Thursday was a busy day for us. We started early and drove to the Indian reserve nearest Toronto and visited the Six Nations Polytechnic. We talked a little about what exactly was a polytechnic and I looked it up online. What I found out is that it is basically a post secondary institution that provides technical training (kind of like a vocational school). When we got there, though, it wasn't anything like what I would consider a vocational school. First, it was a lot smaller than I expected, being all housed in one building. The building also had many indigenous symbols throughout, that our guide, Taylor, would stop and explain to us. He told us that the building had been built to face due north, because of tradition, and the layout was to perpendicular hallways. Where to two hallways met, a turtle was painted on the floor referencing the Six Nations foundation stories.
Secondly, when we met our contact (Tanis Hill), she introduced us to one of the students who was studying at the school, Taylor. He was a graduate who was doing research on indigenous topics that interested him. Ultimately, we met two other scholars, Logan, and Willard. I tried to plug them into my frame of reference, asking them if they were graduate students or doing their research to fulfill a degree. While one man said that he was doing his research as part of an internship, they all seemed mostly to be conducting their research for their own satisfaction. They didn't really expect to publish either, indicating that their research would be stored in the Polytechnic library.
During our conversation, these three scholars told us about their education experience. I was somewhat surprised to realize that they were taught in their native language at school--some of them. But those who were, while closer to their community roots, had a more difficult time going on to post secondary education because of their struggle with using English. Taylor really gave us the most information. He described his primary and secondary teachers as excellent, and mentioned a 50-50 program that helped him to really get a good grasp on how to write in English. He said that when he went to university, he had a very steep learning curve because the way that people taught and thought in the mainstream institutions was so completely different from the way his people thought. I found that very interesting because I have found that to be true in my one teaching experience. The differences between the way people think and operate in different cultures goes much deeper than just facts about the culture, but education often treats that and the limit of culture. Learning to think a different way is not something we are very good at teaching. Students from other cultures, when they join a western style institution, often have to pick up that skill as they can.
They also talked about their new bachelors programs that they were beginning in the fall: two bachelors in indigenous language studies. There were some other plans to add teaching degrees later, but those plans were still far in the future. They talked about the difficulty of funding, stating that they could never be sure how much funding they would get from year to year, which made planning difficult. This was a very similar observation to what Lee Maracle made.
We stayed for lunch (they hosted us in their dining room). After lunch, we joined a teachers' continuing education course about incorporating indigenous learning methods in the classroom. During that class, we basically sat around in a circle and talked about our backgrounds. I enjoyed that part because in all our travels, I had been surprised to realize how many people identified as indigenous, and so found it difficult to relate to new people I met because I wasn't sure of their relationship to the discussion we were having (was this new person talking about their own history as a member of the first nations or were they a Canadian speaking as a learner from the outside?). I found that knowing this information really did affect the way I related to that person. We had to leave that class early to get to our appointment at Mohawk College.
We still ended up meeting with our contact at Mohawk College a little late because we miscommunicated on where to meet. When we finally met Amanda Collina, she told us immediately her own relationship to the aboriginal community (she was indigenous on one side of her family but had generally grown up outside the community). She was the first person we had met who did that so automatically and without any prompting on our part. She then told us much of the same information about the student success center at Mohawk as we had learned at the University of Guelph.
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