[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]
Wednesday, June 7, 1995
.1540 
[English]
The Chairman: [Technical Difficulty - Editor] ...and then we'll go to question period, with the different parties.
Mr. William Mussel (Native Mental Health Association of Canada): I actually wear more than one hat. I'm the chairman of the Native Mental Health Association of Canada. I am also the principal educator of the Sal'i'shan Institute, which is a private post-secondary educational organization that specializes in the needs and aspirations of indigenous people. We're based in Chilliwack and have been in operation since 1988. The priorities for our work as an educational institute have been social development and education.
Most of the training we do addresses mental health matters. Specifically, we're in the business of preparing and equipping community health workers to respond appropriately to the many demands in their own communities. We also prepare and equip beginning practitioners who are addictions counsellors.
In addition, we do quite a lot of custom design work, working right in the communities themselves, because we've found the more people we are able to reach by inspiring them to get in touch with their experiences, more specifically to get in touch with what it is they know, the better, because many of the people haven't had a chance to process their experiences in ways for them to become consciously aware of the knowledge they possess. So that kind of work within the community is very important.
What I would like to do today is to share with you some of my experiences, and in particular the discoveries I've made as a community educator about education as a method for change. Many people have said to you, based on what I read in the transcripts, that education is a very important method, but there hasn't been much discussion about the particular means of promoting the expansion of knowledge and the increase of skills.
I began my formal teaching career almost thirty years ago, when I obtained my secondary teaching credentials. Fifteen years ago I began to design and develop educational programming at the community level. While doing graduate studies in adult education, I discovered that the literature on education of indigenous people focuses on the lack of success, not success. I wondered why.
I applaud your mission and hope as a committee you will be able to shed some light on the question of success. I hope the ideas, thoughts, and experiences I share will help you move towards your goal. Some of the information I will present in the form of recommendations.
The first topic I want to address is the question of quality learning. What is quality learning? I have on the overhead here a model we employ through our institute. You will notice that what's critical in the model is the significance of the life experience of the learner. It doesn't matter whether the learner is 6, 16, 26, or 60; what's critical is to be able to relate any new information that's being taught as part of a curriculum to that life experience. Rather than telling the learner what it is the new information represents, we do what we can to help them discover the meaning that new information contains. That particular task is fulfilled by a person we call a ``mediator''.
The reason this model is important is that it creates opportunities for learners to apply and to increase their own range of thinking skills as a means to expand their knowledge. What's concerned me about education generally is that there seems to be a lack of emphasis on opportunities to increase thinking skills, because it's those skills we use to make meaning of whatever it is we're experiencing.
.1545
Quality learning, as I see it, is a renewing kind of experience. It's inspirational, and in many ways I think we can conclude that quality learning can be viewed as quality healing in the sense of always being at our very best with regard to our emotional health, our intellectual health and our spiritual health.
We have discovered in our work as educators that most people have lots of personal experience, but that experience is usually not processed. So what we have in our communities are numbers of people who are not aware of the knowledge they possess. As a result, they tend to be reluctant or hesitant to become involved in any kind of relationship where there's an expectation of reciprocity.
As an educator I have discovered that when learners discover the knowledge embedded in their life experiences and have the safety, they begin to take the risks of sharing their feelings and thoughts about their experiences.
That process is really important because through it individual learners begin to have the confidence and develop the skills that enable them to form relationships with others through which learning takes place and emotional growth can also be fostered.
The second overhead I want to share with you really deals with the question of settings for quality learning. Today there is a lot of dependence on the school as the place to educate the children in our communities. It seems that most people tend to think that education starts when their child enters the school, versus parents and other caregivers in the community who view themselves as being the first and most important teachers of their children.
I know from my experience that the most important teachers are the caregivers, the parents themselves. They're far more important than the teachers, but because of many different experiences in our history I think a large number of people don't perceive themselves in that way. I'll go into that later on.
I think we can identify four settings for quality learning to take place. One, of course, is in the classroom and we can call that formal education. That particular type of education is certainly organized, teacher-led, has goals and so on.
A second kind is called non-formal education. It is not school-based but is organized and leader-led. It often takes place in the church or community hall, or it can take place on a soccer field with a good coach. It can take place at an ice rink, on the fishing grounds or on the trapping grounds. What's critical here is that it is organized and facilitated. In other words, it has a particular purpose. I know from my own experience in our community during the 1940s and 1950s there were a fair number of activities that could be considered to have been non-formal education. It's a very important method of learning.
Another type of learning we can identify is informal learning and this can take place anywhere. It's organized, purposeful, and I see it as being manifested most specifically in parent-child relationships. It's taking advantage of teachable moments. It's informal education. It takes place when you have a new worker to supervise and that person comes to you with questions and other kinds of needs for which some kind of learning is required. It's a very important type of learning as well.
The fourth kind that has been identified is incidental or accidental learning. This happens because it happens and usually involves someone with a lot of awareness who is quite centred, sensitive and able to respond to whatever might be happening with regard to the place and circumstance of the information that's coming his or her way.
I mention those four settings for quality learning because I see there has been a decline in the use of non-formal and informal methods in favour of the more formalized methods in our societies. I think that applies to other societies as well.
My concern is that in our communities we have lots of parents who are concerned about their students getting counselling or other kinds of assistance that takes them out of the formal classroom. I think some parents are concerned about it because they fail to appreciate that the nature of the learning that can be taking place outside of the classroom may be as important, if not more important, as that which is taking place in the more formal setting or, in other words, that is being run by the teacher.
.1550
There are four very important methods. I've explored these with many people in many different communities in Canada and there's a general agreement that, in order to enrich the quality of learning for children and for everyone else in the community, we need to reinstitute in an informal way the means of promoting the expansion of knowledge and the development of skills.
The third question is about why quality learning is necessary. This is the second slide and that's the big picture you have in the set with you. This provides a framework for the discussion, and it's a framework I found necessary to develop several years ago because it's difficult to talk about the challenges we are facing as indigenous people today without some kind of framework.
When you look at the big picture, what you can begin to recognize is that, in terms of the transmission of culture, there has been a decline in our ability to prepare and equip each succeeding generation as time has passed. Technology has had some impact, but there is a decline and there is concern about the lack of ability to transmit culture. But there really hasn't been much in the way of research and development work that helps us to answer this next question. What do we do about it?
I have found that it really helps communities to talk about each member, elected leaders, paid workers, and volunteers, as cultural workers, because culture is lifestyle. It's dynamic and ever-changing, and it is certainly the creation of the people who live the life.
It is important then to look at present reality in the picture and to recognize that if we're going to be successful in making a change in our ability to transmit culture to prepare and equip the next generation, then we're certainly going to be successful in enriching the cultural foundation so that it is more substantial. And it will continue to grow if we're able to do something about that transmission of culture. That, to me, is what education and training are all about. Again, my concern is that our reliance is primarily on formal educational methods to do that when in fact it's enriched and perhaps even supported by informal methods.
If we're going to understand why we live as we live, it's really important that we have a good understanding of what the effects of that history are upon each generation and each succeeding generation, because it's the earlier generation that prepares the next one.
I am concerned that there aren't many of us in our own communities who have taken the time and made the effort to document, to analyse, and to understand the positive and negative forces in our lives so that we can find meaning in the question, ``Why do we live as we live?'', and so that we can find answers useful in terms of correcting what is of concern.
Critical to the challenge is the notion of the restructuring of society. I think it starts with the restructuring of our thinking so we will be able to see things that we've experienced and think we understand through using other models and methods and so that, through doing so, we will be able to see it and appreciate it in different ways. Sometimes the quality of the learning through seeing it in a different way helps us to find other strategies that will make a difference.
The final point I want to make about the big picture is the importance of a vision or a desired future lifestyle. I don't find many communities in the country nor have I seen many plans that really give much serious attention to the kind of life we want our great-grandchildren to have when they become parents.
I worked as a planner for five bands in the early 1980s for a few years, and when I was doing this work and talking to people and families, many of the families responded to the question, ``What kind of life do you want your great-grandchildren to have when they become adults?'', with the question, ``Is it possible that what I think can make a difference?''
So many of the people really don't believe that they have the power and that they have what it takes to make a difference in that regard. and it seems to me that, as elected leaders - I'm a former chief and worked as a band manager and planner in the past - if the community of people don't take the time to define that vision, it becomes very difficult for a leader to provide the leadership that's going to make a difference, relative particularly to decisions about programs: social welfare programs, education programs, economic development programs, and so on.
.1555
I see very few communities in the country that have taken the time to do that. It seems to me that it's very difficult for any of those leaders then to set any kind of policy that's going to be useful in regard to making decisions about programs and services.
Interpersonal relationships is topic number four. Most adults and children are hesitant to assert themselves. I speak of that as an experienced educator working in the communities, in both a non-formal and a formal way. When I've worked with children in grades 5 to 8 for limited periods of time, I've always been struck by how reluctant they are to engage themselves in any kind of interaction where they show a willingness to play a role in an equitable fashion. Many of them wanted to be guided or told what to do. They lack experience, it seems, in relating to another person in a reciprocal manner.
What do I mean by ``reciprocal manner''? In order for people to interact in a reciprocal manner, there has to be a willingness to take risks in exposing their thoughts and feelings, to reveal things about their inner self that are important. What I find in our communities is that very small numbers of people are able to do that. It also applies to societies around us.
It's a concern to me, because when I look at our history I see a great deal of institutionalization that results in circumstances where young people are training to meet other people's needs, to keep them satisfied, and to meet their expectations, but don't have the opportunity to get to know themselves in terms of exploring what their genuine thoughts and feelings are or to begin to explore why they may want to break a rule or why they have got into trouble.
When you're in a situation in which you're constantly motivated to please others, you have very little opportunity to get to know yourself. When you don't know yourself in that way, you're afraid to enter relationships later, because maybe in the past, when you did take the risk of being dynamic and genuine, you got into trouble. I see that as being a consequence of custodial care, of institutionalization.
Each of you will recognize that positive relationships with other people are what serve as the vehicles to enrich learning. Those relationships also enable us to grow emotionally, to be more loving, giving and accepting of people who are different. In our communities, in a lot of different ways, there is a lot of distrust. There's a lack of trust, which again can be identified with the creation of residential schools and other kinds of institutionalization that does not build on trust. It's built on distrust.
The relationship opposite to the reciprocal one is a depiction of the relationships that we know better as indigenous people. I would sense that's also the case with yourselves, given your history and cultural circumstances. It's a relationship where somebody else has greater power and control. Someone else has more authority.
As a student in the educational system, I discovered that most teachers play the expert. They really believe they have to know the answer. Very few of them, in my experiences that I recall, were willing to admit that they didn't understand something and would say, ``Gee, I'm not sure what the answer to that question is. Let's you and I go to the library and explore it. Let's find some way of discovering what that's all about.''
My concern is that we've adopted many of the very same attitudes in regard to relationships in our communities. As is revealed in the overhead projection, a situation exists where there is anti-communication. It's not a situation where people interact and leave with something more than they had before. It's a case of somebody doing something to somebody else, somebody making a decision for someone else and not engaging that other person in the decision and, through engaging them, helping them to understand something more about what the underlying problem is and why there may be a need for a different kind of solution.
.1600
What this kind of relationship results in, as I see it, is an absence of opportunities to develop communication skills. It is an absence of opportunities to develop those kinds of skills. It also makes it very difficult for the people involved to develop thinking skills that can be used to enrich their learning.
Due to the lack of opportunities to develop thinking skills that are fostered through positive relationships characterized by reciprocal interactions or the sharing of meaningful information, what becomes a challenge today in regard to programming is to find ways and means to expose people to those opportunities so that they can begin to learn how to learn.
That's what's critical with regard to working with adults. If parents aren't able to communicate and learn how to learn, what kind of influence are they going to have on their children? I think that's a major factor that accounts for the difficulties that many of the children have in the formal educational system.
What are the outcomes of a breakdown in relationships? What's critical in that regard is to look at the phenomenon of people who play victim. Also, these same people who, when they get into positions of authority, find it quite easy to become a rescuer and do things for people. From a leadership point of view, by believing that by doing more and more for the people, they believe they're being a better leader; they're being really effective in carrying out what is expected of them. That tends to be relatively common in our community.
It's common because there aren't enough of us asking ourselves: why did we have a need to do this for the people? I was talking to a maintenance man in the community a few weeks ago. He said he was expected to keep grass cut and to do this and that in the community. He said he wasn't really helping the people. In fact, he said he was making them rather helpless by providing something that they're capable of doing themselves.
I think we need more people in our communities to ask themselves, when they're working for the community or in leadership roles: who is meeting whose needs in this particular circumstance? I see that kind of reality coming out of the breakdown in relationships, because when I look at our history, there's been an absence of nurturing in terms of intellectual stimulation and emotional food that helps us to grow emotionally.
What's happened is that many of us, through being deprived of those opportunities, logically end up playing victim. We can easily fit into becoming a rescuer, but if things don't go well, man, we're pretty good at cutting down other people and doing what we can to hurt them because we're angry.
Those roles are roles that a person who plays victim can easily fall into. The only way you can help people to change is to find ways of nurturing them so they can feel better about who they are and so that their emotional and intellectual needs are met in terms of helping them to begin to understand why they behave as they do.
I mentioned the notion of needs. The medicine wheel is a very useful model to help us begin to recognize the importance of needs and what those particular needs are. I'll talk only about the emotional and intellectual ones.
When I teach this in our communities to students, some of whom are adults, people will generally agree that there's an absence of positive recognition in their lives. There seems to be a reluctance or perhaps more of an inability on our part as members of our communities to make other people important by listening to them, acknowledging their importance, and doing things to let them know that they're important as a human being. Most of the people will talk about being far more familiar with negative recognition than positive recognition.
Other kinds of emotional food certainly are unconditional acceptance, the need for understanding, love, privacy, discipline, and having someone who cares enough to set limits for us, because many of us aren't very good at taking care of ourselves. We sometimes overdo it. We don't get enough rest. We take risks. We can do that when we're tired or things aren't going very well, and it's important to have somebody who cares enough to help us recognize those things that we're not doing.
I mention those items because they are really important. It's important for all of us to understand those as needs, because they're essential for our survival and our growth and development.
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In the intellectual area, we really need concepts in order to begin to make meaning out of our lives. We need ideas. We need thoughts to inspire us and to help us develop other thoughts. We need to develop habits that will help us to learn what it is to be learned. Certainly we need the discipline necessary to be able to regulate and control what it is we're doing to be able to set priorities and to get work done.
The next thing I want to comment on is the need for a balance of attention to inner and outer environments. The formal educational curricula give greatest attention to the external world around us. Very little attention is given to helping us understand what makes us tick, why we feel as we feel, why we think as we think, why we behave as we behave, and perhaps even more importantly, why we perceive things as we perceive them, and the fact that not all of us always perceive things in the same way.
What we've discovered as educators is that when we do what we can to help people understand more of their internal world by looking at the seeing, the feeling, the thinking, and the doing, it really does a great deal to help them make more meaning out of their own lives. It appears to me it would be very important to give more attention to providing people with the opportunities to learn more about themselves.
The final item I was to share with you is the healing-growth journey. You may be aware of the fact that in British Columbia in particular, and certainly on the prairies as well, a great deal of attention is being given by the authorities to the effects of abuse in residential schools. I can describe that generally as the accumulation of personal losses in the life of members of our communities.
Those losses, when they're not grieved, result in emotions that are repressed. Grieving then is required in order to release the repressed emotions. When they have built over the years, where's there's an accumulation of losses, it can have a very serious negative effect on the thinking and feeling, and therefore the behaviour, of the person who has been victimized in those ways.
What's happening in B.C. right now is there is an investigation that's organized and involving the police, who have undertaken to interview all people who were victimized in a sexual sense while students in a residential school. I think the numbers of people who were victimized are far greater than anyone ever imagined.
What's worse, when you look at Canadian statistics on abuse, the statistics reveal that 60% of the people who have been abused become abusers. If you look back and say, well, that goes back five generations in a community, look at how many potential victimizers there are, because of the number of victims in the original instance and continual exposure to risks where they could well be abused.
So a great deal of attention needs to be paid to that particular need in our communities. When you look at that from the point of view of the effects on the lives of the whole community, you can begin to recognize that it does have effects on the ability of children to handle the work associated with being a student in the educational system.
I've found personally, as my colleagues in the institute have, that as people begin to grieve and heal, they certainly begin to free their energies up to be able to focus on the challenge of creating knowledge. Once they're able to get on that track, with continued support and counselling, they're able to learn whatever they want to learn.
That's a dimension of the educational challenge we haven't talked about enough. I don't think those of us who are in positions of authority understand it well enough to be able to ensure the resources necessary to make a difference are provided.
The recommendations I've come up with deal with the following. About curriculum and delivery of curriculum, there should be a balance between caring and sharing and the teaching of thinking skills to prepare and equip learners to learn how to learn and thereby succeed in whatever learning goals are chosen. There seems to be a lot of caring and sharing, but sometimes that takes most of the time of the teacher. I think there really has to be a balance between that and the activities that I'm saying really should be designed to help the child learn how to learn. We should be able to move away from the need of children having to memorize what the teacher has taught, because when you have to memorize it, it means you really don't understand it. You don't know how to apply it to things that are familiar in your life.
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The second one is the teacher preparation to include the need for knowledge and skills to manage the learning of children raised in contexts and circumstances revealing trauma and associated difficulties. The teacher preparation also includes the creation of knowledge and skills to maximize quality learning through the use of non-formal and informal methods to complement the formal methods, which seem to be more important to them in practice. Attention to material culture in the curriculum should be balanced by attention to the non-material culture so that the truly human dimensions of lifestyle are recognized and appreciated.
In my personal opinion, too much of what is being taught as culture deals with the exotic, deals with what's really different, deals with the whole thing of tepees and costumes and feathers. It really doesn't do much to create mutual understanding of the fact that we all have a brain, we all have a heart, we all have a spirit, we have a physical self. When we can begin to understand one another from that point of view, I think it will go a long way to creating better relationships between human beings.
For some reason the western world seems to be reluctant to do that kind of thing. It affects not only indigenous people; I think it affects all people who have differences. I think we do too much to emphasize differences and not enough to bring together information that will show what it is we share in common. I think that as time passes, because of technology and other circumstances, we have a great deal more in common than we have that's different, and I think it's important that something be done to address that.
In regard to the community contexts of the school, these are the comments I want to share with you. Ways and means must be created to involve parents in the education of their children, because they are the child's first and most important teachers while they are in the home and also while those children are enrolled in a formal educational program or programs. There's a lot of lip service being paid to parental involvement, but there appears to be very little actual involvement. The question of why that involvement is as it is really needs to be examined and understood.
Significant numbers of these parents were deprived of opportunities to discover the feelings of satisfaction from learning or the creation of practical knowledge and skills. Because of this, serious attention is needed to remediate this gap in the lives of these caregivers who tend to have far greater influence upon the lives of the young people than any teacher or counsellor.
Many of these caregivers were also deprived of opportunities to form and maintain positive relationships through which they would discover the knowledge they possess and build upon it as they integrate new information. Structured ways and means, formal, non-formal and informal, can be used to reach this goal.
There is an absence of defined rights and responsibilities of a community member - and this would be of some interest to you, given what I've read as questions in the Hansard. With such an absence it is very difficult to delegate responsibility to elected or appointed leaders and to be consciously aware of ongoing rights and responsibilities, which are the member's responsibility.
Until a community addresses this need, questions of responsibility and accountability will remain speculative. In a sense, it's almost blowing in the wind, because we don't have a base of concrete information to work from.
I've wondered when I vote what particular responsibilities I'm delegating to the person I'm voting for to be a council member. I have not seen - and I've travelled extensively and done a lot of work in our communities - a community that has codified the rights and responsibilities of its members. I really think it's important that such work be done and that the communities do the work, and certainly not have outsiders doing it for them. I think it will do a great deal in dealing with questions of eligibility for programs, who gets assistance for education, and so on.
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On the final couple of items in regard to research, serious attention should be given to the need for information that describes key factors in the lives of successful learners and professionals to balance the attention directed to individuals labelled as failures, drop-outs, and so on. There's a tremendous bias in favour of looking at the children who don't make it, in looking at learners who don't make it.
I really think we will learn a great deal more if we understand what it is that happens to people who are successful as students, and certainly successful then as professionals as a result of their earlier successes, and that the values and benefits of evaluative research of outcomes be realized through the provision of resources to document what works and does not work, why, and so on, so that interested citizens can access the wisdom of experience in the educational and other human services fields.
It's almost impossible today to go anywhere in the country, to any band or native organization and say, now, 15 years ago you attempted this kind of program and it lasted for two years; what did you learn from the experience? It's impossible to go to the Department of Indian Affairs and ask for reports that will share that kind of wisdom.
I think that's the case because there has been no requirement, at least no instituted requirement, that the outcomes of programs, pilot projects, and other things be evaluated in order to determine what works and what doesn't, and so on. The primary concern, and the only concern, really, has been to have a proper accounting of the expenditure of the money.
I know that from having worked as a band manager and a planner. When we've attempted to provide qualitative and quantitative information that looks at outcomes, people of the government will say that they're not interested in that and that they just want an accounting that can be properly audited. That has deprived us of many, many years of efforts made by a wide range of people in regard to trying to address the educational needs and challenges of indigenous peoples.
The final point is that serious attention should be directed to the need for information that describes the history of families in communities, generation to generation, so that community members will have the opportunity to know - and I underline ``know'' - their history and in turn have increasing abilities to comprehend present realities, to know why we live as we live and make informed decisions about what needs to be changed, how, and so on. That's very, very necessary and it's going to help us.
If we were to do that and had the resources to do that, it would help us to begin to create and recreate the knowledge necessary for us to take charge of our lives, because we would understand better why we live as we live because we would understand our history. When we can understand why we live as we live, we can make better decisions about what we want to change. If we then are able together, as members of our communities, to define a vision for the future, we can then talk about the development of strategies to make that difference.
One of the teachings of the elders that I certainly remember the best was this: if we don't know where we've been, we can't possibly know where we are. Also, if we don't know where we've been, we can't possibly know where we're going. There's lots of wisdom in that, and tragically in lots of ways governments of countries don't know their history. They don't know their own history, and in a sense it seems to me that regarding a lot of the decision-making that governments are expected to make, perhaps they aren't the best bodies or parties to be making those decisions, whereas in a community like our own communities, where people have lived for hundreds of years, there are people who have a good understanding of that history. The difficulty is that we have not had an opportunity to document it as well as we can, and therefore we're not able to use it in a way that I'm suggesting, to help people in fact to be empowered to take charge of their own lives.
That's my presentation.
The Chairman: Thank you very much. It was very interesting. We will now go to the question period. Usually we always start with the official opposition, but I think today I'm going to reverse the roles and start off with the Liberal members, with ten minutes for both.
Mr. Bonin (Nickel Belt): You just gave us a degree in education. If we can pass the test we could get the certificate, because you've covered it all, and I have to say that I agree totally with what you're saying. I particularly enjoyed the presentation on the board, which is probably guided by the theory of transactional analysis, which is something I believe in.
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As a community, way back when we instituted schools, we decided we would have schools for a specific reason. It was to form individuals who could contribute to society. Not too many people remember that, but that's why we have schools. I think we've lost touch with that, and you've dealt with that in your presentation.
Because I have only five minutes, I'd like to close in on one of the last points you touched on, and that's the responsibility given to leaders. As an advisory committee, we are not to come on aboriginal communities and say this is the way it's going to be done. This is not the intent of this committee. But unless we have recommendations that bring results, we will have been wasting our time.
Personally, I am convinced that you, as an administrator yourself, could go to any school system and look at the books and you'd know what's going on in the classroom. Maybe a five-minute visit would confirm what you thought you saw. I firmly believe as a government we have to start putting conditions on the funds that are transferred.
The type of conditions I am talking about...I don't believe in block funding, giving to the chief and council the power to set priorities that consume dollars that are directed to education...towards some other endeavour. For example, it really upsets me when I hear that some of the education money goes to roads. It really upsets me when I hear some of the money goes to chartering aircraft to bring hockey teams to tournaments, because as a former school trustee, I firmly believe we're cheating the children.
In our debates I probably will say things that will upset people. I will say it for the kids. We've seen so many different systems. Some people will associate what I say with the good systems and ask, why would you say that? I am going to do it for the kids who aren't getting the results.
How do you feel about the transfer of payment being calculated - and I'm not trying to save money here; I am talking about the same funds - being based on a per capita, per student...take the total amount, divide by the number of students, and that's what you get...and that a portion of that be mandatorily spent on curriculum development and professional development, the way they do in all the other boards of education in the country, so the money reaches that child. In a lot of cases I don't think it's reaching him or her now.
I didn't leave much time for you to respond, but that's my preoccupation.
Mr. Mussel: I agree with you that the child is the one who's being deprived if that's what's being done with the money. But even more importantly, the community itself is being deprived, because each member of that community does have an influence, and can have a significant influence, on the future life of that community as time passes.
My personal view is that if there is a contract, it should be a business arrangement. There should be a mutually agreed on contract or conditions of contract. Those items you mentioned are very important items in any kind of educational system. Therefore why not make it a business arrangement between responsible parties?
Mr. Bonin: Absolutely. In many of the situations we visited, the chief and council appoint the school board or school commission. You have a change of chief and the new chief appoints a new group. The stronger boards of education have trustees who have been there for 25 to 30 years and who have developed a commitment because they built the system and have expertise. I am finding we're lacking this. How do you feel about an elected autonomous school administration within the reserves?
Mr. Mussel: I like the idea in principle, but as I mentioned, if a community of people do not have a clear understanding of what their rights and responsibilities are, until that's looked after, I think there will always be difficulties associated with the power that's delegated to a particular authority, whether it's the band council or a school board or a health authority or whatever it might be.
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So my advice is that it would be important for communities to be encouraged to codify what those rights and responsibilities are and then to begin to define what will be delegated to a school authority; what's to be delegated to the political leaders of the band council, as we know them today; what's being delegated to a health authority, because in some of the provinces health authorities are being created that are separate from the political authority. So that's where we have to start.
Mr. Bonin: I'm impressed by your presentation. I wish we had more time. Thank you.
Mr. Murphy (Annapolis Valley - Hants): One of the things we saw when we moved around was the involvement of parents, the involvement of the community in education. From your perspective, what would you define as community control of an educational system? Should that be the band, or should that be the board of education, which is an offshoot of the band?
Mr. Mussel: The notion that appeals to me is to look upon whatever is being done in regard to delivering a service as the community being the client. The client is the community. If you're a member of a family and I'm a counsellor and you have difficulties and you're a hard character to develop a relationship with but you have a good relationship with your older brother, then if I work through the strengths of your family and through your brother to help you to deal with your problems, really I'm doing something that I consider to be more akin to recognizing the community as the client.
Being consistent with that, the members of the community own the school program. The members of the community take responsibility for what they delegate to the chief and council and take responsibility to hold that chief and council accountable. So in the ideal circumstance it starts with the people of the community.
Something less than that is being practised in many communities. The model you provide as the Canadian society has been practised in our communities, which is where the elected people take it upon themselves to make a number of decisions, whereas I personally believe band members should play a major role in making decisions, because they affect their lives and the lives of their children and grandchildren.
So my preference is that if it is community-based, then the members of the community will take responsibility to ensure that it works.
Mr. Murphy: I couldn't agree with you more. Obviously, DIAND has passed over funds for education to the bands in the hope that community control will take place. I think we could safely say that what we saw in a number of locations was not that. It was more a group of people.
To be fair, we saw some places where there was a lot more of the client being the community, and that was really nice to watch.
These are nice words, but how can we get that to happen? How can we help communities? What kinds of recommendations would people make to bring that about?
I was really impressed by your idea of the code of responsibility and conduct and so on. That certainly is one of the levers. You sound like a community developer. What kinds of things...?
Mr. Mussel: One of the things that came to my mind as I listened to you is that the people who are able to address questions and concerns about tomorrow are people who are not caught up with crises of today. There are also other people who I find are so well defended that they really live in the past; they cannot face the realities of today and they need to find ways and means of avoiding and escaping from it, and they are quite successful in doing that. It's part of the defence system.
The ones who are stuck today are generally people who are very dependent upon whether other people like them or don't like them. They're very dependent. When you're dependent in that way, you really don't have the energy to think about tomorrow.
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What I'm saying in a roundabout way is that there aren't enough people whose lives are together well enough and who aren't captured by the problems and crises they're living through to be comfortable in thinking about tomorrow. Let's face it, when we talk about education and training, we're talking about the future. We need to keep that in mind as we're making decisions about education and training, because if we limit it to the present, we're probably going to miss the boat with some of the decisions we're going to make about what the priorities will be and where money should be spent, and so on.
So what I'm saying, in a sense, to be more concrete, is that we really need to give attention to what it is that needs to be done to help people deal with the crises in their lives today so they can harness their energies and focus on the decisions that have to be made about tomorrow. In the past the government has made a lot of those decisions for us. When you look at the nature of programs and policies and laws, they have been done to us from the outside. We're now in a situation where we're being told we're going to have to do it ourselves. We're becoming so consciously aware of the negative effects of the past that yes, there are lots of problems that need to be addressed in order to free more of the people to be able to welcome the challenges of making decisions for their tomorrows.
Does that make sense to you?
Mr. Murphy: A lot of sense.
[Translation]
Mr. Bachand (Saint-Jean): Mr. Mussel, I would like to thank you for your presentation. However, I must say that during the first part of your presentation, I felt a little bit as though I were back in my psychology classes. You presented us with a psychological overview laid out in seven or eight charts. I was reminded of psychologists like Watson, Piaget, and Freud; I'm now wondering whether we shouldn't be adding the name Mussel. It was a fairly original presentation. I am not at all challenging the ideas you have offered us, because I agree with a lot of what you said.
However, I do have a few questions. These questions arise from the briefing notes that were prepared for us and from your presentation as well, because you have raised some interesting points, especially with respect to residential schools.
We have indeed visited various locations. Our travels took us to British Columbia. Investigations are presently being conducted by the RCMP. I have asked the Solicitor General for detailed information on those investigations. Amongst other things, I would like to know if the investigations are being conducted jointly with the First Nations. We know that there were victims: an entire generation was deprived of its rights. Have the members of that generation been adequately consulted? Have the First Nations been consulted with respect to the inquiry into residential schools? That is my first question.
From a cultural perspective, you have told us what life was like in traditional times. In the picture you presented to us, you had quality of life on the left, with a peak and a low level. Quality of life was at its best when the traditional lifestyle was flourishing in 1893, but it is now at a low point, and you yourself have said that this is in a way the result of technology. Then, you said that if you could find a way of improving that quality of life, you could go on to make your vision for the future come true. We, as white paternalists, have difficulty reconciling these two concepts.
How do you reconcile the latest advances in computer technology with the traditional lifestyle? Is that not one of the reasons why a number of First Nations cannot decide whether to cling to their traditional lifestyle or open the floodgates and move to this new vision for the future?
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Could you comment on how those two concepts, one based on technology and the other on tradition, can be reconciled?
Finally, how can we go about helping you without being paternalistic, as we so often are? I agree that the cycle of dependance has to be broken. I have always believed that the First Nations should control their own destiny. However, we do see some instances of abuse, and we are reluctant to intervene because of the principles of democracy for native peoples, whereby people should be made accountable and take responsibility for their actions.
We find ourselves between a rock and a hard place. Should we try and stop the abuse? Funds are being misused, but those funds were given to native peoples so that they could control their own destiny. We can't really threaten to cut their subsidies if they don't use them for the right purposes, like education, for instance.
We are in somewhat of a bind. You have not suggested any solution to us. You simply said that people were traumatized by a number of occurrences on the reserves and in residential schools, but how can we, as a committee, as white decision-makers in the House of Commons, help to break this cycle of dependance so that the First Nations can indeed control their own destiny through education?
[English]
Mr. Mussel: Let me see if I can remember the three points. The first was on residential schools and whether the people were involved.
I've heard that in the last six months a group of government personnel, mainly provincial, including the RCMP, have met with a committee of native leaders to discuss the need and a method or strategy to respond to that particular need.
When the RCMP investigated the Port Alberni residence and began to identify the people who were responsible for the abuse, they began to see that that staff moved around to other residential schools and they reached the conclusion that they might as well do all of the schools in order to get the story about abuse.
They had further discussions with the committee and there was an agreement that, yes, all of the schools would be done. There was a short training course. After they hand-picked the RCMP officers to do the investigations, they had some particular training. More recently, a provincial coordinator was named, a native woman from the Williams Lake area, to coordinate the activities associated with the investigation and the identification of people who need follow-up support, guidance, and counselling.
I think four sub-regional coordinators have also been appointed - there is one in the northeast, one in the Fraser Valley, one on the island - in addition to the regional coordinator. They're to be the link between what the police are doing and the involvement of the native communities, and so on.
So the involvement of the native communities has been primarily through the naming of the people on this committee, which consists mainly of native leaders.
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I'm concerned personally that there may not be enough resources to pick up the pieces after the investigation starts, because abuse is something that is highly personal; it's talking about secrets, about things that have happened and that you have packed around for a long time. It could well mean that there have been other incidents of abuse since you have become an adult.
So I'm hoping there will be enough resources to address that problem.
The second question had to do with....
Mr. Bachand: Vision and tradition.
Mr. Mussel: I think what is important for us to recognize is that many of the traditions of the past continue to be practised in the present.
Those of us living the life very often can't identify what those traditions are because we live the life. We have not had a chance to process and discuss and learn what we can of what was there 100 years ago and what continues to be present in the present. The traditions that have practical value and use are continued into the present.
The person who integrates values, beliefs, and other ingredients that are necessary in order to develop your own lifestyle is the learner. If the learner is able to integrate whatever is of interest and concern and what is given priority in his or her life - and it may be the family who makes that decision - I don't see that there's a conflict between tradition and modern.
As the late George Manuel said, what's really important is that indigenous peoples of the world be prepared and equipped to be able to integrate whatever they want to learn from any other culture of the world as they wash upon the shores of North America. I think that was the phrase he used. I fully agree with him.
What's important for us to recognize is that our cultures are not in the museum. Our cultures are not what's shown in pictures. Our cultures have much more to do with non-material things: values; beliefs; rhythms and patterns of speech; rhythms and patterns concerning song, poetry, and a lot of things we cannot see. It's important for us to value that because some people who are looking around and don't see tepees and feathers and this and that are asking what's happened to our culture.
The problem is not the person who is living the life; it's the person who is asking where the tepees are, because they have a certain perception of what is cultural and what is not. My concern is that some of us have been trained to think like those people who are looking for the tepees. It's more than that.
I don't see any conflict in bringing together tradition with the modern. The key is that the people themselves have the opportunity to make a choice. The problem comes when the people do not have a choice and it's imposed on them. That's one of the aspects of our history that has created a lot of difficulties.
With the creation of residential schools, first being run by the church and then being run by the government with government support, students in those institutions didn't have any choices. Many of them were not adequately prepared to live a life characterized by being able to make choices. That's one of the biggest challenges facing us as leaders in 1995.
Mr. Bachand: And how to break dependency -
Mr. Mussel: There's the question of how to break dependency.
Mr. Bachand: - without being paternal.
Mr. Mussel: That's a toughie. That's a very difficult question.
I would respond by saying this. When I as an educator work with a group of people and I can convey to them that I believe in their ability to modify themselves, I have success. If I were to expand that, it seems to me that what's critical then is that we have leadership and workers and outsiders who are getting support who have an unfailing belief in the ability of the people to change themselves. When you have a team of people working in a local government who believe that together as a team they can make a difference, they will make a difference.
I mention that because in the work I've done with some of our local governments, they're working hard to develop themselves to become a team. Right now many of them are working as individual agents trying to run a program and do this and do that.
What I like to remind them of, as an educational consultant and educator, is that they're all there because of the same families, and those same families have needs and wants. Because we're serving the same families as a first nation, for example, we should be working together and pooling the resources we have, human and material, to be able to provide the best services we can and not worry about whether it's the health worker who does it or the teacher or the social worker or the recreation worker or the economic development officer. We match needs with the talents of the people who are on our team and respond in that way and give one another support.
I really think that's necessary. To me, it's viable in our communities because our communities are relatively small and they are not transient, which makes us very different from other Canadian communities, because most other Canadian communities are quite transient.
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I see that as being an attitude to community development that's really important...and not to get hung up on the notion of independence. The word I tend to prefer is to create opportunities for people to learn how to live in a ``co-reliant'' fashion. No one is more responsible than the other. We each share responsibilities, as a good team does, to be able to accomplish something.
Co-reliance to me is what's necessary, and co-reliance to me involves being cooperative, involves collaboration, involves truly effective communication. It involves individuals who are prepared to be responsible as responsible team members are in a winning team. That's more viable in our societies because of their size and the fact that we're not that far away from our tradition. But the key is who is around with the attitude and the knowledge and skills to be able to promote and support that kind of development.
Mr. Duncan (North Island - Powell River): I agree with my colleague on the other side. I don't agree with block funding either.
The whole business of education, according to some, is the second-largest business in Canada. Yet in some respects it's really not run like a business.
Mr. Mussel: It's more of an industry than a business.
Mr. Duncan: I guess ``industry'' is a better choice of words.
One of the things that have become evident to me over time is that a bit of competition in delivering the services of that industry is something a lot of people now desire. In the public school system we now have competing private schools. This empowers the individual and in many respects promotes the community interest from the standpoint that they want their school to respond. If it doesn't respond, then they may go somewhere else.
Is this an issue in your community? Is the community sending all its children to the one Sal'i'shan institution?
Mr. Mussel: We're dealing at the post-secondary level. The population we serve is those people who are already employed, mainly through contracts with medical services, which in turn contracts with us to do the training.
Mr. Duncan: This is all post-secondary?
Mr. Mussel: It's post-secondary.
Mr. Duncan: I heard you talking about grade 4 and grade 5 earlier, but that's from a previous life -
Mr. Mussel: I used to work with that. I do some of that work in my work now, but it's not regular.
I do want to mention this. Where there are band schools, not all parents send their children to the band school. Some of them exercise the option of sending their children to the provincial schools. Where they send their children is an individual decision of the family.
Mr. Duncan: That's correct, and that is something I wanted to expand on, because there's a growing phenomenon of major capital expenditure by the department on schools on reserve. We now have a phenomenon where people are being discouraged by the authorities from sending their children to the public school; the authorities being either the chief and council or the department.
I personally find this to be going backwards for those parents who feel strongly that they want to continue to send their children to the public school. Potentially it's a very great disservice to the children. If you get a captive market, it would only lead to a potential lowering of standards.
Can I read into what you're saying that you would agree with those sentiments?
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Mr. Mussel: No. How can the council prevent them from -
Mr. Duncan: It's the financial penalty and additional costs of sending their children off reserve that they didn't previously encounter prior to the school being built on reserve.
Mr. Mussel: Some of the people I know at home right now who do not send their children to the band-run schools do not pay extra. What they do, though, is make sure they get there. They provide the transportation. It may require driving 20 miles each way, twice a day.
But they are investing. They believe in their children enough to invest what they need in their children.
Mr. Duncan: Yes.
Mr. Mussel: Look at our case. Mary, my wife, and I have two daughters. Our oldest daughter was very unhappy in the public school in grade 10. She's a very good student. We ended up sending her to a private school. That was the best thing we could have done, because it suited her learning style, her needs and what not. It was well worth the investment. It cost a fair amount of money, but my wife and I were prepared to make that investment.
Certainly I believe that, again, it's important for parents and members of our communities to have choices. We also recognize that there are circumstances in which we're going to have to invest in our own children. I see more and more evidence of it as time passes.
Mr. Duncan: I was personally in circumstances this week in which the parents on reserve were feeling very much that their options were being limited.
Mr. Mussel: By their own leadership.
Mr. Duncan: Yes, by their own leadership. I think it boils down to this. Say you finance a brand-new school facility costing many millions of dollars. Then people ask why it was built, because they didn't really want to send their children there. Somebody is not going to look all that wonderful out of the exercise.
Mr. Mussel: But the other question is whether the parents were involved in considering the alternatives relative to whether a school was to be built or not and so on.
Mr. Duncan: No, that's the operative question. The answer is that they were not asked this. This relates back to what you were saying about community involvement right at the beginning. I know it was talked about from the other side. I couldn't agree more that it's at the root of the situation.
There is one other thing I would like to talk about. I talked to a Cree teacher who teaches in the public school system. Her students are predominantly Cree, but not exclusively so. She believes very strongly in standards testing to determine the benchmark level for your students, and then see how far one can progress in a year. I don't pretend to be familiar with this testing, but she thinks this is the most invaluable tool she can utilize from the standpoint of academics.
Then she separates academics from cultural studies, of course. But she feels that unless she gets the academic standards up to where they should be, then the cultural studies are really wasted. Do you have any strong feelings on standards testing?
Mr. Mussel: I think we need benchmarks with regard to the need to assess and evaluate what it is we are doing and how we are doing it. Of course, the clearest indicator is the performance of your learners. It's important for us to be aware of what it is they bring when they arrive in the classroom.
Most of the testing I have seen, though, tends to be based upon producing the right answer. My bias favours testing that provides the learner with information about their skills as a thinker. That's the learning of skills to make meaning out of what it is they are doing. I've seen testing that's based on that, and I think that's far more useful to the learner and to the educator than getting a reading on whether or not they produce the right answer.
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But we do need something that testing is supposed to do, and that's some evidence of the progress being made. Norms are useful, but the key is that they not be cast in stone, that they not be treated as something that's more than what it is - an indicator.
Mr. Duncan: How widespread is that kind of testing, in your experience?
Mr. Mussel: Do you mean testing that deals primarily with thinking skills, or the other, the right answer?
Mr. Duncan: I guess I'm asking you a question about a part of the school system you're not dealing with directly. I'm asking you about lower levels of the school system, so it's not a fair question at this point.
Mr. Mussel: I'm curious, though, about the Cree educator you're talking about, relative to excluding learning things about culture. Culture is lifestyle.
Mr. Duncan: I'm not saying she's excluding it. What I'm saying is that she won't rest until she gets her academic standard up, because she doesn't feel there's as much value in trying to teach the cultural stuff until she gets the academic level up. It's her first and foremost priority. In her view, that's how the children are going to be a success later in life.
Anyway, I found your presentation very interesting. Thank you very much.
The Chairman: Thank you, Mr. Duncan.
One of the disadvantages of being chair is that you get to ask your questions last. I have four small questions. One of them was asked by Mr. Bonin and the other one was asked by Mr. Bachand, so I just have two short questions for you.
At the beginning of your presentation you said that today's students are lacking in non-formal and informal learning. Are you saying that some parents and elders are not doing their job as educators?
Mr. Mussel: Yes, they're not giving enough time and attention to creating the needs for knowledge on the part of the children, because good parents create needs for knowledge and do things that inspire children who want then to learn more about different things. I'm concerned that not enough quality time is being spent by the adults with the younger people.
The Chairman: As you know - I think it was John who mentioned it - we are a committee that make suggestions. Are there any suggestions you could give us so that maybe we could address that problem?
Mr. Mussel: What's interesting to me in the more recent literature concerning growth and development of children is that the pattern of life to be led by a child as a young adult is set by the time that child is four years old. The parents bringing the child into this world and looking after that child until that age are powerfully influential in regard to what it is that the child creates as a lifestyle for himself or herself. Most parents do not fully appreciate the significance of that kind of finding.
Further to that, I think, and it's something we ourselves as leaders and educators in our own communities really need to share, is to do what we can to help people truly appreciate the fact that they can change themselves, that they can modify themselves. It's important to have people around who believe they're capable of doing it, help them prove to themselves they can do it, and in turn be more effective in mediating the learning of other people, particularly their children.
The Chairman: Educating the parents.
Mr. Mussel: Yes.
Some people like to assume that we know what quality education is, but I argue that point. What is quality education? What's quality learning, and what does it take to create an environment that's rich and inspiring, relative to children increasing their life experiences and creating the tools necessary to continue to make more and more meaning out of whatever it is they're pursuing?
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I think the concern is not the 20%. It's interesting that, in looking at the question of aboriginals and education, we tend to lump all of the children into one group. I think that up to 20% will succeed wherever they go because they have the foundation. But the other 80% really need far more attention in regard to changing the statistics, in regard to successes. We need to be more focused on what in particular the needs and circumstances of that 80% are.
The Chairman: That's interesting.
We have travelled quite extensively, and I have noticed that more native students seem to be going into arts and social studies than into the field of science. Is there any way in which we can reverse this trend, or are we doomed to produce more...?
Mr. Mussel: I would say that the kinds of thinking skills necessary to understand mathematics, chemistry, and physics, any of the pure sciences, are different from what it takes to understand history or some of the social sciences, to do English and in the end pass the course.
My experience tells me that because of the lack of quality communication in the lives of many people in our communities, and certainly in the lives of families, many of the children do not have a chance to develop those thinking skills, because they just don't have the practice, they don't have the people with whom to interact. I think that's a factor contributing to the fact that so few children from our communities go into the pure sciences.
The Chairman: So it all starts back at the home.
Mr. Mussel: I think it starts at the home.
The other thing is an attitude on the part of teachers. I've known students who have said that teachers see them and recognize them as native and say that they shouldn't be in maths and science because native students have a hard time.
I have a friend who is doing second-year math at a local college in B.C. He got the top mark in the class, and classmates had the nerve to accuse him of cheating because he got the best mark. Why? Because they believe that Indians don't have the brains to be good in mathematics.
Various other forces can be identified, but I really see that the base needs to be set at home. If it's not set there, then there needs to be some kind of remediation in the formal educational system to make up the difference. Again, it has to do with believing in the ability of the person to be able to do it.
I've seen some students be highly inspired and do really well until they hit grade 4. There seems to be a real difference with regard to what happens to them once they get into grade 4, after being in grade 3. I think a lot of it has to do with the preparation of teachers. Primary school teachers are trained differently from intermediate teachers. In B.C. grade 4 is the first year at the intermediate level.
I think that what happens in a sense is that they are no longer as supportive and understanding and caring, etc. They get to grade 4 and it becomes more of a business; you have to get your work done. They are being treated in a more adult, responsible manner. Some children get turned off at that stage, because it's such a transition, a radical change from that earlier year. I've seen that happen to a fair number of our students moving from grade 3 into grade 4.
Mr. Bonin: There was a study done in northern Ontario that supports exactly what you're saying.
Mr. Mussel: The shift and the effect on the learners is amazing.
The Chairman: Thank you very much, Mr. Mussel. It was very informative.
This meeting stands adjourned.