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FIRST NATIONS PERSPECTIVES

Abstract

One of the challenges facing Aboriginal education is how to raise academic standards of Aboriginal students. The issue involved is not merely that of methods of teaching and learning but of acquiring the necessary tools for shaping and implementing a socially- and culturally-oriented curriculum that can be sustained from within, recognizing Aboriginal local resources in context and reinforcing and maximizing their use in education to make school learning an integral component of the social and cultural context of Aboriginal children’s heritage. This paper is about First Nations perspectives, opinions and attitudes about the status of language and culture in schooling and their suggested strategies to revitalize and preserve First Nations culture. The paper concludes that the issue involved is not merely one of cultural education of students but also of helping Euro-Canadian teachers to attaining the necessary cultural tools for determining and putting into practice a socially- and culturally-oriented program.

Introduction

In contemporary times, there is increasing recognition of the role of culture in Aboriginal education (see Lipka with Mohatt, 1998; Battiste & Henderson, 2000; Agbo, 2001; Pérez et al., 1998). While studies of Aboriginal education have focused mainly on raising academic standards of students, the wide array of community resources needed for raising the standards has only now begun to draw attention of researchers (see Agbo, 2001). This is not merely an oversight by researchers, but results from the emphasis the schooling system places on Euro-centered education. Recently in 1998, Jerry Lipka with Gerald Mohatt introduced a special volume on Transforming the culture of schools: Yup’ik Eskimo examples. They noted the apparent limitless ways by which Aboriginal communities can create “culturally responsive education that fundamentally changes the role and relationships between teachers and schooling—and between the community and schooling” (p. 3). In Lipka with Mohatt’s (1998) view, “The important role of the community and its elders in indigenous contexts is an aspect of the culture of school that is central in transforming the framework of schooling to become more inclusive and democratic” (p. 5). This paper is about a First Nations Reservation community people’s perspectives, opinions and attitudes about issues concerning First Nations language and culture in the local school and how the community people involved and mobilized themselves for action on issues concerning language and cultural education of their children and Euro-Canadian teachers of the community school.

In the past, most theories about indigenous people’s education assumed that ethnic minority people did not succeed in school because they were culturally deprived. As Pai & Adler (2001) write: “ Although it is absurd to speak of a culturally deprived child as if there could be a child without any culture, this notion was used in the 1960s and 1970s to describe many minority children for whom compensatory education was designed” (p. 22). One way to prove the absurdity of the notion of cultural deprivation is to examine the meaning of culture. Pai & Adler (2001) view culture as having a cause-effect relationship with personality and human learning. They define culture generally as “that pattern of knowledge, skills, behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs, as well as material artifacts, produced by a human society and transmitted from one generation to another” (p. 21). In more specific terms, Pai & Adler (2001) view culture as “consisting of the standards and control mechanisms with which members of a society assign meanings, values, and significance to things, events, and behaviors” (p. 22). Several recent theories of indigenous peoples’ education have been enormously successful in explicating the role of culture in education. The interesting conjecture common to all of them is the enormous influence that culture exerts on learning. This means that culture and learning co-exist in a dynamic symbiotic relationship. In their book “Protecting indigenous knowledge and heritage”, Battiste & Henderson (2000) reiterate the need for Aboriginal education to foster a sense of respect for ethnic and cultural knowledge while also recognizing and building on the distinct features of the various elements that constitute the school curriculum. In his now famous report, Hawthorn (1967) asserts that Aboriginal children do not succeed in school because the rich experiences they acquire in their own culture and language do not prepare them for the boring routines and activities of school (see Agbo, 2001). Pérez (1998) speaks to an epistemology of literacy rooted in a socio-cultural theory that is powerfully shaped by the culture of the learner. According to Pérez, a socio-cultural theory of literacy “considers and seeks to understand the cultural context within which children have grown and developed. It seeks to understand how children interpret who they are in relation to others, and how children have learned to process, interpret, and encode their world” (p. 4). From the perspective of researchers, it is not difficult to understand why the cultural context of the learning process is crucial to student achievement (Agbo, 2001). To help First Nations students learn effectively, teachers must be aware of the cultural and value differences and linguistic variables that are likely to affect the teaching-learning processes as education is the process by which individuals learn the culture of a society and become its members (Pai & Adler, 2001).

The National Indian Brotherhood’s (NIB) (1972) Indian Control of Indian Education policy paper invited Canadians to learn and share the history, customs, and cultures of First Nations people. The NIB provided a philosophy, and a set of goals, principles, and directions that emphasized First Nations culture. The policy stated that First Nations want an education that would develop in their children First Nations attitudes, and values that form the basis of First Nations tradition and culture (p. 2). Accordingly, the NIB perceives Euro-Canadian education as creating a disparity between First Nations children and the culture of the school. As an essential part of conveying culture and tradition, language is the pivot on which First Nations people stabilize the alternatives they see available to them to educate their children (Battiste & Henderson, 2000; Lipka with Mohatt, 1998; Pérez et al., 1998). The National Indian Brotherhood sees First Nations languages as providing a more practical connection between learning at home and learning at school than just learning English at school. As the National Indian Brotherhood (1972) writes: "While much can be done by parents in the home and by the community on the reserve to foster facility in speaking and understanding, there is a great need of formal instruction in the language" (p. 15).

The problems of the relationships between First Nations culture, curriculum development and implementation are crucial to First Nations education. Hampton (1995) argues that First Nations control of education is meaningless unless it is linked with the control of the structures, methods, and school faculty. Similarly, Paquette (1986) contends that, except in a few cases, the curriculum of the First Nations schools does not respond to the realities of the community. He asserts that most First Nations schools tend to follow the footsteps of public schools, "to teach provincially mandated curricula without systematic modification to recognize the cultural and linguistic milieu students come from "(p. 45). Because First Nations education authorities do not control the training of teachers for First Nations schools, and the majority of teachers of First Nations children are not of Aboriginal origin, it becomes it becomes impossible for them to adopt a functional approach to a culturally responsive education. Even for teachers of Aboriginal origin, Western education has historically created some definite new class formations of teachers that stand at the margins between Western worldview and First Nations worldview (see McCarty & Watahomigie, 1998; Lipka with Mohatt, 1998).

Ready-made benchmarks or standards of education transplanted from the Euro culture without imagination and discrimination guarantee to Aboriginal students only school failure (Agbo, 2001). This, indeed, is the danger of present-day First Nations education. In the United States and Canada, it appears that there are grassroots movements to revitalize indigenous culture and language in American Indian and Canadian First Nations education (see Pérez, et al., 1998; Battiste & Henderson, 2000; Agbo, 2001). Bouvier (1991), for example, has argued persuasively that First Nations culture and history must form an integral part of the whole gamut of the Canadian education system. As Bouvier (1991) writes:

All school systems, whether federally, provincially or band-controlled, must take into consideration the history, language, culture, present experience, and aspirations of aboriginal people. These elements together must form the foundation for legislation, policy, curriculum, instructional and evaluation decisions, leadership development, preservice and inservice for teachers, instructional resource decisions, and other programs and services within the entire spectrum of an educational system (p. 97).

Paquette (1986) also contends: “Establishing a desirable balance between Native and non-Native curriculum content is at once one of the most elusive and most crucial questions in Native education today” (p. 45).

But Hampton (1995) sees the main problem facing First Nations education as lack of a theory of First Nations education. He maintains there is a need to build a comprehensive theory of First Nations education; that is, establishing a body of knowledge that can legitimately be called a theory of First Nations education. There has been considerable research done on the education of First Nations children. Yet, many researchers have felt that studies on First Nations education are susceptible to explanation through Euro-Canadian theoretical frameworks, and have excessively relied on research that analyzes hypotheses that are irrelevant to the First Nations situation (Hampton, 1995; Christie, 1988). This paper documents First Nations perspectives on the status of culture and language in First Nations schooling and how education could become harmonious and less disruptive to traditional culture. The paper also documents recommended strategies of social and cultural orientation of Euro-Canadian teachers as essentially a method of mobilizing the various participants of First Nations education in a positive and constructive way, building on the distinctive characteristics of all stakeholders of the school system, whether Western or indigenous.

Researcher and Research Participants

Because this study is a cross-cultural research, my personal cultural introduction is relevant for the interpretations I make in terms of my “interests, purposes, and values” (Smith 1989, p. 145). As a person from an underrepresented ethnic origin, I am naturally inclined to briefly review my personal and cultural background as a backdrop to elucidate the idea that unless we harness the vast cultural resources of indigenous communities for the education of their youth, the traditional formal education system bequeathed to indigenous societies by the Euro nation states holds very little hope for the progress of indigenous children.

I was born in a small, rural community where the majority of the inhabitants engaged in subsistence farming. At an early age I learned the community vocabulary, logic, morals, values and standards that differed from those imposed upon me by school. The young members of the community in which I grew regarded adults as fountains of knowledge and looked up to them for cultural education. A local age-sex hierarchy offered support, structure and opportunities for self-fulfillment and established the social identities of adults in the community. Reciprocal obligations of clan and neighbor provided support for all members of the community. Various customary practices that taught us interpersonal morality and clearly specified virtue and vice formed a basis of trust and provided structure to all the members of the community. We basically derived motivation from expectations of advancement in the age-sex hierarchy, with its concomitant prestige, wealth, power, and security.

I went to school at the age of 7, and learned English as a third language, my second language being a common area dialect learned alongside English at the beginning of school. At school, I did not learn my Native tongue, the dialect I spoke at home and in the community. I became aware, early in my school life that community standards, values, morals, ethics, and religious practices, which we held in reverence as integral parts of our very existence were, in the language of the school “evil,” and should not have a place in our lives. I remember very well doing punishments for speaking my own language at school. A remarkable feature of the school was that it gave virtually everybody some avenue to uncertainty, fear and competition. No one made it clear to me why I had to go to school; I learned later in life, school was introduced in my community as basic skill training for the sole purpose of reading the Bible. However, during my time, interpreting the Bible no longer became essential because colonialism succeeded in imbuing the tenets of Christianity into old and young, and Christian life and routines had already become part of the life of the community. School was a necessary evil; it became a meaningless routine for me and the other boys and girls of the community. One either dropped out or continued. I was one of those who continued schooling, primarily due to my parents’ insistence.

Years as classroom teacher and administrator of remote Aboriginal reservation schools rekindled my interest in improving schooling conditions for Aboriginal and underrepresented groups. I have learned over the years that theories regarding Aboriginal education either come from the viewpoints of very well educated Aboriginal people as well as from scholars of Euro cultures. Therefore, the need to document the different ways that Aboriginal people living in remote communities view their own children's schooling is crucial. As the culture of Aboriginal people living in remote communities is different from the Euro-Canadian culture, and their understanding of schooling issues may be different from their educated counterparts, it is important to investigate their conceptions about schooling and how they would engage themselves in exploring ways to improve their schools so that they may closely reflect the culture and aspirations of their communities. These questions were at the very foundation of my study as I sought to engage Aboriginals in a participatory (or action) research.

Because of my knowledge of the principles involved in participatory research, I "put myself out to be requested" (Maguire, 1987) from Aboriginal school authorities for the research. My decision for this study (and its methodology) was a result of discussions about problems of schooling that I had with Aboriginal people in and outside the communities in which I did my research.

I was aware that the only way to be able to do a meaningful research with First Nations was to integrate myself fully into a First Nations community and to be part of the school system. By early December of the year prior to the study, I sent resumes out to Native communities in Ontario to seek a position as a teacher. In May of the following year, I was invited by a Local Education Authority take the position of principal in one of their school systems. With little information about Cat Lake, I made a commitment to undertake a participatory approach for my research. The decision was, somewhat, an answer to my desire to work hand in hand with community people to bring some improvement into their school system. From my literature review about participatory research, I learned that the process should be a cooperative venture. I faced the initial problem of not yet knowing a specific group with which to work. However, I was confident that my position as principal of the reserve school would permit a participatory research for school improvement. I therefore structured my study to be practical and useful to community people in a way that would enable them to seek their own ways of improving their school system as they determined the order of priority in which they held educational issues and sought ideas and suggestions for change.

This study was to be practical and useful to community people in a way to enable them to seek their own ways of improving their school system as they determined the order of priority in which they held educational issues and sought ideas and suggestions for change. This paper documents First Nations perspectives as regards First Nations culture and language in the community school and describes how they mobilized themselves for dealing with the existing curriculum. The paper addresses itself to specific research questions pertaining to First Nations language and culture in the school: 1) What is the status of First Nations language and traditions in the community 2) How much credence do community people give to learning First Nations language and culture at school? 3) What are their suggested priorities for developing First Nations language and culture in the school? The study drew on traditional critical pedagogy by collecting data through document analysis, participant observation and interviews. The exploratory and action oriented purpose of this study led me to believe that a paradigm based on an alternative research or participatory research (Participatory Research Network 1982; Maguire 1987; Hall 1993) was the most practical orientation for the study.