How Canada is failing remote First Nation students in northern Ontario
Indigenous education leadership brings a sense of belonging and culture to students in Thunder Bay. First Nation students in the city must live hundreds of kilometres away from family to complete high school. Photo by Matteo Cimellaro / CNO
By Matteo Cimellaro
At the end of spring, Canada’s National Observer published a five-part series on the incredible odds stacked against First Nation students in northern Ontario who must travel hundreds of kilometres away from their families to get a high school education.
Our series reported on the trials facing students when moving south, how the grassroots staff in Indigenous education are not appropriately resourced, and how repercussions stemming from residential schools and colonization of northern First Nations disrupt education success. We wrote about how a revolving door of teachers brings precarity to classrooms on northern First Nations and how immersion language programs and on-the-land education must be prioritized to indigenize curriculums in schools up North.
Now, Canada’s National Observer is summarizing our reporting through data and an interactive map to show in a qualitative and quantitative sense what Kiera Brant-Birioukov, an Indigenous education researcher at York University, calls the “multi-pronged systemic discrimination” faced by Indigenous children and their families. Brant-Birioukov describes it as a double whammy of historical injustice coupled with contemporary inequities.