PART 1: History cannot be changed
Canada was built on colonial power and the abuse of Indigenous people. The past can’t be changed. But Camosun College can, and the changes on campus aren’t restricted to Camosun’s aesthetics. Installments like Na’tsa’maht at Lansdowne or the Cultural Centre in Interurban’s new Alex & Jo Campbell Centre for Health and Wellness are not tokenism or just to say that the college is catching up to the times. These installments are meant to build relationships.
Nearly 25 years since the last residential school closed down, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) has continued to bring awareness to Canada’s past and to make an effort to build a relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students. The personal and cultural trauma of residential schools is all too real for Indigenous people but has only recently been brought to light for non-Indigenous people. According to the TRC, the purpose of residential schools was to sever the parental involvement in the spiritual, cultural, and intellectual development of Aboriginal children. This traumatic process was abusive and incredibly harmful to generations of Indigenous people.
Since our 2017 article on Camosun’s reconciliation efforts, the college has made significant changes. However, the matter is not solely dependent on the college’s Indigenous students and faculty. If we are to build relations, non-Indigenous students and faculty need to live up to the duty of entering a reconciling world.
PART 2: What has changed at Camosun
Camosun has embraced an Indigenous landscape, and the physical changes are certainly there. Lansdowne especially has focal points that signify Indigenous cultures on campus. Of course, Na’tsa’maht is the biggest landmark, but there are also the elder parking stalls and stairs for visiting elders to use. Ecology classes have worked on switching out decorative plants for indigenous plants to reclaim their native soil.
Eyēʔ Sqȃ’lewen director Janice Simcoe says that the implementations, especially on the Lansdowne campus, have not gone unnoticed. She says that these Indigenous structures and gardens were not developed by, or even prompted by, Indigenous staff or students.
“Through Camosun’s response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission calls to action, the focus has been how does that happen for Indigenous students at Camosun College? It happens because systemic changes happen, and cultural changes within the organization happen,” says Simcoe. “An awful lot of work has taken place over time, and we’ve seen that on the grounds. It used to be weird to have an indigenous plant garden; now it’s a source of pride. There’s a bench down on the lawn of the Young building; that is an elders’ bench. There’s stairs that go down there. Those stairs were built for when we do pit cooks, so elders could get down onto the field there without falling… and Eyēʔ Sqȃ’lewen didn’t build that, the college did. They thought it up; it’s made of indigenous rock, and made by a local company. The bench was made by Indigenous students and given to the elders that were there the day it was opened up.”
Simcoe says that introducing native plants embraces Indigenous culture on campus and strengthens the bond between Indigenous students and the college.
“There’s this physical presence with the plant life,” she says. “That experiment that Environmental Tech is doing, it’s an experiment about indigenous plants, and about invasive species. We had nothing to do with that, but it was one of the things that came out of this thing called the Innovation Fund.”
Interurban has a way to go in terms of representing Camosun’s Indigenous cultures through appearance, but with more changes the campus can express its solidarity with indigenous students. As Camosun School of Access dean Ian Humphries says, it’s of great importance to have centres for Indigenous students to feel a sense of community.
“For example, we have a new Cultural Centre in the health building at Interurban. What we’re talking about here is, specifically, space for Indigenous advisors and a place where students can drop in and have some food and check in,” says Humphries. “That is part of the master planning process, so it’s mixed in with a whole bunch of other stuff, but we hope to be able to specify where exactly we’re going to locate that service area shortly. So plans are underway to address it, we just haven’t been able to get to it.”
Humphries says that there is already a space for Indigenous students at Interurban, but the goal is to expand.
“There is space in the the Centre for Business and Access, on the first floor, at Interurban,” he says. “There is space there for Indigenous advisors where students can drop in. We just want more space, and better space.”
Humphries says that Camosun actively reaches Indigenous people who cannot access the college’s campuses.
“We have partnerships with the W̱SÁNEĆ school board in Brentwood Bay, Victoria Native Friendship Centre, Songhees Wellness Centre,” says Humphries. “Students can take courses at those locations, and they are Camosun courses delivered by Camosun staff and faculty. And then they can transition to the campus. We also do, in some smaller communities… right now we are working with the Pacheedaht Nation, in Port Renfrew, in delivering programming there. Depending on what our funding availability is, we rotate funding through smaller communities and do programming beyond those big three I mentioned—W̱SÁNEĆ, Victoria Native Friendship Centre, and Songhees.”
However, embracing Indigenous cultures and communities isn’t just seen in permanent structures. Camosun TELŦIN TŦE WILNEW facilitator and Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning education developer Dawn Smith says that events and curriculum changes are an integral part of the community.
“One of the things that Eyēʔ Sqȃ’lewen does is a welcome feast every year, and they ask for people to volunteer their time to go there and help cook,” says Smith. “I’ve seen Ian Humphries in the kitchen with his sleeves rolled up, and they’re there into the wee hours of the night helping clean up. To me that’s the real demonstration of relation. When [Esquimalt First Nation chief] Andy Thomas died… I saw these people that I know in this college that I can depend on for support.”
Resources for Indigenous students are readily available on campus; however, as Simcoe explains, this goes beyond providing resources.
“Fifteen, 20 years ago, this was the experience all the time of being absolute strangers and aliens within the post-secondary system,” says Simcoe. “Experiencing this on top of personal and family-related traumas, traumas like colonialism and racism, it’s important to change Indigenous students’ experience, because why would you ask any population to experience all of that just to get the education that was freely available for everybody else? If we’re going to talk about reconciliation we first have to talk about Indigenous people’s experience.”
Now, beyond meeting the minimum requirement of available communal spaces or providing resources to help students, Camosun has support that students can depend on to fulfill their educational needs.
Third-year University Transfer student Morgan Armstrong says that the resources were greatly needed for his education.
“I wouldn’t be here if not for the resources provided,” says Armstrong. “I’d say that it’s definitely helped.”
While the changes on campus have helped Indigenous students, they have also helped build a relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students. This is one of the most crucial steps in the reconciliation process. Classes like Introduction to Indigenous Peoples and Indigenous Peoples’ Health have grown in popularity for non-Indigenous students. Tearing down ignorance has helped deepen the understanding between everyone. Smith says that Camosun has made great progress in the past 15 years, and that that is especially apparent in the classes students take.
“At the college here, we do a better job than other institutions—speaking from experience, and having been at the University of Victoria for 15 years—in terms of TELŦIN TŦE WILNEW and [Camosun course] Understanding Indigenous Peoples and how that’s offered to faculty 10 months out of the year,” says Smith. “It’s essentially volunteered and it’s word of mouth. People take it and recommend others to take it. For students we have IST 120 [Introduction to Indigenous Peoples] and now that’s exceeded its capacity. So many people are interested, and that’s the younger generation, of course.”
Relations have extended overseas, as well—Indigenous students have been given the opportunity to participate in Camosun field schools, specifically one to build relationships with the Maori people in New Zealand.
“We’re looking at new programming in relational, cultural leadership. We want to do a good job of identifying pathways and connections between Indigenous and non-Indigenous programs,” says Humphries. “A lot of work happened over this last summer looking at domestic and international field schools for Indigenous students—for example, with Maori students and institutions, and supporting students to learn more about international approaches to Indigenization.”
Equal opportunity is, of course, much needed, but so is fair access for Indigenous students who really need an opportunity to begin with.
“Those services include access to Indigenous advisors, and there’s a financial and educational support piece tied to that,” says Humphries. “There’s access to elders for cultural support. There’s access to Indigenous counsellors—that’s a relatively new position at the college. We hope we can improve on this, but we’ve got a welcoming space at Lansdowne, and we’re working on trying to do something similar at Interurban… I think there’s a number of great programs and courses for Indigenous students and non-Indigenous students. There’s a huge number, through some very generous donors, of awards and bursaries available for Indigenous students.”
PART 3: How the future can be changed
The question is no longer what our future will look like, because we’re already in the transition toward joining Indigenous students with non-Indigenous students in a gracious celebration of Aboriginal culture. The question is how we do it.
In terms of the classroom, Smith says that while there are a lot of students in IST 120, there are fewer in TELŦIN TŦE WILNEW, a course meant for staff to expand their knowledge on Indigenous worldviews.
“[IST 120] has much more of a pull than TELŦIN TŦE WILNEW,” says Smith. “We’ve been running that for 10 years—this is my own understanding of TTW—we have 900 or 1,000 staff and faculty and just over 300 people have taken it in 10 years. We still have a significant amount of work to do, but you have to meet people where they’re at.”
While Humphries says that there is an impressive number of staff members taking TELŦIN TŦE WILNEW, he adds that there is more need for IST 120 and Health 111 [Indigenous Peoples’ Health] to be accessible for students taking different programs.
“I’m very keenly focused on trying to make, especially, non-Indigenous students aware of courses like IST 120 and Health 111 that they can take as electives,” says Humphries. “One of the challenges with the electives is it depends on what program you’re in. An associate degree is quite different than a certificate, or our BBAs. They all have different requirements around electives. [I want to] educate folks on what different electives students can take in various programs. So IST courses, for example, are not just for Indigenous Studies students.”
Indigenization should not be restricted to Indigenous courses, however. While classical forms and techniques from Western culture have been integral to post-secondary education, Indigenous education should be equal in importance in all forms of the classroom. While this is easily accessible in IST classes or in courses that observe a multitude of cultures, how can we remind each other that we are on Indigenous land? Information and knowledge willingly shared from culture to culture isn’t necessarily restricted.
“In July, we had a number of students go to the Ara Institute of Canterbury,” says Humphries. “As part of that trip, the [Camosun] program leader for Indigenous Studies, Todd Ormiston, made a stop at the University of Hawaii—this is the Oahu campus—and [was] engaging the Ara Institute and the University of Hawaii for some new programming at the college.”
Humphries adds that sharing knowledge and researching on campus is another aspect of building a more trusting bond between Indigenous cultures and education systems.
“[With] policy development, we’re coming up with an Indigenization policy at the college. We’re looking at an Indigenous research centre—what that would look like, and synergies between that and applied research,” he says. “Finally, [we’re] working with other island corridor institutions, so UVic, Royal Roads, VIU, and North Island [University], to implement, maintain, and continue our TRC recommendations.”
Simcoe also pushes for the importance of Indigenous cultures in post-secondary schools and in all classrooms.
“The glory of Canada was held up without good discussion about how that happened—no knowledge of ecology, knowledge in sciences, psychology, business,” says Simcoe. “Knowledge that Indigenous people have been carrying for millennia was completely ignored. That knowledge emerged from Europe, and had some connection with Greece and Egypt, but never on this land with our people.”
The way we can reach this ideal future, one where there is a great bond among all Camosun students and staff, is through embracing the culture that we have. Simcoe understands that problems lie within greater powers, and she says that the reconciliation process is far from over.
“The only way for Indigenous people’s experience to change is for those who have power and control of systems to change,” says Simcoe. “Because the systems have to change; they’re not just going to happen and it’s not just Indigenous people’s responsibility entirely, and it’s not within their power to make these changes. All of us, from the executive right to the people who take care of the facilities, everybody’s got some responsibility in how they impact Indigenous students. It’s been three years since Camosun started working on its formal Indigenization and reconciliation project. There’s been a lot of willingness; so far there hasn’t been a lot of resistance from Camosun employees. If there’s anything that unites all of the groups, it’s that we’re here because of the students.”
While Smith agrees that problems lie in the greater system, she says that changing students’ mindset is something that can be done within the next few years.
“We’re faced with racism and discrimination that continues today,” says Smith. “That’s something Canadians haven’t really been willing to admit. Reconciliation is really hard to imagine when we still live under the Indian Act and racist policies and the way we’re seen in Canadian society, as well.”
Smith says that there is a divide within non-Indigenous students in terms of reconciliation.
“There’s 30 percent that are for Indigenization and reconciliation, then there’s 30 that are on the border—they’re kind of interested, really haven’t done anything—and then there’s this 40 percent who really just don’t want anything to do with it,” says Smith. “That’s how we see it unfolding, so for me, it would be getting that 30 percent off the fence, building up the other 30, and shifting that 40 to the [middle ground]. How do I bring people together? Because people like that need to feel safe when they come into a room where I am here because they think I’m gonna hit them with all of this colonial guilt… I think when we do, we’re going to see Indigenous student populations say they feel safe in all spaces, not just certain places.”