RUBENSTEIN: The (indigenous) kids are not ok

On May 17, 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education, the United States Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the traditional judicial doctrine of “separate but equal” facilities for different races was unconstitutional and that black students must be allowed to attend the same public schools as white students. The recognition that “separate but equal” is a rhetorical and practical oxymoron was also the cornerstone of the 30-year struggle by Nelson Mandela to destroy South Africa’s apartheid system.But legalized racial segregation lives on in the city of Winnipeg in the form of two aboriginal schools, Niji Mahkwa (“Our friend the bear”) Primary School and Children of the Earth High School.An open-air extension of such segregation in a rectangular green space in the city’s hardscrabble north end, whose largest ethnic cohort is disadvantaged indigenous people, 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 and her colleagues have 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.Neither school is controlled or funded by the local aboriginal community. Instead, both were established in the early1990s by the bureaucratic public school monopoly and are managed by the Winnipeg School Division, the largest in Manitoba.“It was the first time that I think that I’ve ever made Connie cry because she said, ‘I’ve been waiting for more than 35 years to see this begin,’” said Donachuk, who is Red River Métis.“And that’s what we’ve got; we’ve got a beginning.”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.This new initiative reflects the growing demand for lessons on the land and recognition of their essential place in the province’s public school system.Manitoba Education released Mamàhtawisiwin: The Wonder We Are Born With — a policy directive to guide Indigenous education and create culturally appropriate resources for First Nations, Métis and Inuit students — in 2022.“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.According to its 2022 vision statement: “Niji Mahkwa School and Community upholds the belief that all children have an inherent right to the highest quality of holistic education.” “The integration of traditional, cultural teachings in a supportive learning environment will provide students with strengths and skills to meet the challenges of life” while “ensur[ing] the preservation, appreciation, and utilization of traditional languages by offering Cree and Ojibwe language instruction as compulsory subjects.”As for Children of the Earth High School, it:“…. believes that language is a critical component to educating our children. We offer the Aboriginal Languages Program (Cree or Ojibwe) to all students from grades 9-12. We believe in and recognize the importance of preserving and promoting language learning for fluent and non-fluent speakers. As a result, various levels of reading and writing skills in the Cree and Ojibwe languages are established during the student’s time at Children of the Earth.”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 a single impartial 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. These factors have always been taken as self-evident. Any call to systematically test them — or even question their relevance — is taken as prima facie evidence of systemic racism. So is the observation that other immigrant ethnic/racial groups facing many of these same problems have managed to overcome them, generally within a single generation. 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.Human beings are very intelligent and adaptable creatures: Given the right opportunities and motivation, all normal children, regardless of racial or ethnic background, can easily master several languages. Dozens of Canada’s ethnic groups have shown this for generations by setting up and managing independent after-school programs. What these successful efforts reveal is that the state should get out of the way and let ethnic groups manage their ethnicity on their own terms using their own resources.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.

RUBENSTEIN: The (indigenous) kids are not ok

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