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Fed. of Sask. Indian Nations call for separate school system
December 5, 2009 - 4:13pm
Quote:
Regina Leader-Post Earlier this week, a panel struck to address Winnipeg's violent crime problems recommended a publicly funded aboriginal school division, which advocates say could teach First Nations language and culture and life-skills courses to help curb high dropout rates for aboriginal students. That was the inspiration for the FSIN to call on Friday for such a publicly funded separate school system in Saskatchewan, which would be similar to the Catholic school system, or the francophone school system, the Conseil des Ecoles Fransaskoises.
bump. But what about assimilation into the imperialist-capitalist setup? How can people learn to be proper consumers and taxpayers in propping-up a dying ideology if not totally immersed in whitey's ways?
Complicated issue.
My gut reaction is to be opposed to anything that would further institutionalize current racial/racist segregated educational systems in Canada. Past experience has shown that most such systems simply re-iterate inequality that already exists in other areas of social life.
For example, I know from personal (work) experience that infrastructure in Canada is much poorer and more badly funded for FN communities than for non-FN communities. It's how the whole thing works.
Anyway, if the FNs are suggesting that this is the way to go, then I'm not prepared to reject such proposals out of hand. Educational funding may make this a better approach. I'm going to be studying FN educational issues in January so I should be reading more about this very soon.
Presumably there are FN run schools on reserve all over Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Yes?
Do they have a province wide umbrella organization?
In Nova Scotia, with much smaller numbers, there are a few band-run schools and a province-wide MigMaw Education Authority.
And as far as funding goes- its federal funding goes into whatever system[s] where FN students attend school.
I've just looked at the Assembly of First Nations website (AFN) and it becomes abundantly clear that there are extremely serious issues that are still unaddressed by the Government of Canada. So bad is the situation, in fact, that the AFN openly talks about litigation and/or human rights complaints against the GoC for its "negligence in fulfilling fiduciary and Treaty obligations". The Education Secretariat of the AFN notes the following:
So, there is still plenty of work to do in regard to collection of the data to actually understand the extent and depth of the problems.
The First Nations Education Action Plan is over here. (.pdf file requiring Adobe Acrobat to read) Some selected quotes follow.
FN control must, therefore, be missing for it to be made such focus.
"... this gap is increasing." Under the current Harper regime, things are getting worse, as the gap widens further between FNs and the rest of the Canadian population.