Wednesday: University of Guelph

Our Wednesday itinerary was a little less demanding than the days before. We only visited the Aboriginal Resource Centre at the University of Guelph. It was an interesting contrast on a similar office at Ryerson. Guelph is a more rural suburb of Toronto, with lots of open spaces. The staff was expecting us and our contact there, Natasha Smith, sat and talked to us for more than an hour. Their office primarily focuses on student services and she had less to say than Diane about the curriculum that was offered in aboriginal topics. Instead she described how the office was formed (student motivated, about 15 years ago) and the different services and events that the program offered.

Of particular interest to me was her discussion of challenges students face in attending a university. As I have gleaned, Canada has three tiers of post-secondary education: university, college, and polytechnic. Students who grow up on reservations go to schools that are controlled by the federal government, whereas all other schools are controlled by the provincial government. This means that until high school, students on the reservation receive a very different education. When they graduate from middle school, they must move into the city and live at a boarding school in order to attend high school. Many students choose not to go to high school, and many who do choose to go, do not do well, simply because the educational system is so different and getting caught up with their classmates on different material and different cultural norms can be a very steep learning curve for indigenous students. Natasha as described a tendency of high school councilors to steer students towards more vocational career paths (at colleges and polytechnics), so that often they do not take the courses required to enter a university program. I was surprised that students were still required to move away from their families in order to join mainstream education--if they wanted to progress in a career. That fact strongly reminded me of the residential schools. No doubt that abuse is not so prevalent, but indigenous young people are still being removed from their families and trained to assimilate into the mainstream culture.

Natasha also described in some detail the difficulties indigenous people have with their status. In Canada, indigenous people are given tax-exempt status if they can prove their indigenous ancestry. Natasha noted, however, that the rules governing this exempt status were inconsistent and skewed by historical moral choices. Women used to lose their status if the married a non-indigenous man while men did not. Alternatively, non-indigenous women who married an indigenous man, would gain status. The law changed in 1985, but the law had already affected thousands of families, and those families are still trying to figure out what there status is according to the new laws that have been put in place--laws that Natasha argued have many loopholes and inconsistencies.