Blackbear

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FROM: THE TORONTO STAR NEWSPAPER

http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/Con...Layout/Article
_Type1&c=Article&cid=1114254012384&call_pageid=1012319932217&
col=1012319928928

Apr. 23, 2005. 09:04 AM

Poverty, Despair - And Hope


LOUISE BROWN
TORONTO STAR

Cellphones don't work in this remote northwestern Ontario Indian reserve.
But it doesn't matter, because DJ Sarah Kakapetum spreads the messages over
Sandy Lake's radio airwaves:

"Alfred Meekis, your mother says it's time to go home for dinner."

"A reminder to the Grade 4 class: Do your homework; it's the word search
about nutrition."

"Did everyone hear what happened to Jesse Fiddler? He shot a moose in the
***!"

Deep in the woods, an hour by bush plane from the nearest library, hospital,
coffee shop, dentist's office, movie theatre or cellphone tower, Ontario's
largest fly-in Indian reserve is a tight-knit community of 2,000 more than 700
kilometres northwest of Thunder Bay.

It's one of three fly-in reserves in northwestern Ontario that the Star
visited this month to explore why native children lag three to four years behind
their non-native peers in school achievement. Lieutenant-Governor James
Bartleman, who has collected and shipped a million books to local schools, has called
this corner of the province "Canada's Third World."

There is poverty, drug abuse and despair - but there is also laughter, hope
and determination.

Community leaders are setting their sights on the future, one they say begins
with education - more help for children with special needs, more books on
school library shelves, more parenting tips, more homework and more curriculum
that makes sense to First Nations. By urban standards, life here can seem
foreign. Yet, in some ways, it's not so different.

This is Indian land, here in Sandy Lake and in other communities northwest of
Thunder Bay. This is private property. It belongs to the First Nations bands.
There are no motels. There is no tourist industry. Visitors must check in
first with the band council.

Even Ontario's Highway Traffic Act does not apply.

"You can always tell the southerners - they're the ones who put on
seatbelts," jokes Sandy Lake's education director David Kakegamic, at the wheel of his
standard-issue half-ton pickup. People can only bring in new vehicles in
winter, when a road across frozen lakes links them with highways to Winnipeg and
Thunder Bay and auto dealerships there. When the winter road melts, as it did
this month, it costs from $400 to $1,000 by bush plane, each way, to reach points
in the outside world.

"It's cheaper for southern Ontarians to fly to Europe than to fly up here,"
says artist Goyce Kakegamic, vice-chief of the Nishnawbe Aski Nation (NAN), an
area the size of France that reaches from the Manitoba border to Hudson Bay
and is made up of 49 communities. (Goyce is not related to David; they share one
of the common surnames in the region that belong to the handful of original
families who signed treaties with the Canadian government.)

"That's why education is so expensive; there is an extraordinary cost to
bringing anything up here."

In Sandy Lake, no building is more than two storeys high. The horizon is
unbroken.

If you're a native, you can hunt moose when you want and keep as many
pickerel as you want - David Kakegamic boasts he once caught 70 fish in an afternoon
- while anglers in the south are limited to four to six fish per day. But you
can't serve wine with dinner here because, officially, these are dry reserves.
You can't bring in yeast because it can be used to make homebrew.

Yet, somehow, people smuggle in alcohol and crack cocaine, with devastating
results. Local leaders pray they can keep out crystal meth, the bargain drug
sweeping big-city streets.

In its way, Sandy Lake is a gated community where nature once provided the
lock. But after 30 years of intrusion by satellite TV and the Internet, it's
struggling to adjust to the wider world.

Walk along the gravel roads here and you enter a world of old ways and new
ways, where people can attend a traditional baby-naming party to see an elder
bestow a native name on a newborn, then go home and write about it on their
Internet journal.

It is a culture of both beadwork and blogs.

Kakapetum, the radio host, flips at will between English and the local
dialect of Oji-Cree, a hybrid of Ojibwa and Cree. Even outsiders here say "gookum"
instead of "grandma."

The closest thing to a downtown is the general store called The Northern,
where the price of a box of cornflakes is $9.19, three bananas $2.56, a pack of
12 processed cheese slices $7.69 and two tomatoes $4.15 - the cost of flying
food from faraway farms and factories.

Fully 75 per cent of residents are on welfare. If you don't work at the
school or the store or the band office, there simply are no jobs.

"But I don't want to emphasize the poverty because we are rich in so many
ways," says vice-principal Lynda Brown, an Ojibwa from near Thunder Bay. Brown
and her husband have chosen to raise their two children in Sandy Lake, a
community she says is kind and welcoming.

"When my mother died last year, the town raised $1,000 in two hours to pay
for my plane ticket back for the funeral," Brown says. The call went out on the
radio.

Yet, such generosity belies deep poverty. Brown says there are a few students
who live deep in the forest in makeshift shacks with no insulation, no
running water and holes in the walls.

"I've done laundry for students who have no access to a washing machine," she
says. "They can't help it if their clothes are dirty, but they feel
embarrassed when there should be no shame, so I try to help."

This is big sky country, a place where the northern lights are common, but a
traffic light is unheard of.

On the outside, many bungalows sport a satellite dish. Inside, they may house
eight to 10 people because the bands can't build enough houses to keep up
with the growing population, says Margret Kakegamic, an elder in North Spirit
Lake, a fly-in reserve of fewer than 250 people, about 60 kilometres south of
Sandy Lake.

Kakegamic lives in a modest three-bedroom bungalow with from 13 to 18 people,
including three of her five children and five grandchildren, one of whom has
fetal alcohol syndrome.

"It's okay once everyone gets up off the floor in the morning," she says. "My
husband and I want to keep our family together. We don't want our
grandchildren growing up in foster homes.

"But overcrowding is a problem in these communities. We need to build more
homes for younger families."

Like any town in Ontario, yellow school buses bounce through the potholes
each morning to take children to school, but unlike public schools in the rest of
Ontario, children here start their day reciting The Lord's Prayer.

Public schools under the jurisdiction of Queen's Park must respect the
religious backgrounds of a diverse student body, but native reserves are not diverse
- they are largely Christian. Sandy Lake has five churches for 2,000 people.
Kindergarten children throughout the region learn hymns like "Jesus Loves Me."


"I'm Christian, and the children are Christian, so these are good songs to
teach," says Charlotte Rae, a kindergarten teacher in North Spirit Lake.

The nearby community of Weagamow, population 550, holds three gospel revivals
each week. On alternate days, the community plays bingo at home, with the
caller announcing the numbers over the radio and the winners coming to the band
office to collect their prize.

The grade school in Sandy Lake runs from kindergarten to Grade 6; the high
school from Grade 7 to 10. Children who are ready to go on must fly out and
board in Sioux Lookout or Thunder Bay to finish their high school diploma.

Schools here close for hunting week each fall. But they often shut down for
other reasons.

North Spirit Lake's school has been closed for six weeks so far this school
year, says principal Laura Marchand.

It was closed two weeks because the furnace broke and nobody local could fix
it, and the only repairman willing to fly in kept cancelling.

It closed for two more weeks for cleaning after vandals sprayed the
classrooms with fire retardant. And it was closed for yet another two weeks when the
flu felled almost all the students and every last teacher.

"I've told some of my Grade 8 students they should get training in the repair
business and come back to work; they would do very well here," Marchand says.

Some have returned after completing their schooling elsewhere.

Computer consultant Jesse Fiddler travels the world as a website consultant
with skills he gained at the University of Windsor, but he and wife, Angie,
returned to Sandy Lake to raise their children among family and heritage. Fiddler
runs his computer business from his home.

He is embarrassed about shooting the wrong end of the moose. It was the first
hunt for a modern dad whose wife calls him a "computer nerd."

Angie Fiddler jokes that in Sandy Lake, her husband "may have fathered three
children, but only after shooting a moose did he truly become a man."

__________________
Don't worry that it's not good enough for anyone else to hear... just sing, sing a song.

Blackbear

************************************************** *************
This message is reprinted under the Fair Use
Doctrine of International Copyright Law:
http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html
************************************************** *************


FROM: THE TORONTO STAR NEWSPAPER

http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/Con...Layout/Article
_Type1&c=Article&cid=1114380609380&call_pageid=968332188492&col=968793972154&
DPL=IvsNDS%2f7ChAX&tacodalogin=yes

Apr. 25, 2005. 09:04 AM


RENÉ JOHNSTON/TORONTO STAR
Sandy Lake student Allison Rae, 9, reads about skyscrapers in her language
arts textbook. In her Oji-Cree community, no building is taller than two
storeys.



No Skyscrapers In This Culture (Apr. 25)


Ontario's Forgotten Children
No traffic lights, or curbs, either
Other words must help kids learn


LOUISE BROWN
EDUCATION REPORTER

SANDY LAKE, Ont. - In this small native reserve high in the northern
wilderness, Doreen Anishinabie's class ran into a skyscraper the other day.

Students turned to the reading passage in their Grade 3 language arts
textbook only to find the topic was "Skyscrapers." No building in this Oji-Cree
village stands taller than two storeys. Many students did not know what the word

meant.

"So before we ever get to the reading, I need to prepare them for the
concepts they don't understand," said Anishinabie. "That's why it's so much more

difficult up here to teach reading with a standard textbook - because a lot of
this stuff is irrelevant to their way of life."

Ontario's remote north has become a world where two cultures collide; the way
of the land and the ways of the world, with many children struggling in both
and confident in neither.

Try teaching kindergarten with books that don't mention farm animals. But in
this town of 2,000 that sits 720 kilometres northwest of Thunder Bay, there
are no farms. This is bush.

And never mind safety lessons about stepping off curbs - there are no curbs
because there are no sidewalks.

Or stopping at a red light, because there are no traffic lights. For that
matter, there's no traffic.

But a growing chorus of educators say if you want children in Canada's
isolated northern reserves to learn, you must begin by teaching them about the
world
they live in.

Not only will the lesson mean more, but children will gain a cultural pride
that will equip them to take part in the wider world, says Saul Williams,
education director of Weagamow First Nations, a fly-in reserve of about 550
people
roughly 700 kilometres north of Thunder Bay.

"Instead of putting up Mickey Mouse pictures to decorate the classroom, now
we put up different styles of snowshoes to show our children that design and
technology is part of their culture, too," said the softspoken father and
artist.

Williams points with pride to displays throughout Weagamow classrooms that
show different types of snowshoes strung by local families.

"The wider Bear Claw shape designed for open areas," he explains, "and the
narrower Woodland style tailored for dense forest."

Many native leaders see schools as the place where their children find a
balance, gaining literacy skills to function in mainstream society should they
choose and a deep sense of heritage that will foster self-esteem.

"Before satellite TV came to our community in 1992, only one child in every
new kindergarten class couldn't speak our native language," said Williams.

"Today, only one child in any new kindergarten class can speak it. They rent
violent, adult video games and have no sense of their own history."

Distraught over falling test scoresand morale among native students,
educators across the 24 fly-in reserves in the vast Sioux Lookout District First

Nations decided to begin using the classroom to rebuild a sense of identity for
children who live in the woodlands stretching north of Lake Superior.

With funding from the federal government four years ago, the Sioux Lookout
District Education Planning Committee, a team of local chiefs and educators,
launched an innovative resource centre to design new curriculum about
traditional
language, culture and history.

Most students in every grade now have a native language lesson several times
a week in Ojibwa, Cree or the hybrid Oji-Cree and a native culture class at
least once a week.

Several schools have launched native language immersion programs similar to
the popular French immersion programs in other parts of the country. Junior
kindergarten children slowly count to 10 in a new Oji-Cree immersion program in
Sandy Lake, as instructor Thomas Fiddler holds up the syllabic symbols for
numbers from one to 10.

"I wish they had this when I was in school. It would have been easier for
me," says Fiddler, great-grandson of the school's founder.

Only Oji-Cree may be posted on the classroom walls, so Fiddler has translated
the class rules, calendar and student list. The Sioux Lookout Resource Centre
has sent posters in Oji-Cree about careers ranging from police officer to
doctor to computer programmer.


------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--
`The history book said, "the savages massacred the settlers."'

Roy Morris, native curriculum writer at Sioux Lookout resource centre

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--


But progress can be slow, as with immersion programs in any language, admits
Sandy Lake teacher Barbara Kakegamic.

"I talk to the children as much as possible in the old language, but many
won't speak it back. It takes time."

Fiddler is translating local legends into Oji-Cree for students to read, with
the help of elder Rhoda Meekis.

"We want children to know what went on around here a long time ago," Meekis
says, "so they know about who we are."

In Sioux Lookout, at the resource centre, Roy Morris races to illustrate
native curriculum in each subject to meet the demand from isolated communities.
It's a far cry from the Euro-centric approach this artist from Bearskin Lake
encountered when he went "out" to a city for high school years ago.

"We were learning about the French explorer Adam Dollard who was settling
around Montreal, and the history book said `the savages massacred the settlers.'

"On the next test, there was a question, `Who massacred the settlers?' and
the right answer, of course, was `the savages,'" Morris recalls.

"Some others didn't want to participate in this one-sided version of history,
so they left and dropped out and went home.

"But I knew that in order for me to get the mark and pass, I had to put down
`the savages massacred the settlers,' so I did."

But so disenchanted was he that after graduating from high school, Morris
decided against university and went home to Bearskin to learn the traditional
ways from his village elders.

"I learned to hunt and fish and navigate the rapids and to this day, I could
survive in the bush if I had to," he boasts.

Today, he works on a curriculum that ensures students can learn those
traditions in school, along with more standard curriculum.

It's the same change Toronto teacher Sandra McArthur has noticed since she
first came here to teach in 1969, when she brought her Dick and Jane readers
with her.

She soon realized they were irrelevant in a world "where nobody's daddy wore
a suit and nobody lived in the suburbs with a cocker spaniel."

So McArthur and her students made up their own basic readers.

More than 35 years later, McArthur has returned to teach in North Caribou,
where there is no mandatory retirement age, and her classroom is stocked with
glossy symbols in Oji-Cree instead of homemade readers.

But unstable federal funding has threatened the Sioux Lookout District
Resource Centre that produces this bicultural program, warns the outgoing
executive
director Ifka Filipovich.

"We had to lay off four of our seven staff who were helping train principals
and education directors and translate materials," said Filipovich in a recent
interview.

"And we've put in a request for special education resources that has
consistently been turned down."

Still, the two cultures often blend with grace.

On a recent parent-teacher interview at Weagamow, Matthew and Kezia
Petawanick met with their son River's teacher and went through the folder of his
term
work.

One assignment had been to write down what he likes to do with his family.
River seems to have a foot in both cultures.

"I play Xbox with my dad and we'll go on the Spring Hunt soon."

__________________
Don't worry that it's not good enough for anyone else to hear... just sing, sing a song.