Volume 3 Number 2
January 1964

Rev. Andre Renaud, O.M.I.

This paper will try to formulate briefly the working hypothesis of a teacher training and research program in the area of Indian education presently being developed at the College of Education of the University of Saskatchewan.

The program had its start in 1960, when the provincial Department of Education consulted the University concerning the education of children of Indian background in the northern areas of the Province. Responsible departmental officials were disturbed by the high turnover of teachers on the one hand, and on the other, the even more discouraging rate of progress of the pupils. The president of the University set up a committee under the dean of the College of Education, Dr. J. B. Kirkpatrick. The main recommendation of this committee was that an experimental summer session be organized to help teachers, already engaged or to be engaged by the Indian Affairs Branch or the Department of Education, orient themselves in Indian education and explore more efficient methods of imparting the 3 R’s to children of native background. At the suggestion of the committee, the author was invited to conduct such a session in July of 1961. Forty-two teachers were admitted, most of them with experience.

The enthusiastic response to this first experiment, not only among those who took part, but also with their fellow Indian or Metis school teachers across the province and throughout the country, convinced the authorities of the University that the experiment should be repeated and expanded.

"Education 357", as the first course has been labelled, is a workshop type orientation course affording students direct and personal experience in accelerated cultural change and developing in them basic anthropological concepts and attitudes. No student is admitted without previous practice in classrooms attended by Indians. Special arrangements have been made with the Department of Education, the Teachers’ Colleges and Indian Affairs Branch, to provide such an opportunity to teachers in training who are interested in Indian or northern work. This, incidentally, has surprisingly facilitated and improved the recruiting of teachers for schools on reserves or in the northern areas of the province.

The present plans call for developing two more specialized courses. The first, on "Curriculum development and practices with children of Indian background", will be offered this summer to graduates of the first two summer sessions who have completed at least two years of university work or secured their provincial standard teaching certificate. The other presumably will deal with "The school and the community in accelerating cultural adjustment" and concern itself with the educational growth of the total community. These three courses will form the core around which a selection of supporting courses from the various departments of the College and the University will be added, leading to a specialized B. Ed. in Indian Community Education.

Besides this orientation and training program for teachers, supporting services are anticipated, to provide all teachers in the field with more appropriate information and materials. Research projects, both of the survey type and experimental, are being planned to keep program and services on a truly scientific basis.

The schooling of children of Indian back ground can have various objectives which inevitably influence the orientation and specialization of teachers, the development of curriculum and the provision of supporting services.

The school can aim at preparing these children for complete social and economic integration in adulthood or an individual basis. At first sight, such an aim seems most commendable and exclusive of all others, in view of the lower living standards on reserves, the deterioration of the traditional economy and the constant extension of our majority society up north. It seems also to require a minimum orientation for teachers. In fact, equal educational opportunity, so popular in our democratic society, is readily interpreted as identical school facilities and programs through immediate physical integration of pupils of Indian background in non-Indian schools.

However, the Indian youth leaving school upon graduation or at age 16 is inevitably the end-product (or at least the intermediate one) of the eculturating processes of his local native community as much as of the schooling process to which he is subjected. Therefore, the schooling process itself cannot be divorced from the on-going cultural stream operative in the community. Not only has the pupil been reared in this stream before entering school, he is more or less constantly in inter-action with it.

Except for glorious and sometimes misleading cases of successful schooling regardless of background, the youth of immediate Indian tradition will be adequately prepared to become a self-supporting and contributing member of his native community, or of any other Canadian community, only to the extent that the school and the community will have provided him with a personality and the skills necessary to participate successfully in the economic, social, political and other activities found in this country.

Since the on-going culture or sub-culture in many communities of Indian background, particularly in northern areas, is socially, economically and otherwise at variance with that found in other Canadian communities, and since it is also, from a sociological and anthropological point of view, according to the standard notion of culture, inadequate, truncated and maladjusted, the schooling process offered most Indian youths must make up for as many deficiencies as possible that might interfere with full participation in the social and economic activities of our society. On this very basis alone, if individual and complete integration is to be the aim of schooling for children of Indian background, teachers are in dire need of pertinent information and understanding, concerning the cultural background of their pupils, and of skills in adjusting the curriculum to enrich and other modify this cultural heritage.

The school or school system can also be more realistic and accept the fact that in many areas, particularly up north, individual and complete socioeconomic integration is presently inaccessible to the majority of the pupils, partly because of the remoteness of the reserve or settlement, and partly because most children will leave school at age 16, without completing even grade 8, let alone grade 10 and one year or more of vocational or technical training. In this perspective, the school can and should aim at providing the older children with some skills for earning a living, keeping house and raising children in a way one step closer at least to those developed and accepted in our society, so that the next generation may not be so far removed from our cultural foundations.

Preferably, and this is the hypothesis guiding present developments in Saskatchewan, the—school in communities of Indian background, particularly in the North, can consciously accept to become part and parcel of the ongoing cultural, stream operating in the community, and the tool or main instrument through which said community adjusts its on-going culture to modern times and solves its problems, in the light of appropriate scientific and technological progress.

Indian communities on the whole, particularly in northern areas, whether they be made up of people legally recognized as Indians by the Federal Government or not, have constantly been by-passed by the diffusion of scientific and technological discoveries. This was historically inevitable of course, before the occupation of this continent by western society, or by any other literate society for that matter.

This cultural isolation has persevered in too many areas partly because of geographical factors, partly because of administrative, social, economic and even religious segregation. As a result, even now, the responsible adults in these communities, who have decisions to make for themselves, for their family, the community and the tribe (or ethnic group) are poorly equipped in ideas, understandings, etc. to fulfill this role successfully. Decisions are slow to come, problems remain unsolved, the cultural disparity with the dominant society increases, returns from official educational efforts are discouraging.

This cultural isolation and its accompanying maladjustment and retardation is best understood if we compare a community of Indian background with an average Canadian community elsewhere. In the latter, practically all parents and adults have been reared and schooled in western culture and thus are already familiar with many scientific ways of human living, having inherited a substantial amount of the discoveries of the past. Books, periodicals, magazines, newspapers, government and other agencies publications, radio and television constantly impart the results of scientific research and of political, economic and social experimentation from all over the world. When a new situation or problem emerges for which individuals, singly or collectively, do not find themselves prepared by their own schooling and experience, they can consult not only books and other documents in the library, but better informed neighbors, the professional people, the government agencies, the research centers, etc. There is not a single problem about which they cannot get, if they care to, scientific and pertinent information so as to be in position to choose, for themselves and by themselves, what course of action they are going to take for the life-purposes they have in mind. Hence, decision-making goes on, individuals and communities keep up with the times.

This is not so in a community of Indian background. Most of the above-listed sources of ideas for successful decision-making and cultural adjustment are missing. On the other hand, the few agencies present on the reserve are controlled by remote mechanisms and usually offer little choice in the solutions they propose to on-going problems. Hence, few decisions are made and often enough halfheartedly because of a lack of choice in relation to life-purposes which Indianish people wish to maintain for themselves and their descendants.

We assume that it is the role of the school as an institution to try to make up for this intolerable shortage of pertinent information and become the learning centre of the community. We theorize that the school must help the decision-making individuals and groups to (a) identify their goals in relation to the survival of their traditions; (b) establish efficient contact with pertinent information accumulated in our society (and with those sources of information from the outside that can best help the local community solve its immediate problems); (c) adjust its culture; and (d) eventually become part and parcel of the fabric of the nation. We predict that it is possible to train teachers to understand the sociological situation and to equip themselves with (a) techniques to study the community, the tribe, the larger ethnic group and their insertion in the regional and national community, in a functional anthropological perspective; (b) data concerning the solutions of on-going problems; and (c) the skills to feed this data in the community through curriculum management in the classroom and various forms of learning experiences for the adults.

The present difficulties and educational problems of children from Indian background are created by the on-going cultural stream in which these children grow up and live. This cultural stream is the fact and raison d’etre of the community. We gamble that the best and most radical solution to these problems lies with the community, hence, that the school must become part of the community.