Today is September 30th, National Day for Truth and Reconciliation and Orange Shirt Day. It has been just over ten years since the Truth and Reconciliation Commission issued its report, and so this seemed like a good time to review the state of Truth and Reconciliation – and Indigenous issues generally – on Canadian campuses. So, I am teaming up today with Mark Solomon, Associate Vice-President Reconciliation and Inclusion at Seneca Polytechnic to put together some thoughts on what progress we have made over the last decade.
Let’s start with the TRC Calls to Action which have to do with post-secondary education. These can be broken down into two parts. The first is a call (#7) to the Federal Government (not institutions, interestingly) to develop with Aboriginal groups a joint strategy to eliminate educational and employment gaps between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Canadians. Now, while a lot of talking has been done about this, it’s hard to say that anything resembling a strategy has emerged. Partly, that’s because the feds don’t want to spend a boatload of new money and partly it is because Indigenous groups across the country don’t all agree on what that strategy should be. One sticking point seems to be the relative prominence of Indigenous vs. mainstream institutions in closing the education gap and thus implicitly how generously to fund the former. Another is that while the federal government has a treaty relationship to provide education (K-PSE) for Indigenous learners, actualizing that responsibility to some extent requires coordination with provinces and territories, which isn’t exactly the feds’ strong suit these days.
That doesn’t mean that nothing has happened on this front. The Post-Secondary Student Support Program (PSSP) for Status First Nations students was augmented substantially in Budget 2019, though inflation has since eaten away most of the value of the extra money. The federal government also provided new funding to Inuit and Métis students, thus to some extent fulfilling Call #11 on adequate funding for Indigenous students, though most would still say the funding is still inadequate. The question is: has any of this led to a closing of the access gap?
As Figure 1 shows, the answer is no, or at least not yet. Indigenous educational attainment rates are growing, particularly at the college level, but the total post-secondary attainment gap has increased a tiny bit, from 15 to 16 percentage points, and the university gap has increased a lot, from 19 to 26 percentage points.
Figure 1: Higher Educational Attainment Among Off-Reserve Population aged 25-64, 2014, 2019 and 2024
Let’s turn to the second set of Calls to Action – those Action aimed at institutions. The three big ones were parallel calls aimed at medical/nursing schools (Call 24), law schools (Call 28) and journalism schools (Call 86) to require all law students to take a course in Aboriginal people and the law, which includes the history and legacy of residential schools, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Treaties and Aboriginal rights, Indigenous law, and Aboriginal–Crown relations. This will require skills-based training in intercultural competency, conflict resolution, human rights, and antiracism.
(Why not social work, or policing? We wondered that too.)
The website Indigenous Watchdog has been following institutional progress on these areas. As of last year, 22 of 24 Canadian law schools had such mandatory courses, which is pretty good. The country’s 93 nursing schools have not done as well: only 41 are seen as having introduced mandatory courses with the requisite content; 18 have apparently no mandatory course at all and the remainder are somewhere in between. Journalism faculties, similarly, have a fairly spotty record: with 11 apparently meeting all criteria, four meeting partially and six not at all.
This is where evaluation of progress on reconciliation gets tricky. Lots of these professional programs which did not introduce mandatory courses have, nevertheless, things which they think are relevant to reconciliation. To take merely one of potentially dozens of examples: look at the Journalism School at TMU. There, the course Reporting on Indigenous Issues remains resolutely mandatory but the faculty has put together an interesting website called Reconciling Journalism, which the school hopes will “provide a platform for Indigenous students and host many different student projects on Indigenous issues and communities at Toronto Metropolitan University” In such a case, should one give TMU points for creativity and good wishes, or take them away for thinking that it knows better than Justice Sinclair what constitutes a contribution to reconciliation? There is a difference between “Indigenous issues” and “reconciliation” which gets blurred here.
More broadly: there are many institutions which have done a lot of Nice Symbolic Things for Indigenous peoples over the past decade. Things like Indigenous-language signage at places like Laurentian and UBC, Indigenization of campus architecture and campus planning like at Seneca, Centennial and Calgary. It’s good, but is it reconciliation? (and also: why is it is easier to change signage and build buildings than change curriculum?). It’s not just symbolic stuff, either. There has been a lot of hiring of Indigenous staff, academic and otherwise. What one might call “Indigenous lead” positions have been elevated in stature and in general individuals with Indigenous identity are moving closer to the centres of power within institutions. That’s all positive, but actually, none of the TRC calls addressed these issues. Generously, one could see these things as pre-requisites for greater Indigenous participation in higher education (back to Call #7) in the sense that Indigenous students won’t attend if they don’t feel seen or welcome; but even if that’s the case, it doesn’t seem to be working yet.
One thing that isn’t symbolic is the notion of “Indigenization” of the curriculum. Call #62 asks federal and provincial governments to provide the necessary funding to post-secondary institutions to educate teachers on how to integrate Indigenous knowledge and teaching methods into classrooms. That hasn’t happened, of course, but there has been a significant elevation of Indigenous Knowledge within institutions which is worth recognizing. The notion of “Indigenization” of institutions has got stuck in part because no one can agree on what it means nor how it can be measured. Progress here won’t come from a one-size-fits-all approach. More institutional engagement with surrounding Indigenous communities on what that could and should like is necessary because in all likelihood the answer will differ a bit from one place and one set of communities to another.
Broadly, then, it’s a mixed picture. Arguably, one could say that Canadian post-secondary institutions are doing better on Indigenous issues than they are on Truth and Reconciliation. Room for improvement for sure, but at the same time, it’s worth being mindful of the potential for backsliding, too. All of these measures were taken at a time when university and college budgets were growing; with a long period of budget cuts ahead, we’ll soon see whether or not our institutions view all of these measures as must-haves or just nice-to-haves. Time will tell.
“Education got us unto this mess and Education will get us out of it” – Justice Murray Sinclair (1951-2024)