New university offers courses to Northern B.C.

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When the University of Northern British Columbia opened last fall, it was operating under a mandate to reach out to Native people in the north of that province.

It has done so using scattered campus-based classes in various communities, such as Terrace, Kitimat, Port Edward and New Aiyansh, as well as at the main campus in Prince George.

"Part of our mandate has been to provide course offerings to British Columbia's First Nations people," says Jim McDonald, acting chair of the First Nations Studies Program and acting director of the Office of First Nations Programming. We do so through our main campus in Prince George, our other campuses, distance education options and...we are exploring the options offered by interactive video technology.

McDonald comes to the program, which is a part of the Faculty of Arts and Science, with a solid background in Aboriginal affairs. He has worked with the Nisga'a on land claims and cultural decolonization, and will continue to do so while he fulfills his teaching and research obligations as a UNBC faculty member. He earned a PhD at the University of British Columbia in anthropology and sociology.

"The intention is to take classes to the communities, and to provide community-based learning there, not only of subjects at a university level," he says. "The eventual intention is to offer each language and each culture in each community," although that's down the road a long way. Northern B.C. has dozens of distinct languages and as many cultures.

British Columbia has more First Nations cultures than the rest of the country," says McDonald. It is primarily due to the coastal topography, but that makes the task undertaken by the new university positively Herculean.

"We can only grow," he says. "We have forwarded 33 new course proposals to the (university) senate committee, mostly to do with language and culture, for introduction in the fall."

That just scratches the surface, however. What is holding UNBC back is the lack of teaching materials, and even more, the lack of teachers.

Teaching a language and a literature assumes that there is something written down in it, and while some of the larger First Nations in the area have some documents, some of the smaller have none at all.

The literature is one now in creation, as speeches by chiefs, new Indigenous authors' poetry and prose, and stories from a rich oral tradition are being written and saved on paper for the first time.

"It's quite an exciting thing going here," says McDonald of the graduate studies component of First Nations Studies. ""Our program deals with two things: issues and northern Indigenous nations, including those which aren't North America." He explains that one grad student is studying the Lapps of northern Europe, for example.

Undergraduate work is basically of use in four areas: a general education dealing with First Nations issues, but which depends on what the student takes, according to McDonald; the learning and teaching of the Native languages; a solid training for issues that affect the Aboriginal community; and an intensive study within the culture, which is described by some people as a "revivalist" or "survivalist" movement of sorts, in the face of the dominant non-Native cultures. There is also the opportunity for those who are not from the First Nations to learn about and come to some deeper understanding of Native cultures and issues, allowing for the decolinizing of attitudes towards Aboriginal people and nations.

In other programs and faculties, UNBC is designed so that courses should touch

on or explore in depth First Nations issues, so that everyone attending the university will get some idea of the Indigenous peoples of northern B.C. First Nations study is especially necessary in some aspects of health, social work and political science. "Much of what we're talking about is talk, not reality, at this point," says McDonald.

UNBC admitted its first students in the fall of 1994 and nowhas about 1,500 students all told. Most of the programs, in all parts of the new university, are in development or proposed.

It will take as much as a decade to actually see the final shape of UNBC. Students, faculty and administrators of the school will have a good deal to say what the institution will eventually be like.