Aboriginals need help that works

Controlling destiny and legislation don't build houses or provide purpose-oriented education and the support people need. There's never been anything to prevent delivery of what Indians thought they were getting when they affirmed the Treaties. The late Harold Cardinal said decades ago that fixing the Indian Act would be easy if the government first met its obligations--meaning the totality of support systems. Senator Murray Sinclair says education is the foremost answer, and I agree with him. But he never actually suggests how to deliver the opportunities for schooling, sports and recreation, and career planning that he had when growing up in Selkirk, Manitoba. Ironically, in 1925 anthropologist Diamond Jenness told the federal government that the fur trade was precarious and that northern peoples should be educated and trained for the jobs in their own lands. But the majority of Aboriginals don't fill professional, managerial or trades jobs anywhere. When in 1980 I was the advisor on education for Ontario's Royal Commission on the Northern Environment, we asked these questions at community meetings:

1. Should we deliver education for the modern world?
2. Should we deliver education for life on a remote northern lake?
3. Or should we combine these objectives?
4. And, if we aim to combine them, do you think that can be done successfully?

Overwhelmingly, Indians said they wanted education for both objectives, and they were emphatic that it would work. But having fifteen people living without hope for the future in an overcrowded shack unfit for human habitation defeats all educational objectives.

Ottawa Councillor Mathieu Fleury says 40 percent of the clientele at the Shepherds of Good Hope are Inuit. But the Murdered and Missing Women inquiry seems to be ignoring its mandate requiring recommendations for "concrete and effective action to remove systemic causes of violence and to increase safety ... ." It's obvious that educated and skilled women of any ethnicity in rewarding jobs are seldom murder victims, and they seldom disappear. And men with stable lives are seldom perpetrators. But most troubled adults were once children who got left behind. Why is that? There are templates for success. For addicts and dealers, drug courts work as an alternative to jail, with its $213 daily inmate cost in Ottawa--but only when combined with intensive treatment and supervision. Intensive education works universally, like the well run hostels that former cabinet ministers Leona Aglukkak and Ethel Blondin attended. That's why Indian chiefs in northern Manitoba currently run a residential high school in Winnipeg. Another template for success is the Indian-run program in Vancouver that provides comprehensive counselling for housing, addictions, remedial education and job placement. In the United States, the Knowledge is Power program (KIPP) and the Teach for America program prepare children in marginalized communities for university. Aboriginal youth can retain their identity and also become educated, skilled and gainfully employed members of the wider society. Those objectives are not mutually exclusive. Expecting less is the bigotry of low expectations.

Colin Alexander was publisher of the Yellowknife News of the North. He has family living in Nunavut. [My daughter Madeleine is mayor of Iqaluit. I know whereof I write!]