest factor keeping Mi’kmaw learners out of post-secondary institutions.
But there are other challenges. Many Mi’kmaw university students have told researchers of discrimination on campus, insensitivity to Mi’kmaw culture in general, and a lack of First Nations role models at universities. Across Canada, Aboriginal people are underrepresented among university faculty, and the proportion decreases at higher administrative levels. The cultural knowledge that indigenous students bring to post-secondary institutions—traditional knowledge that is encouraged in a collaborative environment within MK—is often devalued within competitive environments on campus and in lecture halls. And there is still psychological residue from the residential school: formal education is strongly associated with assimilation. Aboriginal graduates sometimes feel isolated or ostracized in their own communities and lack role models who have graduated university. Aboriginal students are far more likely than other students to have dependants and childcare expenses, which are not funded. Leaving tight-knit, remote communities where they receive an education grounded in Mi’kmaw culture for a large, faraway, urban school where they become a visible minority can be enormously stressful.
Despite this situation, the first few years of MK saw a nearly 10 percent increase in its students going on to graduate from university or community college. First Nations students from the Atlantic provinces now attend post-secondary schools at a higher rate than their counterparts across Canada. A big factor in that change has been the tireless work by MK staff in building partnerships with St. Francis Xavier University, Cape Breton University, and Nova Scotia Community College, among others. These institutions have in turn reached out to Mi’kmaw high school graduates and accommodated their unique needs.
CBU responded by creating the Mi’kmaq Elmitek—“showing the path” —program. Elmitek goes beyond the usual first-year university transition-year program. Mi’kmaw students can complete off-campus classes in Indian Brook, Eskasoni, Membertou, and Wagmatcook. They need to be on campus only once a week during their first year, allowing them to remain connected with their communities. The university also started a four-year integrative science program with a focus on both Aboriginal and western science. And it created Mi’kmaw programs through its Mi’kmaq College Institute, now Unama’ki College, in business, law, natural resources management, and applied science. Meanwhile the School of Education at St. Francis Xavier has been working since 1995 to train Mi’kmaw teachers for band and provincial schools. “ST. FX really came to bat for us,” says MK’s programs director John Jerome Paul. “We’ve got 140 to 150 Bachelors of Education from that school.” It’s the people at any given school and their level of support for Mi’kmaw students that make all the difference. “The personal relationships with people at schools make it work. There have been really good people at ST. FX and we’ve been lucky.”
Language Losses
“Reconciliation will happen to me when I see my children studying their culture, studying their language.”
–Margaret Ward testifying at the TRC
Mike Isaac of the Mi’kmaq Liaison Office of Nova Scotia’s Department of Education travels the province in his work, speaking with band council leaders, educators, and students. He remembers, as a boy, having to stop speaking Mi’kmaw when he went to a Catholic school, and feeling that he had surrendered a piece of himself. “People don’t value the language because they don’t see it as something that will give them employment,” he says. “Less and less young people are speaking Mi’kmaw because they don’t see value in it.” This attitude is a remnant of the colonial education system. The Mi’kmaw language thrived up until the 1950s, when nearly all Mi’kmaq spoke it. But the disruption caused by the residential and day schools, which forbid its use, caused significant loss of the language. To Isaac, the language is the Mi’kmaw identity. If you speak Mi’kmaw, he says, you “feel who you are as a people because our culture is embedded in our language. It’s going to allow for that individual to have that sense of pride and dignity. They know exactly who they are.”
In 1999 the Assembly of Nova Scotia Chiefs directed the recently formed Mi’kmaw Kina’matnewey to study Mi’kmaw language use in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. Surveyors polled a remarkable three-quarters of Mi’kmaw households. At the time, Mi’kmaw was being taught mostly as a second language in schools on reserves. The researchers found that 55 percent of Mi’kmaw households used at least some Mi’kmaw language in the home. But the rest used only English. Only 43 percent of respondents could read Mi’kmaw and just 31 percent could write it. Eight percent said the reason they didn’t use Mi’kmaw was due to the lasting impact of residential school. Others gave reasons that could also be indirectly attributed to the colonial education system. Seventeen percent said their children went to non-Aboriginal schools, and 15 percent said using English was the only way to succeed.
Eight years after that survey, in 2007, the Mi’kmaq Health Research Group and the Union of Nova Scotia Indians instigated a comprehensive study of the health of the Mi’kmaq on reserves. These researchers found that the vast majority of Mi’kmaw parents felt it was important for their children to learn the language. But only half of Mi’kmaw children understand it. Only one-third can speak it. And just 28 percent of Mi’kmaw youth use the language “in daily life.”
If the Mi’kmaw language is to flourish among young people, skilled Mi’kmaw teachers must have access to good language-teaching tools. Thankfully there is a growing list of options for Mi’kmaw-language teachers. MK set out to publish as many books as possible in Mi’kmaw for students. “We’re probably up around a hundred and working on the next hundred now,” says John Jerome Paul, whose seven children have all grown up fluent Mi’kmaw speakers and have passed that on to their own children. Paul says that many of the program’s students focused on language education and wrote Mi’kmaw-language stories as part of their studies. MK obtained funding to publish nineteen of those stories. Mike Isaac, who in a
ddition to his day job writes children’s books in English and Mi’kmaw, stresses the importance of having Mi’kmaw stories in the Mi’kmaw language. “You can translate Hansel and Gretel but there’s no cultural relevancy,” he says.
In October of 2013, Velvet Paul, the director of education for Shubenacadie First Nation, had her Mi’kmaw-language elementary school workbook, L’nuey Klusuaqn Wi’katikn, published, with an initial print run of two hundred. The first of its kind, the book has been so popular with teachers and students that almost immediately after its release she had to have another seven hundred printed. There are also now two dictionaries and a grammar book for the Mi’kmaw language. Trudy Sable and Bernie Francis are working with MK to develop an online atlas of Mi’kmaw place names, called Pjila’si Mi’kma’ki. MK is also creating an eight-thousand-word, interactive, online talking dictionary animated with photos, video, prayers, and the national anthem in Mi’kmaw at mikmaqonline.org. Fluent Mi’kmaw speakers are doing the voice work.
It is important to remember that Mi’kmaw wasn’t the only language attacked by colonial education policies. If anything, the language of the Wolastoqiyik (Maliseet) of New Brunswick, Wolastoq, has suffered even greater losses, and is now severely threatened. There are now only sixty people left with Wolastoq as their mother tongue. Elders, language warriors, and academics are making efforts to document, promote, and preserve the language, in part through the development of basic Wolastoq-language curriculum.
John Valk, an associate professor of world view studies at the University of New Brunswick, is working closely with Elders Imelda and David Perley as part of a team that is interviewing Elders and recording their stories in a language bank. The goal is “the reversal of language death due to the assimilation policies by residential schools and ongoing provincial policies that limit the use of our beautiful Wolastoq language,” Imelda Perley explains. But for that to happen, she says an inclusive language-education program is needed in public schools so that First Nations and other students can learn Walastoq or Mi’kmaw like they do French or English.
Immersion, Immersion, Immersion
While Mi’kmaw is in better shape than many other Aboriginal languages in Canada, the older generation, who know the language best, won’t be around forever. Transferring their knowledge is a significant challenge. Sable and Francis, authors of The Language of This Land, Mi’kma’ki, believe there is a need for total Mi’kmaw immersion programs “for each and every community where possible.” John Jerome Paul agrees. In Paul’s telling, there are three ways to bring back the language: immersion, immersion, and immersion. “Language-maintenance programs don’t work,” he says. “See anyone who took regular French classes in school.” See also Mi’kmaw students who take language classes in elementary school without being immersed: “By Grade 5 or 6 they can tell you all the colours, count to a million, name all the animal names. But they cannot sit down with an Elder and have a conversation.” Immersion is essential, and MK hopes that in time, with the proper resources, schools can have more of it.
MK has created language-immersion programs in three Mi’kmaw communities, with courses from daycare all the way to Grade 12. At Muin Sipu Mi’kmaq Elementary (Bear River), Acadia First Nation Youth Centre (Yarmouth), and Three Wishes daycares, children learn the Mi’kmaw language in song and dance and from puppet shows. At the preschool age they learn quickly how to count, sing songs, and name actions, animals, and colours in Mi’kmaw. Most elementary school immersion students can converse with Mi’kmaw Elders. They also read and write at the same level as high school graduates who have taken Mi’kmaw as a single course, rather than being immersed in it. On the whole, about 70 percent of MK immersion students are able to recover their language.
Immersion also restores in its students a sense of cultural pride—in their Mi’kmaw identity and values—that the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School once tried to kill, but only wounded. Some teachers have noticed that students use not only the language basics, but also nuanced cultural sayings, like meskeyi and pepsite’lmiw—“I’m sorry” and “don’t disrespect me.” These phrases are signs of the students’ deepening understanding of the collectivist nature of their Mi’kmaw culture, that mutual respect is paramount to the good of the community. Students learn to take pride in their culture and have greater confidence and self-esteem as a result.
The next challenge is bringing the language back into everyday use. The residential school in Shubenacadie showed that without regular use, language is forgotten. “What’s the use of teaching the student the language when the parents or community don’t use it as a working language?” Mike Isaac says. But MK is careful to avoid replicating the paternalism of Indian Affairs, which has haunted the Mi’kmaq for too long. “We can’t be prescriptive to communities,” says John Jerome Paul. He doesn’t think it’s necessary anyway. He notes that many chiefs have made the language a community priority, or have passed policies saying Mi’kmaw is the working language of the reserve. Stop signs in Mi’kmaw can be found on some reserves and around band schools. But policy isn’t always practice, and Paul emphasizes the enormous psychological challenge with speaking Mi’kmaw. “The population is only fifty years removed from residential school,” he says. “People were brainwashed, colonized by the English language to believe that Mi’kmaw won’t help them. Now we have children asking, ‘Why didn’t you teach me my language?’ Often we become intellectually committed, but we never do it if it’s never a convenient time.”
Ways of Understanding
Mike Isaac of the Mi’kmaq Liaison Office, a former teacher, says that because Mi’kmaw culture has been devalued for so long, educators have limited knowledge or understanding of the Mi’kmaq. What little they know tends to be a historical image of hunter-gatherers. The complex post-contact history, the creation of reservations and centralization, early attempts to wipe out the Mi’kmaq, then the residential school—teachers, students, and the general public remain in the dark on these things. Isaac says it is hard for teachers to develop positive relationships with people from a culture they do not understand. And a positive relationship is essential if a student is to learn. That relationship is strongly linked to the content being taught. “It must be relevant to the student.”
It’s not a matter of turning all curriculum into Mi’kmaw curriculum, but rather making a consistent effort to link lessons to the traditional knowledge of the Mi’kmaq. In Isaac’s experience, drawing those links works for Mi’kmaw and non-Mi’kmaw students. “Mi’kmaq say, ‘Wow I didn’t know our ancestors were chemists who understood the properties of matter,’” Isaac says. “And non-Mi’kmaq say, ‘Wow I didn’t know that about the Mi’kmaq.’” Relationship-building with Mi’kmaw students also involves making an effort to bridge cultural differences and learning styles. Non-Mi’kmaw teachers don’t often see this. “If you’re continuing to see the student…lacking in numeracy or literacy you don’t challenge them and they won’t step up.” Isaac says that often teachers compliment Mi’kmaw students for barely passing, which sets the bar too low. Demanding so little creates a self-fulfilling prophesy; the student makes no great effort and continues to barely pass.
Lisa Lunney Borden feels that Mi’kmaw students often disengage from math because they have different ways of reasoning about it—a different world view—and don’t see their culture reflected in the abstract way that mathematics is usually taught, without practical application. She’s a professor in Saint Francis Xavier University’s education department and the founder of Show Me Your Math, an organization that encourages First Nations students in Atlantic Canada to “explore the mathematics that is evident in their own community and cultural practices,” often by talking with Elders about how they use math in their work. She also has Acadian ancestry and taught on a reserve for ten years, immersing herself in the community culture, becoming conversational in Mi’kmaw.
Lunney Borden notes that Mi’kmaw is a language based on verbs—
action and motion, a state of flux. But Western mathematics is a static language. It describes things at rest. So, the concept of “straight” might better be translated to pektaqtek, or “it goes straight.” A house can be described as a kiniskwikuom, “a dwelling that comes to a point.” Mi’kmaw learners want actions but instead are given things. Simply describing things in a more action-oriented manner may make concepts much clearer for Mi’kmaw learners. “As I transitioned from asking noun-based questions such as ‘What is the slope?’ to asking verb-based questions such as ‘How is the graph changing?’ I found that students often understood better,” Lunney Borden writes. Using concepts from Mi’kmaw culture can also help teachers. For example, division and multiplication can start with examples of “fair sharing,” expressed by the root word nemikatun or “divide into parts.” From there the reverse concept—multiplying—becomes clear.
On a deeper level, teachers can learn to understand math as a series of useful processes rather than something to memorize. Lunney Borden calls this the “verbification of mathematics.” It helps if teachers understand Mi’kmaw, or at least the way it is structured and how that structure influences the way Mi’kmaw students think. In doing so, teachers are more likely to see areas where students may struggle to understand math concepts based on knowledge and thinking styles. This knowledge goes beyond merely taking Aboriginal Studies courses in universities. Teachers in Mi’kmaw schools told Lunney Borden that switching instruction from English to Mi’kmaw often increases student comprehension. Even Mi’kmaq who have been raised speaking English often use Mi’kmaw ways and patterns of thinking and expressing ideas, having been raised by Mi’kmaw speakers. Show Me Your Math, the program Lunney Borden started, has been working in MK schools since 2006, and in public schools serving Mi’kmaw communities since 2011. It engages students to seek out Mi’kmaw math in their communities. There have since been more than five thousand student projects. Through these projects, children learn that math is a skill their Elders have always used, even if it hasn’t been recognized academically, and that it is an important part of their cultural heritage. This knowledge encourages them to learn both Mi’kmaw- and western-style mathematics.
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