Earl Celesta

Earl Celesta stand outside the school where he works.

Earl Celesta went to Neqweyqwelsten School for just two years but now two of his own kids are going to the school and getting more of the benefit of the on-reserve community lead education that he started his schooling with. He now works for the band and the school doing maintenance work, but looks back at his time as a student fondly.

 “Probably one of the better schools, for myself, I kinda wish I did stick around a little longer just mainly for language and stuff, but I have a son who’s here now and he’s learning a lot more that I have,” he said. “It’s been awesome. I know the teachers. I grew up with their kids here in Chu Chua. I’ve always had that warm feeling when I come here, I work here as well.”

When asked what role he thought the school played in the community, he overwhelmingly thought it was important.

“They interact  with everyone who is in the community as well they do do some of the outside community as well so that’s for my kids, a lot of their friendships comes from outside of the community compared to just being on the reserve,” he said. “As far as Neqweyqwelsten School, I think being one of the big players in this community, I know for a fact that they are doing fairly well. I think they’ll do really good in the future and I’m just glad that my kids are part of this as well.”

“They also get a mixture of both (cultures) because we also have kids that come here that aren’t from the reserve, they’re just nearby... so that was like our biggest part, they’re learning our culture as well.”

That connection to his band’s culture and language has been good for the more than just his kids.

“Both of my children, one is in a head start program, I’m learning from them now and it’s mostly on my own language and it’s nice for them to be teaching me that when we’re at home. That’s the biggest my biggest goal for them is to have that language themselves because they can talk to my parents in the a language and I always ask them what they’re saying,” he said.

Celesta’s sister also has a connection to education. Brenda Celesta is a teacher at NorKam Secondary School in Kamloops. I talked to her last week about her job and hope to have some excerpts from that interview up soon.

Charli Fortier

Charli Fortier at the Neqweyqwelsten School

Last week I went to the Simpcw First Nation north of Barrier and talked with students and staff at the Neqweyqwelsten School. One of the people I talked to was Charli Fortier who is the Secwepmectsin materials developer.

Here is some excerpts from our conversation that I felt were relevant to this process:

“I work with anything and everything to do with language whether it be booklets to send home with the kids and parents or translating certain things, curriculum development, any little project that I can do to increase Secwepmectsin speaking in school.”

“We grew up having an elder in school that would come in a few days a week... That was Ida Matthew... and she along with a couple other elders and knowledge holders would come in every once and awhile, as much as they could and teach up you know animals, colours, body parts and we’d do basket making and drumming and all sorts of cultural activities so they’ve been without an elder or a Secwepmectsin teacher for a couple of years now so it’s up to the teachers who are community members, they married into the community, to learn as much as they can and to teach the kids so it’s kind of nice to have the kids learning from someone who is Simpcw and grew up with the language so that’s pretty scary but important role.”

“I find myself very fortunate to be growing up a part of the school here. I wouldn’t have experience anything like this in public school. This school was started up, my parents were a part of it and I wouldn’t have been able to learn the language or the culture. It was something that wasn’t very prominent in our parents’ generation at all so we had the elders who grew up with the language having to teach up so I wouldn’t gotten that aspect of that teaching at home so I found myself, I was happy to be here and be part of that.”

‘Going to this school really helped with my self-esteem, you know cultural pride. I entered public school and the world knowing who I was and where I came from. It built a foundation because otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to experience the things I did and go the places I’ve been.”

 “It really helped me accomplish what I wanted to accomplish. I always knew that I wanted to potentially come back here and teach what I could.”

“It’s great to see the kids’ reaction to see someone who’s already been through the school and to come back.” “They react in such a positive manner and also to know that the teachers are so happy to have us come back home, you know that was the goal.”

 “(The school has) a huge role. For one, it’s a school that was established by the parents as separate from chief and council, which I think is a great thing. The parents control what they teach their kids, how they want to learn it, who they want teaching their kids, curriculum development and to have this school right here in the heart of the community with the band office attached to the school, you know the kids are involved in all sorts of community activities.”

“it’s kind of a ripple effect because there’s still parents who didn’t get the opportunity like we did so the knowledge of language and the knowledge of culture and tradition still isn’t there, there still learning too so to have the kids learn it here and to be so enthusiastic and to bring it back home, it’s helping everybody”

“We started off here as one of the earlier school and now the teachers here go off and mentor other schools”

“It’s a huge towards reconciliation because we’re in control. We get to control what the kids learn and how they’re being taught and incorporating culture and language to instill that pride again, that’s a pretty huge step”

“To go to gatherings and to be able to be one of the few to introduce myself in my own language, it’s a good feeling and you see the look on other people’s faces like they really want to learn their own language and do that too.”

“Unfortunately, public schools aren’t quite doing the job yet that they should be so to teach people, to help people with this type of program or this way of teaching is a huge step in helping ourselves, not depending on anyone else. We know the job we need to get done in education so why not do it ourselves?”

Fortier’s not ready to settle down in the community yet because she feels that the world has more to offer than just life on the reserve. She hopes to bring her language and her culture to the world and then the world back to her culture.

Her takes on education are important in how bands might come to see the role of education in the community and I think that no one knows how well a system works like someone who has lived through it.

Rachael Bowser

Rachael Bowser at the Neqweyqwelsten School

Rachael Bowser is a 24 year old First Nations woman living on the Simpcw Reserve, north of Barrier. She has an easy smile and warmth to her personality. 

I met Rachael when I went to tour the Neqweyqwelsten School on reserve. Rachael went to the school herself and now is back on a contract to be the technical assistant at the school. She’s part of the school’s move to bring more technology into the classroom. I spoke with her as she worked at a Mac computer in a classroom full of light and colour. Large containers of paint were stacked on shelves and around the room were number cards, each with the Shuswap word for the number carefully typed below.

I talked with Rachael about her experience at the school and what it’s meant to her as a person.

“I had so much fun growing up here. I wouldn’t know what being in the public school was like when I was younger but growing up here was just so much fun because most of the times were with family. We lived really close. We live in a really really close area so we’d play with each other after school, play with each other before school, play with each other during school so it was really cool growing up with everybody and I just remember having so much fun with anything and everything,” she said.

But staying at Neqweyqwelsten only last until Grade 7 at the latest. For Rachael, the transition happened in Grade 6.

 “It was a little bit nerve wracking. I was a little bit nervous starting out in a public school because here in my grade I had two other girls with me and we had two other guys in the same grade with us so making the switch from having 30 kids in the school to going to a classroom where there’s 30 kids was huge for me, but it was fun.”

Even thought the transition to Barrier was made easier because Neqweyqwelsten and the elementary school had build an existing relationship, Rachael was glad to have spent the early years of her education at Neqweyqwelsten.

 “It definitely made my education a little bit better. I think it did anyway. Learning was a lot easier. For one when I was growing up, it was not uncommon, it’s still not uncommon, for a parent to come in and substitute like you know when teachers need days off so you know sometime my mom was in and she would substitute and even with other parents, they’d be in on supervising duties. I don’t know, it was just really easy on the education because parents were involved in every step, I mean from getting us ready in the morning, sometimes they’d even wind up coming to school with us cause they were substituting or supervising at recess,” she said. “The teachers were there and they helped you grow at your own pace. It wasn’t like you were set in one pigeon hole with the rest of your class. You were really able to grow on your own and you’re really able to be an individual which I remember being.” 

The school is not just important to her but to the community.

“The school was, for me, growing up the bee-all and end-all because it was the centre of everything,” she said, “I guess it’s almost a second home but we grow up learning that it takes a community to raise a child and it definitely does so the school so the school’s definitely played a huge role.”

When I asked Rachael what role she thought education played in First Nations communities taking back responsibility from the Federal government, this is what she said:

“Education plays a huge role in that process because with this school, I know that this school isn’t part of the school district so we don’t have the same curriculum and its huge I think because we make our own curriculum at least as far I can tell the curriculum has always been slightly different than what you get in the public school. For me, it’s a huge thing because when we were younger we got to learn our own language so instead of learning the required French, we were learning Shuswap and that’s carried on even up until today. I still know a little bits and words.”

For Rachael, a lot of her pride in her culture and herself comes from her experience at the band school.

“Growing up in the area, growing up on reserve, going to school on reserve, I probably take it so much for granted just because it the norm for me.”

 “It definitely played a huge role in teaching me just about everything we are as a people so I guess I take it for granted now but it’s pretty much played a really huge role in my life,” she said. “What I love and what I know doesn’t just stay within the community but it spreads and other people get to learn about it too, definitely spreads to other communities.”

But growing up, Rachael’s learning happened at home too.

“A lot of where my learning came from came from home. I mean not only was I learning at school, you know learning about the language and learning about our culture and our people and learning math and stuff like that at school but I was going home and my dad hunts and my mom runs a fisheries program so I learn a lot about fisheries so we learn all of our traditions at home so it’s not just you learn something at school and you go home and you live your regular life but you’re going home and you’re still learning about traditions.” 

These formative years at the Neqweyqwelsten School has help her better see where she fits in the world.

“I’ve gone out and met other First Nations people and they definitely don’t have the connection to the culture that we’re taught as children so it’s definitely definitely had a huge impact on me being able to stand up and say this is who I am and I’m proud of it,” she said.

“Having the positive experience that I had growing up and going to school here has really made me proud of who I am and really proud to say, yes, I’m a First Nations, I am a Shuswap woman, this is where I grew up, these are my people. It’s made me really proud to say that and not only am I proud to say it, I’m proud to definitely be living here, growing up the way that I did and still living the way that I do.”

Joe Jules

Yesterday, I drove out to the Simpcw Reserve to visit the Neqweyqwelsten School. The school is just approaching its 30th anniversary. It was one of the earliest band run school formed in the province. It was started by parents who were looking to offer alternative education options to their children where there would be a greater focus on language and culture. Nearly 30 years later, the school continues to do that.

The sun was shining when I got the school, but brightness was replaced with sound when I went into the dimly gym. The whole space was filled with the beat of drumming and the pulse of young voices. Sitting in a semi-circle, students were drumming on hand drums and singing along with Joe Jules. He’s the band’s Title & Rights Researcher/Coordinator and teaches culture to the young people of the community.

I spoke with him in his basement office about his role in the band and with the students and made a video of our conversation. The conversation is about 15 minutes long but the focus on the importance of education is near the beginning of our conversation. Here is the majority of our conversation though shortened to fit on YouTube

I have many other interviews and stories from my visit to the Neqweyqwelsten School and I hope to share them in my coming posts.

Lisa Cooke

Lisa Cooke in her TRU office.

Last week I spoke with Lisa Cooke, a cultural anthropologist and assistant professor at TRU in the department of Sociology and Anthropology. We spoke about many things including the history of the Indian Act, residential schools and her views on educations and self-government.

Here are a few excerpts from our conversation:

“The residential school system emerges out of the Indian Act which is a document that came into law in 1876 but what it was designed to do was consolidate all of the existing Indian laws, the laws that dealt with Indian peoples, so primarily it was responsible for identifying who was an Indian and who wasn’t and then figuring out from a colonial government’s point of view how to deal with the Indians and the term at the time was “deal with the Indian problem” and the approach was, the philosophy underscoring dealing with the Indian problem was how to get rid of Indians so the Indian Act’s goal was to get rid of Indians and make itself obsolete. So it started by registering Indians and determining who could be an Indian and who couldn’t and then it determined what kind of acts of Indianness or expressions of native culture would be permissible, mostly none. All in an attempt to assimilate into what they called the Canadian body politic so the Indian Act’s goal was to get rid of Indians. That it is still in existence and still in law today suggest that it has not been successful in its goal. Now the residential school system came for the missionary church school system and its main premise was to kill the Indian to save the child was the philosophy there so in attempts to turn all Indians, at the time in law you couldn’t be an Indian and a citizen of Canada, so to turn all Indians into good Canadian citizens the government felt that the best thing to do would be go for the kids. And so residential school were mandatory from the late 1800s up until 1920 when it became illegal not to send your children so this was an aggressive policy and assimilation was the goal. Many residential school survivors talk about how what they learned in residential school was not how to be white but how to be ashamed of being native and so we talk about ethnocide as the attempt to deliberately extinguish a culture. Residential schools can be thought of as a Canadian attempt, an aggressive violent attempt, at ethnocide”

“I am surprised in a classroom when my non-native have never heard of residential schools even because they have got some political traction in the last few years and we live in a place with a very prominent residential school, you can see it from just about anywhere.” 

“We’re not taught about residential school and we’re really not taught about why they came into being and the devastating effect that they had because what residential schools did, by taking away children from community, it had devastating effect of communities and this is happening this is happening in concert with a whole lot of other forces of dislocation and disruption that lead to a series of social and cultural breakdowns inside communities which really was the goal, was the goal of the Canadian government was to do that, the result being that the Canadian government determined that those communities weren’t suitable for children based on their terms of suitability and so the residential school system then became a catchment basin for children who couldn’t be cared for or the government determined wouldn’t be cared for in their home communities and the residential school system was in place for long enough in Canada that it was enough generations damage done that residential school system was just the catchment basin for the problems that it was itself creating which just continued the cycles that it was well established.”

“Creating spaces in our education system from the very beginning is critical where different versions of the story can be told and heard with equal legitimacy is key. I don’t think it’s acceptable that any young person grows up in Kamloops and doesn’t know that that’s a residential school and also doesn’t know the impacts of that residential school, the legacies that were left, the number of children, at the turn of the century it was reported that a full 50 per cent of children didn’t survive residential school, so we really need to understand the very dark ghosts that haunt the shadows in this still marginalized story even though it has gained some mainstream political traction in the last few years, I don’ think it has gained the recognition of the magnitude of not just the residential schools but the whole colonial process in Canada, so I’d say if we’re going to start to dismantle some of these bureaucracy that, though well intentioned by the people on the front lines, I think still flow out of some very hostile colonial bureaucratic structures and processes. If we’re going to start to dismantle those that I think education is critical, and not just of native of native but about native-non-native relations in this place we now know as Canada.”

“While the colonial government saw children as a key to the assimilation project, local communities see children as the next generation so the movements towards community and collected healing, reconfiguring new possibilities, new visions for communities, the education of children is critical and central to that and communities seem to be recognizing the importance of that. But I would say that education again while having some jurisdiction over education for bands for native children is key... those students who are going to be the ones in a positions of power need also to be educated about the complexities of the issues”

 “We colonize with practices. We colonize with violence and disease and policies but we also colonize with education and knowledge and who has the power produce what is legitimate knowledge...taught as official legitimate history so to take some control over what constitutes as educationable knowledge is a push back against that. Our First Nations people have been colonized by many means, textbooks and school systems being one of them, both residential school and what their non-native contemporaries are learning alongside them in the non-native schools that colonial relationships through knowledge so to challenge that is an act, an attempt of decolonization.” 

“I think its enormously significant in terms of cultural pride, in terms of self empowerment... this is about carving out spaces for alternative ways of knowing and living and believing and learning that would allow communities in its most ideal form to create spaces for the legitimization of the their forms of knowing.”

 “One of the things that does come up in self-government agreements when they are reached and signed and implemented is that is the result is the bureaucratization of local politics, local government in a way that allows for the self-governing government to deal effectively with whether is territorial, federal, provincial governmental levels so to be treated as an autonomous government, as a self governing politically autonomous unit to be treated as such, a certain structure is required of it otherwise it’s not taken seriously a politically autonomous unit, that in itself forces on the implementing community a certain bureaucratic structure that might very well not be reflective of its own forms of traditional government.”

“There’s always hope and I think back to the importance of education and the education of everybody, that the story of colonization in Canada is the story of Canada, everybody’s Canada and we are all implicated and we all need to know about it... all of those things are absolutely possible. Culture is always changing.”

Phil Fontaine

Phil Fontaine speaks to a crowd of about 100 at TRU

As mentioned in a previous blog post, I went and saw Phil Fontaine, former national chief of the Assembly of First Nations when he spoke at Thompson Rivers University. While he was there, I asked him what he thought the role of self-government was in First Nations communities and I wanted to share some of his words with you.

Standing in front of a crowd of about 100 people, he spoke about the importance of self-determination.

“All peoples of the world have the right to govern themselves. All peoples in the world have the right to handle their own business. That right was denied to our people for a long time and it’s been only in recent history that First Nations people were able to exercise the right to govern themselves,” he said.

“The courts have rendered favourable decisions. The United Nations, most recently with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, the right to land, the right to self-rule or self-government, human rights... and the most effective way of bringing about change, in my opinion, is through self-determination. People have to be empowered to make the decisions that affect them and we see that the most, the most impressive progress that’s been made to achieve is self-government. Again there’s residential schools produced very few graduates. In fact in 1952, there were maybe 10 First Nations students in university in the entire country and today there are close to 30,000. One point in addition to the one I want to make, because of poverty we’re at this number, the number ought to be three times higher. We should have 90,000 at universities and colleges today, that’s the significant gap that exists. Though the number 30,000 is impressive, that was partially the result of First Nations communities finally being able to exercise the real controls over our education system and that is only made possible.”

When he reflected on when changes were made, he noted they’ve only happened in the recent past.

“The first locally controlled school on an Indian reserve, First Nations community, was in 1973. 1973. How many years is that? 27, 37 years. Recent history and that’s when the numbers started because people have to have a sense of ownership over institutions such as the education system. If that’s denied, you’re not going to succeed as well as those people that take it for granted that the education system is all about them so I absolutely believe that self-determination is the underpinning of anything of significance in the lives of aboriginal people and especially when we talk in terms of the positive transformation. Study after study after study including some of the most prestigious education institutions in the world, Harvard, made it very clear, self-determination has to be the centre piece in whatever we embark on,” he said.

 I agree with his words. Culture differs greatly from one people to another and I think it’s only fair that First Nations communities establish institutions that work for them and are not externally dictated. If that doesn’t happen then the process of colonization is still continuing.

Good Day

Today was a good day in terms of getting things organized. 

I set up a tour of the Neqweyqwelsten School run by Simpcw First Nation just north of Barrier. This came after I received an invitation to come out to the school made as a comment from Judy Matthew on this blog. I’ll talk with her and with other teachers hopefully including some former students who have returned to teach. I’ll speak with students and if the stars align right, I should be able to speak with acting chief. I hope to not only do some interviews, but do a short video about my tour which I will ideally post on this blog.

This trip also aligns nicely with another interview I’ve wanted to do. As I talked about in previous posts, I had planned to talk with Harold Eustache, a Simpcw elder, but he had some health problems and had to cancel. I have now arranged to meet up with him at his home near the school and do the interview with him there. 

I’m also arranging to speak with Brenda Celesta, a First Nations teacher at Norkam Secondary School in Kamloops. She’s also Simpcw and I hope that she’ll be able to give a corresponding perspective to my tour of Neqweyqwelsten School. As someone who works in the public school system, she should be able to give insight into what First Nations students experience outside of a band school. I’ll also talk with her about what her school is doing to help First Nations students feel more included in the school community.

I will keep you posted on the progress of these interviews. I’m feeling optimistic about getting some more first-hand experience seeing what some First Nations communities are doing to manage education in their own communities and what that means to the band and its youth.