IN CANADA: Decolonizing Schools

THERE IS a running gag on a CBC radio comedy show called Dead Dog Cafe. Chief Friendly Bear takes a break from pursuing unlikely get-rich-quick schemes to invite his listeners to settle down for his weekly fireside chat. To the swelling strains of violins and drumming, the chief reads another recommendation from The Report of the Royal Commission on Peoples. The cafe's proprietor, Gracie Heavy Hand, repeatedly reminds the chief that the whole exercise is futile. Nearly a decade after its release, only a pitiful handful of the commission's hundreds of recommendations have been implemented. Gracie is always anxious to get on with teaching her lesson in conversational Cree, which features useful everyday phrases, such as Please ask the chauffeur to bring the car around.1 Political satire has a national specialty. So has foot-dragging on the hundreds of reforms recommended by dozens of reports on issues released over several decades. Most of these reports have concluded that schools, in both their present and previous forms, have been used to ensure the cultural, economic, political, and social oppression of Canada's peoples. Yet the same reports see a transformed school system as this population's only hope for a better future. These themes are taken up in Education in Winnipeg Inner City High Schools, a recent report published by the Manitoba branch of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA.)2 Researchers conducted focus-group discussions with 47 students from five inner-city Winnipeg high schools, 50 dropouts, 25 adult community respondents, and 10 teachers. With the exception of three teachers, all interviewees were Aboriginal. (The term Aboriginal is used throughout the CCPA report, and so I've adopted it for this discussion. However, some argue that First Nations Peoples, Native Peoples, Indian, or Indian and Metis are preferable. Others use many of these terms interchangeably to signal that arguing over labels is not a worthy occupation.) The report interprets the group's responses alongside the growing literature on race, culture, and schooling. Its recommendations are directed to the Province of Manitoba and to everyone whose work touches the daily lives of students in Winnipeg School Division #1. Winnipeg is home to the highest concentration of Aboriginals in urban Canada. The bulk of this growing population (estimated to be 45,000 in 1996) is concentrated in the inner city, where approximately one-quarter of all students are a proportion that will reach 50% within 15 years. Yet one-third of the students in the focus group had never been taught by an teacher. This white, middle-class face of the system is blamed for alienating some students and driving others out of school. More than 12% of 15- to 29-year-old youths leave school with less than a ninth-grade education, compared with 1.9% of their non-Aboriginal counterparts. Almost half the people between the ages of 18 and 24 have no high school diploma, compared with 20% of their non-Aboriginal peers. A deplorable 37.5% of the 15- to 24-year-old population is neither attending school nor employed. CCPA's report challenges the conventional interpretation of these dismal data, which too often implies that the fault lies with individuals, their families, and their communities. The authors contend that it is the school system, not Aboriginals or their culture, that must be fixed, and that this transformation cannot be accomplished by adding an novelist here or creating an after-school Pow-Wow Club there. However well-intentioned, such tokenism actually reinforces the school's role as a colonizing agent by emphasizing the otherness of culture and the superiority of the Eurocentric real curriculum. According to the authors, until both the curriculum and those who teach it become more Aboriginal, schools will retain only those students willing to renounce their culture and their communities in favor of a diploma. …

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