Degree brings respect

Page 18

A college diploma has brought respect she never thought she'd get to a Dene Nation grandmother.

Raised on Saskatchewan's Black Lake Reserve, 47-year-old Marie Rose Yooya took her place in June as one of the oldest of the 20 business administration graduates of the Indian Institute of Technology in Prince Albert.

"There were several things that had gone wrong and I was lost," she says of the dark period of her life just before taking the brave step to enter college.

"I woke up one day and knew I had to do something to get myself out of that hole, so I decided to go back to school.

"(Education) has helped me to see and set my priorities. There was a time when I though the priority was where to get the money for the next drink."

"But I also feel respecting myself is the priority now. (Education) has opened a lot of doors for meand people are coming to me and treating me with respect," she says.

Without any knowledge of computers and little of accounting, Yooya says she struggled against huge odds.

She maintains if it wasn't for the encouragement from college director Wally Isbister and secretary Linda Bilodeau she would have given up.

"There were times when I stayed at the school all night in order to understand something. Something wouldn't balance and I was too stubborn to give up. I'd sit there and fight with (the computer) trying to get something out of it," she says.

Take the easy way, she suggested to students.

"If I can do it at my age there's no reason a person can't do it when they walk straight out of high school because, I tell you, it's a lot harder later in life."

That life, she says, had always been one of dramatic changes but nothing prepared her for how the course would turn her life upside-down.

"I didn't realize what a demand the course was going to be on all aspects of life-time, effort and finances."

She left the reverse at 15 for a residential school far in the south of the province. Soon after, and before completing high school, she entered the job market, working over the year in carpentry, painting, social work and in tourist camps. In 1979, where her two children were still young, she finally completed high school.

One job she's particularly proud of is as liaison and an interpreter during land claim talks between the Athabasca bands of the Dene First Nation, which includes her band, and the federal governments. After 18 years of talks, two of the three bands concluded agreements in 1980.

She doesn't plan to return to the civil service, where she worked in Social Services.

"I wasn't a very civil servant," she jokes. "You're damned if you do and damned if you don't."