Graphic courtesy of the Native Students Union.
Working within the limits of academia while also attempting to transcend them is a common experience for Indigenous students, and it is a fight.
According to the Institutional Planning & Analysis office at UVic, the UVic Indigenous student population sits at just under 1 600 students which is approximately 7 per cent of the general 22 000 students attending this institution.
7 per cent… that’s not even double digits. Keep in mind, this is a massive jump compared to enrollment in the early 2000s with less than 1 000 First Nations, Inuit, and Métis student attendees.
When I share my educational journey to non-Indigenous people, I am often met with comments on its unique-ness, its ‘inspiring’ effect, or an empathetic stare and a pat on the back, maybe even a murmur of its difficulty that acknowledges not everyone can just do school.
And what does this even mean? To do school? To be in university as an Indigenous person means that the hurdles thrown your way during elementary, middle, and high school have all led up to this experience. The be-all and end-all of education: A degree.
From 1876 to 1920, Indigenous people in ‘Kanada’ were involuntarily stripped of their “Indian” status if they received post-secondary education, or joined the medical or legal field. This practice is called enfranchisement.
Other methods included stripping status when an Indigenous woman married a non-Indigenous man, offering an application process to on-reserve folks who wanted to enter society by proving their “civility,” and more.
When enfranchised, you were no longer considered an “Indian” needing Indigenous-specific federal government services and fully assimilated into Canadian society. In other words, access to community, health benefits, treaty rights, rights in general, and Indigenous identity were taken away for pursuing the same things as the white majority.
Let’s remember some key things about intergenerational trauma. Various sources suggest at minimum, trauma inflicted on one person is genetically passed down up to at least two generations after the initial harm. 1920 was 3–4 generations ago.
For Indigenous people in so-called Canada, the pains of the continuous and historically more severe oppression continue to be felt as its generational successors. Within that same truth, the space Indigenous academic professionals presently take up was fought for in light of colonial violence.
At UVic, 1 600 Indigenous students are on campus and learning, which is a large accomplishment when taking in our reality and histories. If a great-grandparent of ours tried to do the same thing, they would’ve been subject to being enfranchised.
Our population is small but the fact that we are here highlights the resilience Indigenous students must have to get through and succeed in post-secondary.
Indigenous students with status no longer lose it by attending school, but as a whole, we are giving up time in our communities, opportunities to reconnect with relatives, and our ways of being to accommodate pursuing the same piece of paper that a majority of our non-Indigenous peers breeze through classes for.
Indigenous students face and consume Euro-dominated, adolescent Western knowledge that teaches the inner-workings of an anti-Indigenous system. Consequentially, we have learned how to move through and overcome this colonial system while still empowering our identities as Indigenous people.
The sentiment across the UVic Indigenous community is that we are not here to just do school. We’re here to resurge and bring back everything we learned to uplift ourselves and our relatives.
Indigenous peoples have fought for the right to sit in all levels of the classroom, and will never experience it as most do. I write this column because I need you to know that. We can’t be reduced to inspirational stories. We are not just regular students.
Can you imagine the pressure? The entire history of so-called Canada rests on your shoulders while you sit in a classroom listening to a settler peer posing a query as to why Indigenous knowledge is even relevant to our learning (as if we haven’t been here over 10,000 years).
We’re here to untangle the past. Why are you here?
