Native education in Canada following the residential school era

Lawrence W.

Order the writing of a tailor-made Social, moral & civic education Term papers

Free quote online

Thesis Format .doc

Native education in Canada following the residential school era

Download

Read an extract

Reader
Abstract
Contents
Extract

Abstract

The history of Native-white relations in Canada is historically, colonial in nature and paternalistic in design, and racist.(Miller: 185) In addition, schooling may not be an idealistic location of growth and study but rather as Metis educator Fyre Graveline (1998) contends, “ideological processing plants.” (Graveline: 8) As an educator Graveline situates herself as a critical educator, a member of the Aboriginal community “responsible for giving back to the community that which I am learning…It is an act of reciprocity.” (Graveline: 8) Thus, contemporary aboriginal educators have to deal with two strands or facets in their critical practice: the legacy of the residential schools and their impact on aboriginal cultures, and the problems of self-directed autonomous education that is interrogative of the school system, while advocating new more holistic and spiritual means through which children can be taught. As Graveline writes,
“The ‘ecological consciousness of our Ancestors has been bombarded by the Eurocentric philosophies that are necessary to support industrial capitalism. Aboriginal beliefs are no longer shared by all North Americans, but our people and our traditions continue to exist. Tradition is not lost if it can be remembered and revitalized to symbolize a possible future.” (Graveline: 8)

Introduction
The Canadian government's establishment of industrial and residential schools
The view held by the Church missionaries designated with implementing the Residential school programs
The study of Saskatchewan Aboriginal youth by Schissel and Wotherspoon
The generations of children subjected to the racist residential schools
The Medicine Wheel: The direct opposite of the chaos of trying to destroy culture through brutal means,
Canada's Official Languages Act as noted by Fettes and Norton
Conclusion
Works cited

Get this table of contents for free after login.

Extract

[...] Schissel and Wotherspoon, like Miller, work from the perspective that relations between Aboriginal peoples and formal education in Canada is largely a history of cultural genocide.” (Schissel and Wotherspoon: 35) Native people who endured life in the schools are coming forward with their stories of physical and sexual abuse, and research studies and scholarly papers analyzing the residential school era note connections among those abuses, the historical official policy of assimilation, and the current dilemmas faced by Aboriginal peoples and communities.” (Schissel and Wotherspoon: 35) High school students today in alternative Aboriginal-centered programs in Saskatchewan have access to studying their culture in ways that was never possible before in Canada including language classes in Cree or other languages, Native studies classes, Aboriginal history and spirituality classes.” (Schissel and Wotherspoon: 80) There is a great deal of books published, from children's picture books to historical, sociological non- fiction books today that could be part of an expanded curriculum that examines topics from an Aboriginal perspective. [...]

[...] (Mellow, 2000) As Martin Battiste (2000) contends the main contradiction about education in Canada today lies in the scientific, rational paradigm through which Canadians view the meaning of schooling. (Battistte: 194-195) The purposes of education in Canada may be fundamentally at odds with aboriginal education and values systems. But education is also needed to enable people to rise above the economic depths to which the aboriginal peoples have sunk due to structural racism in Canadian society. This makes the inclusion of aboriginal subjects in schools problematic as long as the entire philosophy of the schools are not open to critique and debate as well. [...]

[...] One of the specific goals for early childhood education within Aboriginal communities is the “promotion of day care and preschools that will provide immersion or bilingual language instruction.” (Fettes and Norton: 31) Another goal is to get the Federal and Provincial governments of Canada to officially recognize all of the Native languages, which would, in the area of education mean the “development of language structures, curriculum materials, First Nations language teachers, resource centres and immersion programs.” (Fettes and Norton: 32) Methodologies include publishing, online access to linguistic materials, recording of oral literature, creation of programs for mass media (TV and radio) in native languages by native peoples and other areas of communication policies that would directly impact education throughout Canada. [...]

[...] As Miller notes the Church missionaries designated with implementing the Residential school programs held the view that “Natives were morally and intellectually degenerate, either as a result of post-contact debasement or from an innately infantile moral nature.” (Miller: 186) Miller ironically suggests that this was a more complex understanding of Native people than was evident among the government bureaucrats in charge of various assimilation programs. The result, the residential schools where language and culture were literally beaten out of children forced to work in hard labour to learn ‘technical skills' so that they come become a permanent underclass of low skilled wage earners contributing to the great, superior white Canadian society. [...]

[...] In this era of cost cutting and debates over what education should be, where the focus on learning and teaching should be put in the new highly technological globalization environment, Native people needs are both rising to the surface, being fought for and also being subject to constraints through limited availability to meet the needs of all population groups in multicultural Canada and its educational infrastructure. (Schissel and Wotherspoon: 132-133) Part of the bottleneck today has to do with the way concepts and terms are interpreted differently from one locale to another, from province to province, from province to nation. [...]

doc