Action called for on Native education

Page 3

The time for talk is over. It's now time for action on Aboriginal education.

That was the major theme coming out of a three-day conference held July 7, 8 and 9 in Ottawa.

Verna Kirkness, director of the First Nations' House of Learning at the University of British Columbia, told delegates the educational needs of Aboriginal people have been studied to death.

"What we need is action," she told the National Round Table on Education, organized by the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples.

"We know virtually everything we need to know about ourselves," Kirkness said.

She said it was time to draft legislation creating jurisdictional control over education for First Peoples. Once the legislation is in place, then the infrastructure will flow from it.

Kirkness called on the Royal Commission to get the government moving on creating legislation.

"The Royal Commission has the authority to put it on the table," she told Windspeaker.

Kirkness did qualify her remarks about there being no more need for study, saying that an Aboriginal theory of knowledge and education needs to be developed.

"We are still looking at education through Western eyes," she said.

Public action is exactly what is needed, said Harvey McCue after Kirkness's speech. McCue, the Chief Executive Officer with the Mi'kmaq Education Authority, said that when he was the director general of education at Indian Affairs, he ran into a brick wall when presenting suggestions to senior officials because there was no public action calling for the changes.

"The deputy minister or assistant deputy minister would look out the window and say, "Well McCue, you know, these ideas are interesting, they're creative, but where are the swarms of people that demand these changes?"

To back up his recommendations, he would then point to reports and studies, and there would still be no action.

"Studies and reports are a dime a dozen. Government doesn't respond to studies and reports. What they respond to is public and political pressure," he said.

Action for education must be taken out of the hands of politicians and placed in the hands of the people. Meetings and discussions between politicians do not work, he added.

"What politicians, particularly at the provincial and federal levels, respond to are numbers, particularly at the local level," McCue said.

Public action will make the politicians realize that the concerns expressed here today are supported at the local level, McCue added. Politicians hear concerns like

these expressed every day.

"But what moves them, what causes them to think twice about ignoring the situation is when you have people clamoring to get in, banging on the doors, hanging on the windows.

"Until that happens the government will only be too happy to pay for Royal Commissions to have these kind of sessions," he said.

With the end of this round table the public activities of the Royal Commissions are at an end until the fall.