Battiste still blazing a trail for others to follow

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Marie Battiste is a professor of Education, co-ordinator of the Indian and Northern Education Program and co-ordinator of the Human Research Unit at the University of Saskatchewan (U of S). She is also the first female and first Aboriginal person to receive the university's Distinguished Researcher Award.

"I think that is the most extraordinary honour," she said of the award, "probably the highest honour that this university can give to a colleague in that it is collegial. [Colleagues give] this distinguished researcher award to someone who meets their highest standards of research, and I am really honoured that I am the first woman at the University of Saskatchewan to receive this."

The award, which includes $1,000 prize money, recognizes a U of S faculty member whose research and publications have made significant contributions to the university's knowledge base.

"She is an institutional and national treasure, and fully deserving of this university's award for distinguished research," said Education dean Cecilia Reynolds.

In addition to the doctorate degree she earned, Battiste has two honorary doctorate degrees-one from the University of Maine and the other from St. Mary's University in Nova Scotia. Battiste said that her achievements signal to other Aboriginal people that success is possible.

Battiste was born in the United States to Mi'kmaq parents from the Potlo'teck First Nation in Nova Scotia, who left the province when the Canadian government tried to centralize all First Nations in the province onto reserves. Battiste said that her family did return to Nova Scotia and tried to live on the reserve when her father became ill and needed constant care, but the crowded conditions soon convinced them to try to find greener pastures elsewhere.

"We lived there only a short period of time as there was so many people being pushed into this reserve that they didn't have enough housing for everyone," she said. "People were living in camps and tipis and wigwam kind of things or in tents, and it was a very bad situation."

In the end, the family moved back to the United States where Battiste's father found employment as a migrant potato worker in Maine. There he encouraged his children to pursue their education.

"It was sort of his hope that through our education that we would be able to achieve something that we would not be able to by living on reserve," she said.

Education was the key to her success and she eventually studied at Harvard and Stanford, two of the top universities in the United States.

After finishing teacher's college at the University of Maine at Farmington, Battiste spent a few years at the university working with disadvantaged youth.

When The Ford Foundation announced it would offer funding for Native American students to complete their graduate studies, Battiste was one of only a few Native students who held an undergraduate degree. She was recruited by Harvard and, after completing her graduate studies, she moved to California to do research at Stanford and later to complete her doctorate. She received a full-year scholarship for her first year. In her third year, she received funding from Indian Affairs in Canada.

After completing her doctorate, the professor moved back to her home reserve, Eskasoni, in Nova Scotia. There she worked as an education director and principal at the Potlo'tek school. At the same time, she began to work with the United Nations on Indigenous issues around the world. Battiste served as a United Nations expert and co-chair for the Workshop on Indigenous Heritage and as a delegate to the United Nations Workshop on Indigenous Peoples and Higher Education.

In 2000 Battiste chaired a session in Geneva that produced the completed principles and guidelines for the protection of Indigenous heritage, which was then submitted to the sub-commission on human rights. Currently, she works with the federal government on policy issues around First Naion education and the protection of Indigenous knowledge.

Her work, which has garnered her awards too numerous to mention, focuses on two areas: promoting Aboriginal knowledge, language and cultures in the schools and classrooms; and recognizing the deficits of the conventional education system and trying to find new ways to bring about a more socially just education system for all people.

"Well, I think the appeal that I have had and growing up in the 60s in the civil rights era, social justice issues were paramount to all of the work that I started doing and continue to do," said Battiste. "I think that as years have gone on, I have added to that by working and focusing on Indigenous knowledge issues ... but also understanding more clearly the nature of oppression, the nature of colonization, the nature of kinds of education that continues to perpetuate problems that come because they perceive Indigenous people as the problem and not the system as the problem."

As a scholar at the U of S, Battiste said her research has confirmed what many Aboriginal educators have known-that Aboriginal teachers make a difference to Aboriginal students. The number of Aboriginal teachers is drastically below what Aboriginal students in the province need, she said. Out of 12,000 teachers, only 700 are Aboriginal. And those Aboriginal teachers experience various forms of racism, sometimes direct, sometimes covert and sometimes systemic.

What Battiste is trying to do, she said, is "decolonize education," in part by working on a high school textbook with her colleagues. Despite a highly Eurocentric education system, Battiste is optimistic for the future of Aboriginal education.

"I'm trying to tell teachers that even when you don't know, that doesn't mean that this is a permanent condition. That everyone can learn and there's much to learn and there's much to know and share. And when we see diversity as the norm, we certainly will look at the world very differently," sai Battiste. "I think that there's always improvement in our lives in terms of the quality of our lives as Indigenous peoples, but I think also that there's an opening and much more openness, I think, to Aboriginal issues these days anyway, and in the university as well as in the school. So I see a major opportunity for us to be able to do larger research, create a larger pool of teachers in the schools that are informed and educated to the issues and needs of First Nations students."