Aboriginal Education: Fulfilling the Promise

John Steckley teaches in the Human Studies Program at Humber College in
Toronto. He is the author of Beyond Their Years: Five Native Women's
Stories.

The articles in this collection are edited versions of written
submissions to the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples of the
mid-1990s. Of the 19 contributors, slightly more than half are of
aboriginal heritage, and all have some experience in aboriginal
education. As Mi’kmaq educator Marie Battiste states in the foreword,
“This book makes a valuable contribution to aboriginal education by
offering fresh insights and examples of projects that stretch our
imagination as well as celebrate some milestones reached in three
decades of striving for First Nations control of First Nations
education.”

Not surprisingly, given their origin as submissions to a royal
commission, many of the articles are formal, impersonal, and
policy-directed, making them more suitable for policymakers and
educational administrators than for teachers of aboriginal students and
aboriginal students themselves. Those articles that are more accessible
to a broader audience include Chippewa Gail Valaskakis’s “Telling
Our Own Story: The Role, Development, and Future of Aboriginal
Communications,” which successfully incorporates the voices of Native
journalists; and Sto:lo writer Ethel Gardner’s piece on the First
Nations House of Learning (affiliated with the University of British
Columbia).

In the Gardner article, a First Nations student is quoted as saying:
“Having this place, the First Nations House of Learning, is a very
important step—you have a place that is safe when things get tough on
the outside. Coming here is like going to a reserve. I feel that I’m
going home in a sense.” A greater contribution from such voices would
have earned this book a wider audience.