Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Aboriginal Peoples
Issue 4 - Evidence, December 10, 2002
OTTAWA, Tuesday, December 10, 2002
The Standing Senate Committee on Aboriginal Peoples met this day at 9:05 a.m. to study issues affecting urban Aboriginal youth in Canada and, in particular, to examine access, provision and delivery of services; policy and jurisdictional issues; employment and education; access to economic opportunities; youth participation and empowerment; and other related matters.
Senator Thelma J. Chalifoux (Chairman) in the Chair.
[English]
The Chairman: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I would like to thank our witness, Mr. David Newhouse, for appearing before the committee. This study of urban Aboriginal issues is timely because a crisis situation is developing in many urban centres. We appreciate this opportunity to hear your expert advice in respect of these issues.
Mr. David Newhouse, Associate Professor and Chair, Native Studies, Trent University: Thank you, I am pleased to be here and to know that urban Aboriginal issues are on the agenda. For the greater part of time since Confederation, Aboriginal people who live in urban centres have been treated somewhat like a political football, caught between various jurisdictions — federal, provincial, municipal, and now Aboriginal. Mostly they are like the elephant in the room that no one likes to talk about. It has been difficult to place Aboriginal issues on the agenda so that people would talk about them; it was difficult to get the Royal Commission to discuss urban Aboriginal issues.
Part of that is because, in the public imagination and in public policy discourse, Aboriginal people are seen as rural people. Even among Aboriginal people, we tend to assume that the default condition is people living in rural communities. As your research is beginning to show, that simply is not the case. Between 40 per cent and 60 per cent of all Aboriginal peoples in Canada live in urban centres. Depending upon how you count the numbers, the majority of Aboriginal people are urban.
Therefore, not addressing that makes it difficult to begin talks on public policy approaches, in a sense. In the eyes of most Aboriginal people, until recently, the city is perceived as a place of assimilation, degradation and loss. The city is seen as inimical to Aboriginal people. That is the dominant perception that was presented to Canadians in the report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal People.
Somehow, the belief is that, by moving to cities, we become less Aboriginal — that we lose our Aboriginality. The history of urban Aboriginal people, as it is currently presented, is one of lack. Urban Aboriginal people who move to cities lack something essential: They have lost connection to land, to identity and to culture.
To a large extent, that belief has grown over the last 70 years, or so, because urban Aboriginal peoples have been seen primarily through the lens of sociology. First, looking at urban people through the folk-urban continuum. Urban Aboriginal people are seen as primarily urban or as primarily folk. It has been deemed that the slow drift to the city means losing something. Also, the city is seen as a place of disintegration and moving to cities means a loss of culture and social organization and, in turn, that results in poverty. Aboriginal people who go to the city then encounter poverty and begin to live in poverty and develop what Sinclair Louis talks about: a culture of poverty. As a result, Aboriginals begin to transmit that culture to other people.
That has been the dominant way in which we tended to look at the urban experience. The royal commission, as I said, previously reinforced that image in its two reports. The first one was the Report of the National Round Table on Urban Aboriginal Issues and the final report that spoke to the litany of problems that people encountered. Its main focus, to a large extent, was on the pathology.
For Indian and Metis people that grow up in cities, that is the dominant image in which they find themselves immersed: They are lacking something; they are no longer full Aboriginal people, in the same sense as their rural counterparts; they have been assimilated; they have lost portions of their culture; and they have lost parts of their identity.
You can begin to see why, if that is the dominant view, the royal commission began to talk about ``cultural identity'' and the need for reinforcing cultural identity as the major policy thrust that it recommended: that Indians who have come to the city have lost something and therefore need to regain it. That loss is one of identity. If we help them to regain their sense of identity they will begin to do well and to be able to function fully as Indians.
I think that is partly true, but I do not think it tells the whole story. A focus on the pathology only masks other aspects and other views. We do not want to deny the pathology or the problems and the need for urgency in addressing them, but we need to begin to look at the city in a slightly different way, so we began to think about different policy solutions that may begin to help people.
Five years ago, I decided that I was not going to write about Aboriginal problems. I found that that approach was contributing to the cycle of policy solutions that were emerging across the country. I decided to try to begin to talk about the future, about what I felt was emerging and what I saw beginning to emerge in Aboriginal communities. I felt the need to start a new conversation, or add to the conversation that was occurring. That conversation is about achievement, success and the future. It is a conversation that was started by John Kim Bell, who has focused on the National Aboriginal Achievement Awards.
This was stimulated to some extent by traditional teachings that argue for a balanced view and the need to examine a phenomenon from several different perspectives. When I began to look at the scholarship and the research that was being done to inform public policy, I saw an incredible imbalance. I saw a focus exclusively on the idea of lack and the idea of problem, and that is the way in which we began to move forward. I decided I did not want to contribute to that set of scholarship again.
I began to look for a glimmer of hope and a sense of positive change. I prepared a short report for the royal commission entitled ``From the Tribal to the Modern,'' which began to set out some basic ideas about the development of modern Aboriginal society. I put forward the idea that there was indeed a modern Aboriginal society that was emerging in our midst, that we were not seeing it and, to a large extent, it was being masked by our desire to look only at the problems.
I began to gather some data and to think about what the themes are of modern Aboriginal society. I said at that point that six themes begin to emerge.
The first theme was ``urbanization'' because it would continue. It had been going on for a long time. People were moving to cities and were not going to stop moving to cities, and we had to come to terms with that. Therefore, the continued urbanization of Aboriginal societies was a major part of modern Aboriginal society.
The second theme was what I called ``retraditionalization.'' By that I meant an incredible desire for Aboriginal ideas to be used as the basis for the structures and processes of everyday life. People wanted their organizations to look western and act Aboriginal. They wanted, to a large extent, to have their ideas about child care and about the nature of human beings to inform the actions of people working in child care, in education, in health, in economic development, and in organizational management. They wanted those ideas that come out of traditional cultures and traditional thought to form the basis for everyday life. That is an incredibly strong desire.
The third theme was the notion of ``institutionalization,'' the idea that Aboriginal society is becoming a society of organizations, much as the mainstream. As I reported in the documents, I counted organizations and came up with about 6,000 in 1993. There are many more now. Half of those were in the private sector and half were in the public sector. That is an incredible number of organizations that have developed in the past 20 years. If you examine the establishment date, you will find that most of them were established in the late 1980s or early 1990s. There has been incredible growth in the number of institutions that exist within Aboriginal society on-reserve, in rural communities and in cities.
The fourth theme is what I call ``positive cultural identity reinforcement.'' This means rejection of the 1970s notions of pan-Indianism. These days, people are developing identities and want to be seen as Cree, Aishnabe, Metis, Blackfoot or Nisga'a. They do not want to be seen as Aboriginal. They are developing identities, reinforcing those identities, and encountering the world using those identities. They want the world to respect those identities and to begin to act upon them. They are constructing those identities with a sense of pride and in a very positive fashion. That is very different from the 1950s and 1960s when one was taught to be ashamed of being Indian.
The fifth theme is that despite the desire for traditional thought and traditional ideas, there is an incredible transformation occurring as we move away from oral traditions to the development of what I call the ``textural transformation of knowledge.'' People are now writing down traditional teachings. One can go into any bookstore, buy books about them, read them and begin to interpret them. The way in which we begin to transmit knowledge in modern Aboriginal society is to understand it based upon written text, which is very different from the past. A society feels a tremendous effect when it begins to write things down, because in doing so, the relationship between knowledge and authority is changed. That relationship becomes disconnected. People can go into a bookstore, buy a book of traditional teachings, read it and interpret it on their own, with no elder to say what it means. The link between elder and student has been broken.
In a positive sense, that means one can, to some extent, begin to spur incredible innovation and creativity, and also begin to encourage diversity in a society. In a negative sense, of course, that link has been broken and the authority of elders has been challenged. Some people may interpret that in a very negative fashion as society has been out of control. There are those two sides of it.
The sixth theme is the notion of ``self-governance — that modern Aboriginal society will be self-governing. By self- governance in this case I mean that Aboriginal people in modern Aboriginal society will have some stewardship over the structures and processes of everyday life. They are beginning to experience governance in particular areas such as health, education, and economic development. Some people call this self-determination but I think it goes a bit further than that. It means that one is beginning to act upon one's own ideas and that those ideas are coming out of traditional cultures and traditional ideas.
Those are the six themes that I see as animating modern Aboriginal society. The major one that we tend to ignore is that the modern Aboriginal society will be largely urban based. It will take place in the city, it will develop in the city, and it will begin to move forward in the city. That is not to say there is not development on Indian reserves or in Metis communities, but to a large extent modern Aboriginal society takes place in the cities because of the large number of people who live in the cities.
There is a very strong desire among public policy-makers to ignore this reality, because cities are incredibly complex areas. The city has become the site of conflict and battles for jurisdiction as Aboriginal governments lay claim over their citizens in cities, as municipalities think about how they want to deliver services to urban Aboriginal peoples, as provinces move in and think about health care and education, and as urban Aboriginal institutions ask for place and visibility. It becomes an incredibly complex area, and politicians wade in at their own risk. It is a hard place to work.
The evidence of the last 2,500 years or so is that human beings move to cities. I think the World Bank reports that somewhere by the year 2060, 80 per cent of human beings will live in cities. That is an incredible number. That does not mean people do not want to live in rural areas, but the draw of the city is very strong. I think Aboriginal people in North America will continue that trend as well. We are human beings with the same set of desires and the same pulls that other people have been pulled by as well.
Some evidence has been given by Evelyn Peters at the University of Saskatchewan. I would encourage to you invite Professor Peters to come to talk to you. Professor Peters is the Canada Research Chair in Urban Aboriginal Populations at the University of Saskatchewan in the Department of Geography. That is the only Canada research chair that has been established to study urban Aboriginal populations.
She has been doing some interesting work. She is finding that the locations of many Canadian cities are places where Aboriginal people have gathered and have lived and that the movement to cities is not unexpected. She argues that movement to cities is a reclamation of territory — that Aboriginal people have lived in cities in those areas and have been pushed out by European populations and are now beginning to move back. If you look at it in that sense, you have a different sense of how one thinks about that population and the city.
Beyond the poverty — and even alongside the poverty — there is now an incredible institutional infrastructure that serves an urban Aboriginal population. Two researchers have begun to think about that population and there is not a great deal of research in Canada that looks at urban Aboriginal populations. Most of the research looks at population characteristics. There is virtually no research in Canada, except for the Canada West Foundation, that looks at urban Aboriginal institutions.
Those two researchers — one in Los Angeles, one in the west — broke the estimated 3,000 Aboriginal institutions into 14 different categories, including: political, economic development, healing and health, family violence, employment, religion, education and training, recreation, child care, communications, culture and culture development, justice and correction, and kinship organizations that deal with family and youth. The Canada West Foundation counted organizations in three Canadian cities in the West and found about 300 organizations or so. Evelyn Peters is doing the same thing in the city of Winnipeg, and has found somewhere in the neighbourhood of 30 to 40 organizations. An incredible infrastructure exists out there that is serving urban Aboriginal populations.
The genesis of that infrastructure has been Aboriginal Friendship Centres. They played an incredible role in the development of that infrastructure, in terms of serving as community centres, as training areas, and as transition places where people can come in, can look for a job, access some services, some access to employment, and then move out. The centre that of network of organizations has been the friendship centres, and it has now moved into on the areas.
As part of the set of institutions, there is also a sense of community that exists in many places — or even a sense of communities, because it is very hard to talk in terms of a homogeneous Aboriginal population. Some of the research with Statistics Canada indicates that the City of Edmonton has one of the most diverse Aboriginal populations in the country. It has an incredible array of people from different cultural backgrounds. In such a diverse environment, one develops a sense of different communities in order to resist homogeneity. That sense of community is important. There is, in most places, a sense of centre of that community — usually that centre is the Friendship Centre that has developed in those areas across the country.
That community consists of both a set of long-time residents in the cities — two or three generations — and a set of newcomers, recent arrivals and visitors to the city. Statistics Canada and Indian and Northern Affairs talk in terms of what they call a churning effect. A significant number of people move back and forth between urban centres and rural communities on a regular basis; the population is highly mobile. That adds an additional complication into development policy approaches. Usually when we think of policy approaches, we think of populations that are static and staying in one place. It also creates jurisdictional conflict. In some cases, First Nations communities want to claim the ability to serve their own residents in cities. That creates some problems at times.
There is also a group of people in the city who work inside that institutional infrastructure. That group consists of either a nascent middle class or a group of working class people. I do not think we have a good sense of what size those two groups are.
There are also enormous numbers of students. The 40,000 that Indian Affairs has identified as being in post- secondary education are primarily in urban centres. There is also a large group of unemployed or unwaged people as well, in addition to a number of people who are there for health care services.
That population lives in the city is incredibly complex. We simply do not know enough about it to be able to say much from a policy perspective. We have some basic demographic data but, when you break down the economic status and think about it in a slightly different way, we have no data to help us to be nuanced in our policy approaches.
We do not know much about the Aboriginal communities in cities, or about their histories. There is no written history, except for a recent one in the City of Toronto. There are many oral history renditions but there is not much in the way of written documents available for people to read so that they can begin to incorporate into their sense of self. There is not a great deal of information that would help us gain a sense of the history of a particular urban Aboriginal population, whether it be in Winnipeg, in Edmonton, in Toronto or in Halifax. That research has not yet been done.
The existing communities are diverse and overlapping and, in some cases, they are divided along the status lines of First Nation, Metis, or Inuit, and non-status Indians. These institutions that develop have to try to straddle those status lines. In some cases, they are successful; in others, they are not.
There is a strong sense of cultural identification that, at times, plays itself out in organizational and institutional politics that needs to be considered.
There is virtually no research that begins to look at urban Aboriginal populations through that lens of culture or status and some of the conflicts that causes. Thus a great deal of work required. The Canada West Foundation began to sense that in its most recent work when it spoke to the mixed jurisdictions and the problems of not coordinating.
Looking at urban Aboriginal populations through the lens of community is quite consistent with emerging indigenous scholarship, which is informed by traditional ideas. The idea of community is one of the central notions in indigenous scholarship and thought.
Over the next decade or so, that ideal will be brought forward in research. I think it is important that we gain some sense of what community means when we talk about urban Aboriginal peoples. We do not yet have a good sense of that. That is quite distinct from looking at a population. Now we are beginning to look at the structures and the processes of a particular community.
We do not know much about the institutional framework that I have described. We can count it and we can get some sense of the various categories. However, we do not yet know how this institution sees itself or sees the future. We also do not know whether there are possibilities for coordination and whether some of the lines about status or the lines about culture are real barriers. In addition, we do not know how fragile that set of institutions is. We have a sense of it because most of it is government funded through discretionary funding. The form of funding can change, as we are all aware, on a regular basis at the whim of government as its priorities change.
We also do not know much about the support from local municipalities, and we have no solid sense of urban Aboriginal participation in municipal government. Although urban Aboriginal people are ratepayers, we do not know how much tax they pay in any particular city. Some studies look at reserve populations around cities, which give some sense of the spillover effects of transfer amounts. However, we have no sense of the amount that Aboriginal taxpayers are responsible for in their municipal taxes for property, et cetera, nor do we have any idea of urban Aboriginal representation in local municipal governments.
Having said that, when I step back I see, despite all the poverty, a series of communities attempting to deal with their problems and the issues in creative, innovative and aggressive ways. Institutions are concerned and interested. They are trying hard to improve the lives of urban Aboriginal peoples in a whole variety of ways, whether that is through economic development corporations, improved health, establishment of schools, participation in local school boards, or through the development of cultural institutions such as powwows, art collections and so forth.
One has a sense that there is a community — a set of institutions — that is trying to do things. It becomes apparent that this institutional framework developed over the last 40 years, or so, and that it has a history that one can trace. The idea of trying to live in the city and, at the same time, create an urban Aboriginality is not new.
Within communities, we also see the exercise of some form of self-determination in specific ways and areas. In particular, in the West, people are coming together in large urban political alliances such as the Aboriginal Council in Winnipeg. There is also one in Calgary and in Vancouver. I do not know whether there is one in Edmonton, yet.
The Chairman: It is emerging.
Mr. Newhouse: People are beginning to gather and form alliances to achieve common objectives. That is quite interesting.
There is also a small, emerging urban middle class and a fairly large working class, including a large number of working poor, who are concerned about their children. They are attempting to make a better life by trying hard to move away from the poverty in which they feel immersed.
There is not a great deal of research that speaks to their hopes and goals. Most of the research focuses exclusively on problems. I am not convinced that by focusing on a problem one can always solve the problem. One needs to have a sense of what people are trying to achieve and how one wants to move forward.
I want to speak to youth for just a moment. I have 15 years' experience in working in the friendship centre movement. I worked as a volunteer from 1978 to the mid-1990s. I have spent the last 10 years as a professor at Trent University.
I have found that on of the major that students and youth face is that sense of separateness and distance from others. There is a desire to maintain this separateness. At the university level, to some extent, youth are angry and unsure of themselves. I am not convinced that they can achieve much. Based upon my experience, faculty members ``program'' the students for survival. Our literature program, as I discovered a while back, speaks to survival. We talk of helping students to come into the institutions and helping them helping them to survive. We do not talk in terms of excellence, achievement and success. When we tell the students to survive, they do.
The problem became quite acute about five years ago when international students from Europe won the awards for achievement in the Ojibway language at Trent. At that time, I began to ask some questions. That shocked me. We had students whose first language was Ojibway. I would have thought they would have won the awards for proficiency in the Ojibway language, but they did not. They were earning Cs and Bs in those classes.
I began to look at the way in which we were treating our students and what we said to them. We had based our entire approach to student assistance on the notion of survival. We began to change it; we talked in terms of excellence and achievement. We created a climate in which students could achieve and we aimed to help them achieve in different ways. I was pleased that, two years later, the Anishnabe students were beginning to win the awards. We must also think about the language we use when we talk about Aboriginal people and what we are capable of doing.
I teach a third-year class in Aboriginal governance. I ask students in that class to tell me what adjectives they would use to describe Aboriginal peoples. They use all the words that we talked about that come out of the culture of poverty approach — down-trodden, poor and lazy. These are third-year university students in native studies. They did not use the words ``creative'' or ``innovative.'' Those words were not part of the vocabulary of natives and non-natives in the class. That shocked me a great deal. It told me that the students did not see Aboriginal peoples in positive terms. They continued to see Aboriginal peoples as a burden, which is, to a large extent, how we are seen in Canadian society. We are a burden to the state and to society.
I have a book coming out on which I have worked on with the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs and Development. It will be published by University of Toronto Press in June 2003 and is called Aboriginal Contributions to Canada: Hidden in Plain Sight. The book paints a picture of remarkable achievement of Aboriginal peoples from all walks of life. In our research we found that over the past 100 years Aboriginal peoples have won every major military award and every major civilian honour in the country in arts, literature and community service. All of that is present but is all presently hidden. There is remarkable achievement that is not seen at all. It is like the urban Aboriginal histories. They are there, but they are not talked about.
It is hard to think about public policy in that climate because it is so overwhelmed by poverty. It is difficult to bring these positive things to the table and show this record of achievement because it raises hackles in some corners. People ask why I am saying that, am I not forgetting the poverty. I am saying that there is another side, that there is a set of institutions that deserve and need support, that are part of urban Aboriginal communities and that can and ought to play a very important role in the future.
The message I want to bring to you: There is that history of Aboriginal peoples and it has been hidden. Those institutions play vital roles and they need to be researched and supported. That is important.
In terms of that institutional framework, great attempts are being made to ensure that youth play a large role in the governance of the institutions. They are creating youth advisory councils and seats for youth on boards of directors. It is important to encourage that type of support. They are very concerned about the generation that is coming up and they are trying to prepare them for leadership roles.
The philosophy that is animating that action is an attempt to help youth do things for themselves as opposed to doing things for youth. The philosophy of helping youth do things for themselves is extremely important. We had a century or so of people trying to do things for Aboriginal peoples, but the public policy approach now ought to be trying to help Aboriginal people do things for themselves, which means supporting the institutions that are emerging.
The Chairman: Thank you very much, Mr. Newhouse. Your statements are very relevant and timely. It is long overdue that we start bragging a little bit about ourselves, our history, and our accomplishments throughout the generations.
Senator Sibbeston: Welcome, and thank you for your information. We were given three of the papers that you have written and I have read one.
I come from the Northwest Territories where native people are still very Aboriginal in the sense that they live on the land and have world views that are quite different from those of people who live in the cities. As time goes by and industrialization and urbanization occur, how can one still be Aboriginal without a distinct and different world view? One's world view and philosophy depend upon one's life experience. If you live in a city, your experience will obviously be city-oriented and you will be much like everyone else who lives in a city.
What makes Aboriginal people distinct is the fact that they come from the land; they come from a different world experience. Their attitude toward life, their experience on the land and their history and culture makes them unique, colourful and interesting. That is what Aboriginal people have to offer Canada and that is what makes them unique. Yet we are losing this through industrialization and urbanization.
Can one continue to be Aboriginal even though the only distinguishing feature might be that one's skin is a little browner than others' — otherwise you share the same experience of life in the city? What would make you different?
Mr. Newhouse: If I listen carefully to what I have been told, and if I also read carefully what the royal commission is saying, people are attempting to preserve the philosophies and the idea of a connection to land, a reverence for land and the ability to live on the land. That will change a bit. One can bring those ideas into the city as well. One does not need to be able to practise conservation or live in a rural community to have reverence for the land and the environment. There is also an incredible attempt in some places to ensure that people speak an Aboriginal language, so some of the world view from the language is preserved and transmitted.
By focusing in, as some of the elders tell me, upon the philosophies and ideas, one can ensure that those ideas are developed into practice in urban centres. They will change a bit, and the practice will change a bit. However, one can think about how one wants to live with those ideas in the city. One can still have sunrise ceremonies in a city park. One cannot go hunting, obviously, for moose in a city park, but one can still make those sort of traditional pilgrimages, in a sense.
There will be change. That process of change is quite natural, in a sense. We do it through thinking about what things are important and what part of the worldviews are important as well. We can then translate those into some sort of material action.
Senator Pearson: I found your presentation fascinating because I have long been preoccupied about the role of language. I do not mean in terms of which language, but in terms of the terms that we use to describe ourselves. Many women have changed what they do because of the changes in the language that describes women. In the area I am most interested in, which is children, we are beginning to change the language that we use to describe children, which gives them more empowerment. Everything you said in that regard was interesting.
Certainly, your example of moving from survival to achievement is powerful. It is something we all need to think of strongly. Since we started this study with our chair, we have been trying to think in the positive direction in terms of positive solutions and not yet another examination of the problems. Therefore, your presentation is particularly relevant to our train of thought.
You talked about some of the paucity of research on certain aspects. I am interested in students that you have, and how many. Are you evolving new academics who will be interested in these issues? Do you find an interest among your students, particularly the Aboriginal ones? Do you have any Aboriginal students as opposed to others, or as opposed to the foreigners that you talked about? Are there some things we should be recommending to increase the capacity of the academic community?
Mr. Newhouse: We have about 250 Aboriginal students at Trent out of a population of approximately 5,000 students. We are a small university. Native Studies has been a distinct part of Trent since 1969. It is one of the first places where Native Studies as a discipline emerged in the country. The other programs across the country are, to some extent, models of that.
Our classes in Native Studies are about 70 per cent non-Aboriginal students and about 30 per cent Aboriginal students. We do a great deal of educating of non-Aboriginal people about Aboriginal people. We see ourselves as having two missions: educating non-Aboriginal people and educating Aboriginal people.
At the present time, we have a range of programs, from a special intake program for students who do not have the usual academic requirements all the way to a Ph.D. program. We established the doctoral program four years ago, and it is the first one in Canada.
Those academics at the Ph.D. level look at issues of culture and identity and power. One of my graduate students is now dealing with the subject you are interested in, that is, the issue of discourse and talk. He is looking at how you begin to have a conversation in what I call ``the space between the two rows of the wampum belt.'' We talk about the separateness of the two rows, but we also forget there is a space in between. The common interpretation of the Two Row Wampum is that they are separate and distinct and non-interference. People forget that one can still have a conversation, and we need that sort of conversation. Once you move into the centre, how do you start a conversation? How do you break down some of the barriers? How do you deal with questions of power? As we are well aware, words create the reality. This student is working in that area.
Other people are looking at history and beginning to think about how histories are constructed and how to begin to create Aboriginal histories. Another one is looking at the creation of an Aboriginal alternative school and using that as her doctoral program.
The students in this program have a wide focus. About one-half are Aboriginal, and the other half is non- Aboriginal.
We have talked with Professor Peters at the University of Saskatchewan about trying to put together a multi- university group that looks at urban Aboriginal issues from a variety of perspectives, which I think is important. We are working now with SHIRC in doing that and beginning to think about how to fund Aboriginal scholarship and aboriginal scholars across the country. Some of those things are already in place and need encouragement to move forward.
In Native Studies, it is still very hard to get urban Aboriginal issues on the table and addressed. This year, I am teaching the first-year course in Native Studies. Getting urban Aboriginal issues out front in the curriculum — even though I am teaching it — has been hard. No one wants to talk about it.
They all come at it from this issue of the city as being inimical, as a place of loss and degradation: looking at urban Aboriginal peoples is not looking at ``real Indians.'' Those are not real Indians or real Aboriginal people right there in the city. These are highly educated people who are liberal, broad-minded and who see the reality in front of them. They can read the statistics easily. One of them is a researcher of Aboriginal issues. They are marginalized and pushed off to the side, in a sense. It has been hard to do that.
Some call for more research and balance in this area. The curriculum is important. What we teach people is also quite important, because those are the ideas that they take out into the world. That is quite important.
Senator Christensen: This has been a very interesting and wide-ranging discussion. To reiterate what Senator Sibbeston was saying, you are talking about an urban First Nation or Aboriginal society that is developing. The way that you have explained it, it makes all kinds of sense.
How can you sustain an Aboriginal urban society? It seems to me that if you get this great group of people in an urban centre, that the lines begin to get quite blurry. How does the Aboriginal society sustain itself in the long term? You talked about the separateness and the differences and yet, we often see the negative view. We have to emphasize the positive views because there are many. There is a perception of a burden on society and yet great weight is placed on the fiduciary responsibilities of the federal government to First Nations when dealing with matters in respect of legislation and programs. There is a major fiduciary responsibility of the federal government to the provinces and nobody sees that as a burden — it is simply seen as a responsibility.
Again, we are talking about perspective — it is not a burden, it is a responsibility because of past treaties, et cetera. We view the onus from different angles. How do you think this could be brought into better perspective?
Mr. Newhouse: I will deal with the question of sustainability first. In terms of sustainability, one does two things. One is to create a set of institutions that would last longer than the people in them. Institutions of community sustain a community over time. Behind that is a desire to maintain a sense of community. As in the Chinese or Italian communities in Toronto, there is a desire to maintain distinctiveness. That is important. The edges will be blurry but we ought to recognize that. People interact and so there will be intermarriage and some blurring because that is the nature of the world. If we were to draw the lines too sharply, then we would do a disservice to the human experience, in that case. We would exclude more people and create more problems for more people than we would solve.
However, the institutions are quite important. The desire to maintain a sense of separateness and distance is also an important part of that desire. I do not perceive separateness and distance as entirely negative, as you have suggested. All communities have a sense of separateness and distance. The question is when you isolate yourself and move into what I call a ``Mennonite-type'' approach. Some people are advocating that but I am not.
I grew up at Six Nations on the Grand River. I was educated in the school system established by Joe Hill in the 1950s. Mr. Hill's educational philosophy was twofold: one, educate the students so they have a sense of themselves — in this case as Iroquoians — to give them a strong sense of cultural identity; and second, educate them so they can live in the world in which they find themselves. You have to do both, in this case. The objective is to maintain distinctiveness but engage in conversation with others. The Two Row Wampum states that as well. The politicians have overemphasized the separateness, the distinctiveness and the difference. They have forgotten that we need to live in the world and to have conversations with others. By affirming that we can have that conversation and that it will be interesting, we will see it as positive and not as fearsome; that is quite important, as well.
My life has been shaped by some odd experiences and, I must admit, one of them was at Trent University. We have a native studies lounge at Trent — a large distinctive room on the way to the residences. It bore a sign that read, ``Native studies lounge.'' In the fall two years ago, the sign was stolen. At night, the students would pass through this area and take down posters and signs. So, there was no longer a sign on this room. The room had always been used exclusively by native students because it was the native studies lounge. After the sign disappeared, the room suddenly began to fill up. There were not only native studies students but also math, business administration, economics, anthropology and psychology students. Many interesting conversations ensued — people had to learn how to talk to one another.
We do that in native studies — help people talk to each other. We bring students to classes who are afraid of each other. We have non-native students, who have never met an Aboriginal person in their lives, sitting across the table from an Aboriginal student and not knowing how to engage in a conversation. They seem afraid that they will make a mistake that would result in some form of anger directed at them — that there would be yelling and screaming. They are always afraid of making a mistake.
We also have Aboriginal students who are angry and upset and blame the persons across from them for all of the woes of the last 150 years — in some cases 500 years. Over time, this conservation begins and they come to terms with each other, as people with differences, and learn how to talk to each other. They start to move away from the language of burden to a language of accommodation and respect. They perceive each other in very different ways. By the end of four years, they have different understandings of each other. Some people, obviously, do not move very far.
We are building a First people's house at Trent to house native studies, economics and mathematics and business administration, because we have some links with those programs. We tried to determine who ought to be there. Some of our colleagues were afraid that if they entered a house or building that was built according to Aboriginal traditions and looked Aboriginal, they would be changed by that experience. They were afraid that we would force them to engage in esoteric, spiritual practices each morning. This fear of the Aboriginal is a large part of our culture that goes back five or six hundred years. The Europeans brought those ideas, which are still prevalent. All the images that we see, to a large extent, are of the Indian as ``other.'' I use ``Indian'' in a generic sense here as this esoteric, exotic creature.
Even we know that is not true, those ideas in public imagination are still a very large part of our culture and inform our actions, even if we do not want them to. Those ideas also go a long way towards maintaining the separateness and distinctiveness that non-Aboriginal people feel. It is not a feeling that exists only among Aboriginal people but also among non-Aboriginal people. We Are Not You is a book by Claude Denis. I do not know if you have read it, but it reflects what happens when you say you are ``different,'' in the judicial system. It is quite a different reflection of the reality.
The Chairman: Dr. Phyllis Cardinal of Edmonton is the founder of the Amiskwaciy Academy for native students. Some people see it as segregation, yet the more than 300 students attending that school are really beginning to blossom. However, on my visits there I have sensed reverse discrimination in that the students are discriminating against the few non-Aboriginal students who also attend. I would like your opinion on that.
My second question deals with language. Once you lose your language, in many cases you have lost your identity. I see that problem in Alberta. I am a Metis and many years ago we were not allowed to speak our language, Michif. When Sir John A. Macdonald hung our leader, he also hung a whole nation of people, but we survived underground.
I was very fortunate because my father and my mother told us to never forget that we are Metis. However, when I travelled north to see my relatives, I was dismayed to see that they were hiding their identity. They were ashamed. Identity is so very important. Within some Aboriginal communities in the cities there are three or four generations of Aboriginal peoples. I am interested in your views on how these people can retain their identities — something that many of them have never done, resulting in a large identity problem for our children.
I would also like to hear your views on why gangs are becoming so prevalent and dangerous in Aboriginal communities.
Finally, I am interested in the evolution of friendship centres. I am a founder of a friendship centre and have been involved with them since the late 1960s. I see now that our people are beginning to organize themselves into communities. Therefore friendship centres must evolve into something more outreaching than what they are. One who lives north of Edmonton, as I do, will not go to the friendship centre in downtown Edmonton. The same situation exists in various large centres.
How relevant will friendship centres be if they do not develop satellites so they can reach the people? Also, how important are the community service agencies? The small service agencies in the communities are suffering; they are doing a fantastic job with little or no funding.
I would like you to respond to some of those issues to assist us in addressing those challenges.
Mr. Newhouse: First, the institutions are extremely important. They are the core of a community. Support for all institutions — friendship centres, community development corporations and health services — is extremely important.
Second, it is important to encourage the institutions to think about their relevance and to continually evaluate their activities in relation to the communities in which they exist. A friendship centre in Toronto would evolve differently than a friendship centre in Edmonton. As you are well aware, to some extent the centres evolve in particular ways in different places. Yet, they are still relevant. As an urban middle class begins to evolve and people become interested in identity, the centres have important roles to play in terms of cultural education, language, bringing traditional teachers together, and in terms of ensuring that people have some understanding of traditional philosophies and traditional ways of doing things.
Language is extremely important. It defines the way in which one lives in the world and one sees the world. It is difficult, as an adult, to learn a second language. It is important for children. We ought to encourage as many as possible to learn a second language, because most of them are educated in English. Some measures must be put in place to ensure that the centres have language capacity.
I look at the phenomenon of Hebrew schools in this country. Those people have said that language is important for certain reasons and has developed and supported their own schools to that end. They have resources that we do not yet have, but we are beginning to develop. Those sorts of schools need to be assisted by the state for an extended period of time.
I have been very impressed with what the Ontario government has done in terms of its support for university level education and initiatives in the universities. They made a commitment a decade ago for increased levels of support and have maintained that support. There is a long-term, sustained effort so that one is not fighting for funding on a year- to-year basis. That is very important.
We must encourage friendship centres to examine their roles with their own communities. They will evolve in different ways. If they do not evolve they will wither and die. They must continue to be relevant. As the composition changes, they ought to change as well. That may mean recruiting more of the urban middle class on to the board and developing alliances with other organizations that serve as places where people can develop.
I do not know much about gangs, and I would not want to even speculate on the gangs in Winnipeg. I have read what the newspapers have said about gangs, but I do not know very much. My gut sense is that gangs give people a sense of community and protection in a very hostile environment. They are not getting that elsewhere and the gang provides that. Some of the literature appears to support that opinion. That may mean some focus on family and other institutions can provide people a sense of community and a sense of being loved and cared for. That is what the gangs provide.
With regard to language, the group of elders at Trent is saying that we must focus more on the philosophies and the ideas and try to ensure that they are discussed in the classroom and in daily life. That is a different approach. There is a problem of interpretation and translation as well. I keep returning to some things I have been learning about Buddhism. The fundamental teachings of Buddhism are in the original language, but there is not a concern about their translation into other languages. They have now been expressed in English, and people have studied those ideas in English right around the world. Very few people read the original text these days. An incredible scholarship has developed around Buddhist ideas and they are beginning to expand and develop them. They pay homage to the original text, but there are interpretations of them. The ideas begin to permeate a society, which is quite important, away from the original language as well. People still develop identities as Buddhists in English.
Finally, to address your question on the academy, I think it is entirely consistent with Joe Hill's philosophy of educating people to be strong and to have a very strong cultural identity and to live in the world that one lives in.
In terms of the reverse discrimination, the reaction is based upon anger. People are angry. They see all that has happened. My approach in those situations is to help people to begin to talk about respect. Those people there did not do the things that happened. The question I pose is, ``Okay, what will you do, then, to make sure they do not happen again?'' I help people to work on that basis. It takes a while to move from anger. Anger, in the long run, is not a productive emotion; it destroys more than it creates. I am helping people to find other ways of expressing their anger, more productive ways, and turning it into teaching moments.
Again, I always come back to traditional ideas in teaching. I am trying to always come back to the idea of respect. That is an extremely difficult one to begin to work with. It requires a lot of change as well.
The Chairman: A lot of good elders.
Mr. Newhouse: A lot of good elders, that is right.
The Chairman: Thank you very much for an interesting presentation and a very interesting dialogue and a good discussion. You have given us a lot of food for thought, and also the opportunity to make some strong recommendations within our report. We hope to have the first draft done by the end of February. As you say, no one wants to talk about the urban Aboriginal culture and the challenges that we face in the urban centres. You have contributed a great deal to this report. Again, I thank you very much and wish you well in the challenges you face at the university.
The committee adjourned.