1. EDU 211
September 26/October 1 Lecture:
Contemporary Issues in Aboriginal Education
Dr. Evelyn Steinhauer

2. Contemporary Issues in Aboriginal
Education…
It is impossible to make sense of the issues that trouble the relationship
today without a clear understanding of the past.… We simply cannot
understand the depth of these issues or make sense of the current
debate without a solid grasp of the shared history of Aboriginal and
non-Aboriginal people on this continent.
(RCAP. 1996, Ch. 3)

3. Lecture Overview
• Health & Social Wellness; Income
Levels & Poverty
• Academic Achievement
• Off-reserve school experiences

4. Health and Social Wellness
The social, economic and cultural plights in
Aboriginal communities result from the residential
school system, loss of lands, access to resources, and
suppression of Aboriginal cultures and languages, all
of which took a toll on health and well-being.
The Canadian Council on Learning (2007)
Redefining How Success is Measured
in First Nations, Inuit and Métis Learning

5. Health and Social Wellness
The lingering effects that oppression still brings to bear
on Aboriginal peoples in Canada are widespread:
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substandard living conditions
health problems
suicide
addiction
incarceration
poor academic achievement
high rates of unemployment

6. Health and Social Wellness
Aboriginal Children:
• are 1.5 times more likely to die before one year of age
• have higher incidences of hospitalization for lung infections
and injury
• have unacceptably higher rates of child welfare apprehension
(as high as 8 to 1 in some provinces)
• are more likely to live in foster homes outside their
community than their non-Aboriginal peers

7. Health and Social Wellness
• as much as 50 percent of discrepancy in early
childhood outcomes is attributable to socioeconomic
status.
• average income for First Nations families is one third
of that for non-Aboriginal Canadians
• nearly half of Aboriginal children live below the
poverty line
• academic achievement for First Nations people falls
well below acceptable levels

8. Health and Social Wellness
• Inadequate access to housing, food, clean water and
services, and other indicators of poverty contribute to
early school leaving, suicide, substance abuse and
incarceration rates that far exceed the proportions for
Canadians in general.
• Not only current generation who are affected

9. Education levels & Achievement
On - reserve First Nations students enrolled and graduating from Grade 12
Year
Enrolment in
graduating year
Graduates
Percent graduating
of those enrolled
in Grade 12
1996-97
5,485
1,785
35.5
1997-98
5,931
1,975
33.3
1998-99
6,013
1,939
32.2
1999-00
6,460
2,072
32.1
2000-01
7,057
2,112
29.9
2001-02
6,698
1,953
29.2
2002-03
6,711
1,945
29.0
Source: Indian Affairs and Northern Development (2005a). Basic Departmental Data: 2004.
Caledon Institute of Social Policy.

10. Academic Achievement
Some of the factors contributing to this low level of
academic achievement are that Aboriginals in Canada have
the lowest income and thus the highest rates of poverty,
the highest rate of drop-outs from formal education, and
the lowest health indicators of any group. (Council of
Ministers of Education, 2004)

11. Some Education Statistics
• In 2006, 50% of the First Nations people aged 25 to 64
living on reserve had not completed high school, compared
to 30% of off-reserve First Nations people. (Statistics
Canada, 2006).
• The highest level of educational attainment of about one in
four (24%) of First Nations people living off reserve was a
high school diploma, compared with 15% of their
counterparts living on reserve. (Statistics Canada, 2006).
• 69% of all Canadians attained a post-secondary education
in 2006 compared to 36% of Registered Indians. (Statistics
Canada, 2006)
• Graduation rates for First Nations steadily declined from
33.9% in 1995 to 29.6% in 2002 (INAC, 2004, p. 40)

12. According to Statistics Canada (2009)
• the median income of First Nations people in 2005 was
$14,517, about $11,000 lower than the figure for the
non-Aboriginal population ($25,955), a disparity similar
to what it was in 2000.
• A comparison of median incomes for First Nations
people living on reserve ($11,224) with those who live
off reserve ($17,464) reveals a considerable difference
also of $6,240.

13. The High Cost of Low Achievement
“few people recognize the full extent to which low educational
attainment affects society” (Hankivsky, 2008, p. 5).
• reduced lifetime earnings
• poor health
• increased unemployment
• delinquency, crime
• substance abuse
• early childbearing
• economic dependency
• reduced quality of life
• increased incidence of marital instability

14. There are also intangible consequences: High school dropouts
experience
• lessened social growth (impaired relationships with teachers,
peers, or parents)
• a reduced sense of control over their life
• less personal satisfaction
• less of a sense of control over life circumstances
• low self-esteem and emotional disturbances
• reduced social capital
(Hankivsky, 2008, p. 65)

15. There is a positive correlation between educational
attainment and overall health.
• graduates are more aware of the factors of a healthy
lifestyle and make fewer visits to physicians.
• average 45-year-old college graduate in better health
than average 25 year old high school dropout (Levin et
al, 2007)
• differences in life expectancy also attributed to
educational attainment

16. Vicious Cycle
Hankivsky (2008) identifies
low education “as the key
factor in explaining the
relatively weak performance
of Aboriginal Canadians in
the labour market” (p. 38).
insufficient
education
inadequate
income
poor living
conditions
next
generation
social
problems

17. The Answer? A Meaningful Education
Any nation‟s health and vitality is linked directly to its ability to
provide meaningful educational opportunities to its people. Our
future as a nation and as First Nations will depend considerably on
our citizens‟ educational achievements and successes. Healthy and
sustainable First Nations communities depend on the quality of
education programs. (INAC, 2002, p. 2)
Minister‟s National Working Group on Education

18. Parental School Choice In
First Nations Communities:
Is There Really A Choice?
Steinhauer (2007)
Parental School Choice In
First Nations Communities:
Is There Really A Choice?
Steinhauer (2007)

19. Do you know what it is like to feel you are of no value
to society and those around you? To know that people
came to help you but not to work with you for you
knew that they knew you had nothing to offer . . . ?
Chief Dan George

20. The off-reserve schooling experience:
Findings
In an effort to better understand how First Nations parents made
decisions about where their children would be schooled, I asked the
parents who had been selected for interviews the following
question:
“How did you chose the school that you would send your
children to when you had the option of the on-reserve school or
the off-reserve provincial schools?” (p. 107)

21. Parents‟ Responses
Throughout their schooling process, parents wanted their
children to
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have the best education possible
graduate from high school
eventually become self-supporting
feel happy and secure
be proud of who they were
embrace their Native heritage (p. 107)

22. • many were not happy with the public school system
• yet they considered it their best option if they wanted
their children to graduate from high school
• they did not have much faith in the reserve school
system
• and were convinced that the public schools provided a
better education
• 75% of the children from both Saddle Lake and
Goodfish Lake attend school off-reserve

23. • the majority of the people from these two communities
have serious questions and doubts about their own
schools
• most also repeatedly expressed dissatisfaction with the
public school systems as well
• favor the public system because numbers suggested
that their children would have a better chance of
graduating in these schools
• offered few other reasons in support of this choice

24. • Parents seemed to recognize that sending their children
off-reserve came with a price and that they were
“making a trade-off” (Marleen)
• Parents hoped that their children‟s schooling experience
would be more than intellectual or mental exercises
• that it would “meet the needs of the whole child, which
includes the mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual
needs” (Pamela) (p. 107-108)

25. • “When we live on reserve, we have only two choices:
We send our kids to the provincial schools that we have
tuition agreements with, or we keep them on reserve.
But what kind of choices are those?” (p. 108)
• “But there is guilt sometimes for not supporting our
own schools” (p. 109)
• “What choice do we have if we want our children to
graduate?” 109

26. • endless stories about their own negative experiences in the
public schools (p. 109)
• if the school offered good academic programming, parents
and extended family would be able to offer emotional and
spiritual support children needed to make it through the
system (Kristine) (p. 110)
• providing their children with access to the same curriculum
that other students in Alberta were using was the most
important criterion that guided their decisions about where
to send their children to school (p. 110)

27. Native parents are forced to make school choices based on
factors that would receive minimal weighting, if any at all, in
non-First Nations parents‟ school-choice decision making. (p.
111)
Some participants used the term trade-off to define the
situation that they faced in having to give up the positive
aspects normally expected from a school experience, such as
caring, cultural acceptance, and valuing, to try to increase their
children‟s academic achievement. (p. 112)

28. Trade-offs
Some of the trade-offs reported included:
A. Unfair Treatment
B. Low Teacher Expectations
C. Racism
D. Loss of Opportunities for Cultural Teachings.
Overall, participants reported that Native children do
not feel valued or cared about in these public school
systems.
(p. 112)

29. A. Unfair Treatment
“most Native children are not treated fairly within the
public school systems” (p. 112)
Indicators of unfair treatment:
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the Special Needs categorization
the Blame-the-Native-Student Syndrome
the Time Spent in Detention, and
the Academic Program Streaming of Native Students

30. Special Needs Categorization
• special education or special needs came up repeatedly
• “hidden” practices could be termed unprofessional,
unethical, or even illegal
• Several parents gave examples of requests to test their
children
“up to 50% of our children that go off-reserve are labeled
as having some type of learning deficiencies, whereas in
the reserve schools this number is well below 12%”
(Florence)

31. • “Placing children in special-needs classes is not a thing
of the past! The only difference between now and then
is that the schools now need signed permission forms.
They still always want to test Native kids”.
• “Right away they wanted to test her. Something was
wrong with her… I wouldn‟t give them my permission,
and they kept on bugging me and phoning me... So
they did all their tests and stuff. There wasn‟t any
problem after I got this fancy paper from whoever
assessed her. There was nothing wrong with her”!

32. Williams (2000) explained that these discrepancies may be
attributed to the fact that “additional funds for which
First Nations students are eligible are usually based on
disability, deficiency and deprivation” (p. 144), which
suggests that making a case for special-needs funding for
these children would mean “amplifying the negative
aspects of some First Nations students and thus further
entrenching the negative stereotypes” (p. 144).

33. Williams: “one of our greatest challenges has been to help
teachers and administrators to curb their first impulse to push
First Nations students out of the school as quickly as possible
and to direct them towards other resources” (p. 143).
“The way I see it, Native children get penalized just for being
Native. Sometimes I think the school really does believe that
Native kids are not capable of much, and that their coming to
school is just a waste of everyone‟s time. I believe we are an
inconvenience to them. Maybe this is why they place so many
negative labels on us. They don‟t expect much from us” (Leah)

34. Blame-the-Native-Student Syndrome
• “Native kids get blamed for everything.”
• “I remember every time there was a fight, . . . it was an
automatic in-school suspension. Well, I remember one
year, this was a really large fight that happened up town,
and in fact there were three fights at the same time. The
Indian kids got a home suspension, and the White kids
only got half a day in school. I remember asking about
it, because . . . I wanted to know for myself, because I
saw that as unfair, so I asked, “What is the fairness in
that?”

35. • unfair treatment, whether intentional or unintentional,
is very harmful to Aboriginal students
• students react by fighting or developing unruly and
uncooperative attitudes
• come to be seen as trouble makers
• Simply exist…
“many carry on the tradition of active resistance to whitecontrolled school system with its colonial assumptions of
Euro-Canadian cultural superiority”
Silver, Mallett, Greene, and Simard (2002)

36. Streaming Students
• children were almost always steered away from an
academic direction
• Fear of authority inhibits resistance (George‟s case)
• Being pushed into low-level courses seems to be the
norm for Aboriginal students
• school assumes they are incapable of handling
advanced courses and they don‟t aspire to university
“I didn‟t think about going to college or university,
because I just felt it was for the rich kids, and no one ever
suggested that it might be a possibility.” (Dakota)

37. In her study Wilson (1992) found that being pushed into
low-level courses seemed to be the norm for Aboriginal
students, because the school assumes that they are
incapable of handling the advanced courses and that they
do not aspire to attending university anyway.
“A classic example came from a student who
wanted to enroll in a computer class. A teacher
advisor suggested that he take a mechanics course
instead because “there will always be broken
down cars to repair on the reserve but I doubt that
there will be computers to work with.” (p. 52)

38. “Educators are always trying to find ways to increase high
school graduation rates among Native students, but it‟s a
simple answer. Just respect us, encourage us, listen to
us, learn a little about us. Then maybe you will begin
seeing more Native students graduating from high
school.”
(Kristine)

39. B. Low Teacher Expectations
• Research has revealed that, generally, non-Native
teaching staff have lower expectations of Aboriginal
students than they do of non-Aboriginal students
(Goulet, 2001, Makokis, 2000; Silver et al., 2002; Taylor,
1995; Wilson, 1992).
• From my observations and my discussions with the
participants in this study as well as with other
Aboriginal parents and youths, there appears to be a
general consensus that academic expectations of Native
children are low within the public school system.

40. In his study Goulet (2001) discovered that many nonNative teachers have low prejudicial beliefs about the
Aboriginal students they teach. Goulet concluded that
many non-Native teachers believe that Native students are
unable to compete with their non-Aboriginal peers. The
teachers in these studies believed that “[Native] students
had inadequate home life and so did not possess the skills
necessary for success in school” (p. 69).

41. • one prominent factor that contributed to student
withdrawal was belief that their teachers did not care
and that they had very low expectations of them
(Makokis, 2000)
• significance of teachers‟ expectations directly linked to
academic achievement & unfair treatment
• Bernice‟s story

42. C. Racism
The fear washes through my veins
Contaminating the deep red blood.
It travels through my body,
Further, deeper.
The rage heats my skin
Igniting a blazing fire. It burns my brown skin,
Heating, hurting
The sadness flows through me
Touching my heart in the most sensitive places
It brings tears to my eyes
As the wall of racism,
Slams against my face.
(Canadian Race Relations Foundation, 2007, p. 16)

43. • All participants in this study identified the theme of
racism as one of the most serious points of
consideration in making school choices for their
children.
• All parents expected that their children would be on the
receiving end of racism, and, in fact, at least two of the
parents wanted to actively prepare their children to face
this issue. These two parents wanted their children to
grow up experiencing racism, believing that it would
better prepare them for the “real world.”

44. • Learning to cope becomes the means of survival
(Steinhauer, 1999)
• students who are negatively affected by racism are less
likely to attend school regularly and are likely to drop
out of school earlier than other groups of students
• children were often quite vicious… engaging in games
at the expense of Indian children

45. “In my own off-reserve school experience, beginning in
Grade three, I remember children often being quite
vicious and often engaging in games at the expense of
Indian children. On particular game was known as
“Indian germs.” It was a game of tag which began with a
white student touching an Indian kid, then playing tag
with those germs for the entire recess. Of course Indian
children were not included in the game. Although it was
hurtful at the time we learned to cope by playing in other
parts of the playground or school. Gradually learning how
to cope became the means of survival…”

46. Internalized Racism
I found a lot of the Native kids to be more negative, but
rightly so, because they were treated wrong. When you are
treated wrong, when you are oppressed, you are
automatically going to be defensive toward things. Racism,
experienced on a consistent basis, becomes internalized,
and we [the Native students] begin to hate one another. It
can have very damaging effects. (Leah)
• Silver et al. (2002) refer to this as internalized racism

47. “They teach us that Native students are anything but
good, so we internalize this. We begin to believe that we
are in fact no good, trouble makers, incapable of „real
work,‟ and in order to survive, we begin rejecting, and
beating up each other. I hate to admit this, but I was guilty
of rejecting my own Native peers as well. I am so
ashamed of myself now that I recognize this.” (Leah)

48. Calliou (1995)
• Racism is an issue that many people would rather not have
to deal with, even Native people
• Racism creates imbalance and disharmony
• Discussing the issue can be emotionally, physically,
spiritually, and mentally challenging and exhausting
• Most people would rather not face the issue
• Racism has to be named
• “emotion will emerge from the underground of denial
within individuals, lunch rooms, classrooms, textbooks,
media, or school grounds”
• important to do so if we want to have the “public,
affirmative spaces” that we like to think our Canadian
classrooms are

49. [Racism] ....it is there, and it is a significant part of the
explanation for why so many Aboriginal students are not
thriving in the school system. And we believe that if nonAboriginal teachers and administrators were to grapple
openly with the problem—name it, describe it, come to
accept and to understand its prevalence—they would
eliminate much of it. But racism is such an ugly word that
when an Aboriginal person says something is racist, the
tendency is to retreat, to go on the defensive, to deny the
racism.

50. “Going to school with mostly non-Native kids, I always
tried so hard to be like them. After a while it was so tiring.
I was ashamed of being Indian. There [First Nations
School] I could be myself; there I could be an Indian”
Kristine.

51. Indians get everything for free…
All First Nations students, including myself have heard
the resentful accusations that our education is paid for at
the public expense (i.e. their pocketbook; the accuser is
seemingly oblivious of the fiduciary responsibly of
treaties and agreements between the nations within and
the colonial government of the settler Nations.
(Calliou, 1995, p. 49)

52. Cultural Divide…
“Ninety percent of Native children in this country will, at
one time or another, be taught by a non-Native teacher,
and many of these children will receive most of their
education from non-Native teachers. The Native student‟s
self-image, perception of Native/non-Native interactions,
and chance of graduating will all be influenced by their
non-Native teachers” (Taylor, 1995, p. 224).

53. Racial Stigmatism
(Curwen Doige, 2003, pp. 153-154)
• stereotyping and discrimination that still exists in our schools
stigmatizes Aboriginal students.
• personhood is devalued
• individual disconnects from the attributes that assist development of
self-respect, confidence, and the ability to trust oneself and others
• insidious tool of disenfranchisement: not only is the student told that
he or she is unacceptable, the student now feels inferior and rejected
• The affective, spiritual part of the student has been jeopardized. . . .
Not respecting, cherishing, valuing the spirit of the Aboriginal student
deeply affects the process of the individual‟s being in becoming a
unique person responsible for his/her own life and actions in the
context of significant group situation.

54. D. Loss Of Cultural Learning Opportunities
A regret that several parents had about sending their children offreserve to a public school was that their children were rarely, if ever,
exposed to anything that had to do with their Cree culture and
language.

55. [Cree Classes] I didn‟t take the courses for two reasons:
firstly, because these classes were always scheduled when I
had my core courses; and secondly, because I believed
these classes were not very beneficial. Learning Cree
words is not the same as learning the Cree language. No
one can learn to speak Cree that way; and besides, learning
Cree was not my priority at that time. My priority was
getting a high school diploma. (Leah)

56. Goddard (2002):
• “locally developed curricula” considered different fromless intellectually significant than “regular curricula”
• message confirmed when students see their teachers using
their language and cultural classes as prep classes
• Classes tucked away in farthest reaches of school
Cree courses:
• Not valued by teachers or students
• Designed for non-academic route
• Ineffective at teaching fluency
• Native and, therefore, not as good as

57. Curwen Doige (2003)
• Traditions are only one aspect of the ever-changing dynamic
within a culture.
• to focus on traditional dress, food music, ceremonies, and
artifacts freezes a culture in time and perpetuates stereotypes.
Artifacts are static.
• People and their values, beliefs, feelings, and thoughts are
dynamic, and these define the culture.
• Spiritual ideas and traditions like sweetgrass and sweatlodge must
be understood from the perspective of Aboriginal epistemology.
• Otherwise, the identifying values of Aboriginal people are
treated as fixed as well.

58. Concluding Remarks
One might ask:
• Why do these First Nations parents, who are fully aware
of the unfair treatment to which their children are
subjected within these public school systems, continue
to make the decision to educate their children in public
school?
• Do they not love their children? If they sincerely care
about their children‟s future and well-being, why do
they subject them to the unfair treatment that they
know continues to exist in these schools?

59. Parents make the choices
they do, not because they
want to torture their
children, but rather, they
make these choices
because they LOVE their
children.

60. Summation
We have covered:
• Health & Social Wellness; Income Levels & Poverty
• Academic Achievement
• Off-reserve school experiences
Additional contemporary issues include:
• Language
• Culture
• Jurisdiction over education
My next lecture will examine the history of Aboriginal education.