Legalized racial segregation is alive, if not well, in the city of Winnipeg in the form of two aboriginal schools, Niji Mahkwa Primary School and Children of the Earth High School.
Its open-air extension is a rectangular green space in the city’s hardscrabble north end has recently been revealed as a “sacred” grassy plot shared by these two schools.
Though most passersby would view it as a typical school sports and recreation field, cultural support teacher Connie West-Buck has laid the groundwork for a “learning lodge” to be erected in the field to facilitate more “land-based education.”
When Children of the Earth principal Jen Donachuk pitched the project to West-Buck in June, she offered sacred tobacco and requested her help to start consultations on it.
The Winnipeg School Division has set aside $3,000 for construction, fuel, sacred tobacco, and honorarium expenses.
The recipient high school opened in 1991, and the feeder school, established next door three years later, claim to deliver holistic programs that embed indigenous values and traditions into the Manitoba curriculum, now including lessons on the land.
“That’s my vision, that’s my hope, that’s my dream — that we have our own space,” said West-Buck, a member of Sandy Bay Indian Band.
The cultural support teacher said she wants to hold sweat lodges for students and caregivers close to home.
Despite colonialism and historical attempts to erase Indigenous cultures, languages and ways of being, the Niji Mahkwa principal said many indigenous people want to share their worldview.
“We still very much believe that our ways are valuable for everybody to understand as a pathway in living in harmony with the rest of creation,” he said.
No stories about the schools ever discuss their success in imparting indigenous “language and culture” while simultaneously teaching the mandated provincial curriculum.
Indeed, the authenticity of cultural education at the two schools can be questioned because they are founded on the so-called seven sacred teachings (also known as the Seven Grandfather Teachings), a set of principles invented out of whole cloth by an Ojibway Anishinaabe educator and activist, Edward Benton-Banai, in his 1979 children’s fairytale novel The Mishomis Book. Conversely, authentic historical aboriginal culture can only be discovered by reading the detailed ethnographic accounts compiled in the early 20th century by legions of white cultural anthropologists, now gathering dust in university libraries around the world.
There is also an objective study suggesting these two schools are failing to meet the standard educational and indigenous cultural needs of their aboriginal students.
In 1999, standardized provincial examinations in mathematics, the most culture-free of subjects, the Grade 3 province-wide average was 60.7 percent. Niji Mahkwa students averaged 26.8. The Grade 12 province-wide average was 65.9 percent; the Children of the Earth students averaged 34.6. Most isolated reserve schools achieved much higher results.
Though these province-wide exams were abolished years ago by an NDP government obsessed with Marxist equity-of-outcome education, there is no reason to believe the students in these two schools are now more proficient in mathematics.
The academic failure of so many urban native students has usually been explained away by invoking such external factors as urban poverty, spurious cultural differences, systemic racism, single parenthood, and student behavioural problems. Any call to systematically test them — or even question their relevance — is taken as prima facie evidence of systemic racism. Rarely, if ever, are factors intrinsic to the educational system given the consideration the academic literature says they deserve — factors such as teacher training, curriculum content, pedagogical methods, classroom and school management, teacher-union hegemony, and government bureaucracy.
Co-opted and brainwashed by the vast, self-serving, white-managed, guilt-based “Indian industry,” too many native people have come to believe that their very survival, cultural or otherwise, lies in the hands of benevolent statist policies and programs. School boards, among the most wasteful if not harmful of state institutions, have repeatedly shown themselves to be antithetical to fostering educational excellence. How can an institution that has permitted, if not encouraged, a steady 60-year decline in basic educational standards — in reading, writing, history, mathematics and science — be entrusted with such a sensitive and complex phenomenon as cultural survival?
It’s not surprising that not only have these aboriginal schools failed their students academically, but they have also failed to teach them much about their heritage, as the following comments from an objective 1994 external review of Children of the Earth High School suggest:
“I need math. I didn’t learn math last year…. Take drumming, dancing but don’t learn anything about culture…. Since coming here, I haven’t been doing anything other than phys ed.”
“Some of the programs are not well organized. For example, Indigenous Issues, not much to do. Sat and watched movies. There were no assignments. Expected a lot more.”
“In language class, we just sit around. We’re not given time to learn anything. I haven’t really learned Cree.”
“It gets boring. They keep telling you the same thing over and over in the classes. Only Language Arts and Math really interest students. There isn’t enough challenge. They should get more spirit into it.”
Retaining or re-learning traditional languages and preserving ancestral culture are understandable goals that individual native people have a right to pursue if they wish. But what good is it to become fluent in Cree even if such fluency were being achieved — and be left illiterate in English? What good is it to have high ethnic self-esteem — to be proud to be an Indian — but be consigned to a life of material and intellectual poverty?
Native students have the same innate potential as white students. When will enough aboriginal people recognize that, freely chosen or not, apartheid is still apartheid and force the white educational establishment to put aside its mythical and patronizing agenda and allow their children to fulfill this potential?
Hymie Rubenstein, editor of REAL Indigenous Report, is a retired professor of anthropology, University of Manitoba, and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
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