Brenda Celesta

Brenda Celesta at Norkam Secondary School in Kamloops.

Brenda Celesta is the First Nations academic intervention co-ordinator and a teacher at NorKam Secondary School in Kamloops. She grew up in the Simpcw First Nation, just north of Barrier.

In her role at Norkam, she looks after the academic performance of the First Nations students at the school which is about 129 students. And that’s in addition to her teaching Social Studies and First Nations Studies 12.

These are some excerpts from my conversation with her in her office at Norkam:

 “Most First Nations students tend to still follow the trend that’s been there for more than 40 years and that trend is basically that they still lag behind, there’s still a gap between where the non-First Nations students are and the First Nations students are in the way of performance at the completion rates, the letter grades that they’re receiving and of course graduation as well.”

“Basically I got into the role of teaching just based on working with cultural curriculum development project basically at Secwepemc Museum and when I was there just looking at the number of kids that weren’t made aware of some of the local history and the native history and it’s not there is some pieces along the way throughout the curriculum and so basically that was part of my goal is when I got here to Norkam that I would put in some of that history, somewhere along the way – Social Studies 10, Social Studies 11 or whatever it might be. I ended up teaching First Nations Studies 12 so I’ve been involved in a big big way I think more or less throughout the district but looking back now and I see some of the kids who were in my classroom, I think I really wanted to help them in some kind of way to get that goal of completing and getting your Grade 12 certificate and then moving on, moving on to something else whether it’s university, or college, or trades or training of some kind to create a future for themselves.”

When I talked to her she had just done a presentation on residential school to district wide Pro-D day.

“This really hits me when I do this presentation on residential schools and so I did one on our last Pro-D and I open up the entire discussion with the idea that I am the first person in my family to hit the public school from kindergarten through Grade 12 and the time period that I went to school, my older brothers and sisters, my cousins were all going to a reserve school that was a little ways outside of our community or community run schools or were just coming back from residential schools and I remember when that school was shut down and I remember them coming home and I had that experience of being one of the very first ones to go to public school from kindergarten through Grade 12. Both my parents went to residential school at some point in their lives.”

“When I look back in history, not so much myself, maybe not so much my parents but definitely impacted my grandparents because they would have gone from the time they were able to go to school until they became adults. When I think of their own personal history, I don’t know a lot about my mom’s side but I know a lot about my dad’s side, and that’s pretty much where I was raised, in that community. I think there were a lot of gaps probably in language, lot of gaps probably in the cultural traditional kind of aspect. They didn’t learn a lot about it when they were growing up or they didn’t share it because it wasn’t appropriate at that time in their generation to share that information so I think we kind of lost out that way where we didn’t get a lot of transferring from grandparent to grandchild but with my own parents, I know my mom was impacted. She went to residential school for nine years and I think she started at age four and I think she made it through to Grade 9 was her completion and basically went on to her adult life and not returned until she was in her late forties, basically completed just before I did, before I graduated high school so pretty amazing to go that length and not have that background to fall back on. Something like a Grade 12 education can get you a better job and not having those kind of things was really important but there were so many other changes happening at that time, I don’t know if people really thought about every little detail about what was changing.”

 “A lot of that I really wonder like is there gaps between what the grandparents and the grandchildren would know because there would gaps in the types of education they would be given too.”

“They say that less than 2 per cent of the people who are fluent speakers are over the age of 55-60 which means that we’re losing our language. I mean just the rapid pace that it’s going to go in the next little bit that we figure that in 20-25 years our language is going to be coming from people who were taught the basics of the language and the rest of it from video and audio, I don’t know if that’s the right way to learn the language but preserving it I think is important.”

“I don’t know how much of an impact that I make but I do know that now, I’ve been here six years, and at the beginning it was surprising, a little bit shocking to some extent to some students to see that perspective of what my experience has been like and I’m able to share some personal experiences about the changes I’ve seen in just my community, around my community, around aboriginal education with students in Grade 12 in my First Nations Studies 12 class and I think they get really surprised at how real it is. It’s a part of the world that they don’t normally see every day, they don’t watch this on the news and they look back throughout history and at some of the conflicts that happen with First Nations groups and some of the local ones that are really surprising to them, like the Sun Peaks issue and some of the talk we have with local bands about different environmental things and they see those as kind of in the forefront of their mind that we’re just argumentative, we’re just looking at all these things in a way to push the government out or whatever it is but they don’t realize how much of it people live in their day to day lives and because I grew up on reserve, I can bring a lot of those stories forward and I think it gets them to see it in a completely different way.”

In her class, she uses a textbook written by First Nations groups across the country. In the beginning when she started teaching First Nations Studies 12, most of her students were non-First Nations students and now it’s switched over so most of the students are First Nations. And there’s growing interest across the district. Two years ago, she started video conferencing her class to students in Valleyview Secondary. 

“You look at the text books and you say, ‘OK, throughout Canadian history, how much of this is including First Nations history?’ and you can kind of pinpoint different places along the way, so Social Studies 9, there will be an introduction to the historical life of First Nations people. Social Studies 10, we’ll talk about the development of Canada and then the initial contact with First Nations people but what’s lacking is the contact until the present. All of those kinds of things that were happening throughout the development of Canada and as Canada becomes a growing nation. Basically there’s not a lot of historical information there about government structures, there’s not a lot about the contributions that First Nations people made within Canada, but what’s interesting about it is when you get to Grade 12, you see First Nations 12 course but again it’s only a portion of First Nations because it’s all linked to B.C. Most of it is dealing with government so a lot of it, I think, comes from a negative view because of all the conflict that happened across time and I don’t how prepared people are in their background knowledge to know what happened.”

‘I encourage them to learn as much as they possibly can and I’m really big on backgrounds of people so it’s not just my own culture that I’m really big on. When I’m teaching a Social Studies 10 course, I challenge a lot of kids in the room to find out what are your roots? What is your history? What is your culture? How long ago was it that your parents arrived here in Canada? What do you know about the history of your own great-grandparents or whatever that might be? What did they do? Because I think it’s really interesting to know about your own history.”

“I got really lucky. I probably work in one of the best school in the district and I only say that because I know that at every different level within our school we have included First Nations material.”

When she was hired six years ago, she was hired under an aboriginal protocol agreement to boost the number of aboriginal teachers at Norkam but her reception from teacher has been anything but tokenistic.

“I can’t think of one person that I could not say incorporated any kind of lesson plan or showed me some kind of material that they covered for aboriginal people and really caring for our students so it’s really good that way.”

 “What our goal is is to make sure that these students know that they are made to feel welcome here and we want the families to have the same experience. We don’t want them to get that phone call home at the end of the semester when let’s say son or daughter hasn’t been here for 10 days, missed amount of work, could not get caught up, we don’t ever want them to have that feeling so we want them to know that they have a group of people on their side, ready and prepared to do just about anything to get that child through that semester in whatever course it might be.”

“When I got into education that was one of my struggles as a teacher was looking at the curriculum for Social Studies 10 and from my worldview knowing about the development of Canada and all these little pieces I didn’t find in the curriculum, they weren’t there so like I said the contributions of aboriginal people and the contributions of people who are coming into Canada from other places, immigrants in the last 60 years and all of those thing that kind of changed the makeup of our country are not accurately portrayed in history books, you know you read through the text and it’s kind of general basic information but it doesn’t give you the details.”

“I think band-run schools don’t go far enough and the reason I say that is most of them are K to 7 and I think if you could expand it even further you could have students coming out academically probably really strong because they know they have the support of their community but when I look at it too, because I’ve been in the public school system so long now like it been nine years now, I taught in Clearwater too, two and a half years before I was here. The way I see also is that balance. How do they balance the cultural traditional knowledge with what they need to do in the modern world and I think sometimes when we get into the cultural, traditional, historical stuff that they still have to function in the modern world along with other people and that sort of thing and maybe that’s where it would be lacking so a lot more sharing back and forth maybe would be a lot nicer.”

“That’s one of the things I talk about in my First Nations Studies 12 is how the dynamics within a First Nations community change throughout history and a lot of it has to do with education because, these are not my words, these are the words from an elder that had done a presentation two or three years ago, it’s the description of a Grade 12 student coming out of the public school system going into the world or coming out of university going into the world that in one hand they’re carrying a drum representing their traditions, their culture, their language  and in the other hand they’re carrying their diploma, their degree and that basically represents the two worlds that they have to live in so they’re kind of going back and forth between these two separate worlds that are very different but they’re still able to function in both and I think when we look at our people that’s the biggest piece of it is that we have to be able to function in both, that we can no longer make a living within our traditional world, we still have to go into looking at some kind of training or certificates or whatever it might be and I think educating people that way so we can push forward with what we need to do in our communities because we still have people living there, there are people living in our communities.”

When she was going to school in Barrier, she dad a principal who cared about her and her future and she wants to offer that to her students.

“I think it’s really important for our student to have a voice like that, someone who can sit them down and say, “you can do this, you can get through this course. Never mind the stuff that’s going on, let’s sit down and see what you have to do’ and just kind of see it that way I guess.”

“Some of our students now look towards their future, they don’t see it as I just can’t do this and it’s just overwhelming, life is too busy or whatever the story might be I hear them talking about, ‘next year this is what I’m going to do,’ if they’re in Grade 12. Grade 11, this is my goal, in Grade 12, I want to take this course, I want to look at this  and they’re excited about the options rather than being like, ‘oh no, this I have to take this next year,’ and they’re excited about what they have to do and it’s kind of interesting. I don’t know if we had a big part in it but our team is pretty strong with the let’s find a way around this hurtle and let’s find a way around this negativity or whatever’s going on. We want them to push through and make it.”

‘I think they would benefit better from having both worlds and a lot of our students, they understand that they have a different culture, they understand that and even if it’s a Métis, we have a few that will talk about their mother’s experience as a First Nations but they also see the other side so those students often have a pretty good, it’s like a woven web they have (inter-meshes fingers). They know. They understand both and they think both are equally important so I always find it really interesting because I thought that as a First Nations person you might feel a little stronger about it but I actually believe that the students even if they’re first or second generation Métis, they still have that quality and it’s exactly the same as any First Nations student.”

“I just know that this role is big, bigger than what I see it as and I think basically I got my feet wet with all the information I can find and I don’t know where I can draw from other people and basically looking at whoever I can find in education that can give me some ideas about things that I can try, things that I can do is really important.”