Meridian Newsletter: Fall/Winter 2011-Spring/Summer 2012 - Book Review

Book Review

Joanne Tompkins

Inuit Education and Schools in the Eastern Arctic

by Heather McGregor.  UBC Press, 2010. 240 pp., $85.00 hardcover, $32.95 paperback. ISBN 9780774817455.

In Nunavut schools dropout rates among Inuit are high and graduation is low—about 25 to 30 percent of Inuit students graduate from high school. To shed light on how this came to be, Heather McGregor has written a book that looks at the way Inuit education and schooling have developed, and examines their foundations. McGregor writes from the perspective of close familiarity with the topic: she is a Euro-Canadian Northerner who calls Iqaluit home and whose parents are long-serving Northern educators.

Inuit Education and Schools in the Eastern Arctic represents an important contribution to the field of Inuit education. Through an analysis of the historical context of education and schooling in the Eastern Arctic the book sheds light on the challenges Inuit faced as they moved from informal camp-based education through formal schooling. Beginning when Inuit lived on the land in small camps and ran their own affairs, the book then discusses the colonial period (1945- 1970), the Territorial period (1971-1981), and the local period (1982-1999), and concludes at the creation of Nunavut in 1999. The role of tradition and the recurrent themes of cultural negotiation and policymaking are central throughout.

The author separates "education" and "schools" in her title, and this is a key notion in the book. In this context education is the process by which one generation prepares the next to take part in society, equipped with the ways of knowing, doing, and being that perpetuate culture. Schools, by contrast, are Western, Southern constructs intended to prepare children to take their places as citizens. Education may take place, as it once did for Inuit, entirely on the land and in the camps or, sometimes, it may take place in schools; but some of these, like the residential schools many Aboriginal children attended, were hardly educative places. The challenge for Inuit, whose world was disrupted by the move from camps to permanent settlements, has been to enact "education as Inuit did [traditionally] within the confines of formal schooling" (p. 117).

The first chapter acquaints the reader with the geographic, cultural, social and political landscape and, importantly, situates the Inuit experience of education and schooling alongside that of other Aboriginal Canadians. The interconnection of education and culture is raised here. Western, Southern models of education and schooling tend to focus on the importance of the individual; Inuit education emphasizes community and the environment.

The book then moves on to examine education in the traditional period, when Inuit lived in small camps on the land. Inuit ways of knowing, being and doing were the foundations of the Inuit education that prepared the next generation to live well in their environment with each other. Inuit education centered on environmental knowledge, experiential learning with a focus on demonstration, observation and practice, and informal and learner centered education with the learner often having a close personal and kinship relationship with the person teaching. The "curriculum" focused largely on knowledge and skills related to the environment. The quotations from Inuit elders and philosophers peppered through this chapter attest to the fully coherent view of education that existed and was practiced in this period:

The Inuit language and culture is designed to help the society to survive in a harsh environment, by putting a lot of emphasis on practical lessons. When teaching a child to think and develop their skill and knowledge base, we should do so with a lot of love, kindness, understanding and patience being continuously present. Recognizing a child's character will help determine the types and methods of teaching that will work best for the child, as each person has a different way of processing how they generate thought or process ideas. - Joe Karetak (p. 37)

The third chapter discusses the period of accelerating change following the Second World War that saw Inuit leadership displaced by Southern administration, with corresponding loss of control of their land, communities, and even of raising their children. Parents were largely excluded from the formal education process by distance (in the case of residential school), by language (inability of the school to accommodate Inuktitut-speaking parents) or by practice (lack of formal mechanisms to include parents in decision-making). It is debatable how much education happened in this period but there clearly was a lot of schooling. Generally the goals of education were imposed upon Inuit by the government and were assimilationist, as it was believed that for Inuit to succeed they had to become employable in the white man's economy. Whether this goal was accurate given the changing hunting and trapping economy is debatable; but more to the point is that Inuit were not part of any discussion about either the goals or the kind of schooling that was developed for their children. The chapter explores the residential school experience, in which children were most disconnected from their families and culture, and moves forward to examine the federal schools that were established in many communities (Arctic day schools). What stands out in this chapter is the sharp contrast between schooling and the Inuit education of the traditional period. Experiential education was replaced by largely didactic transmission of knowledge; informal teacher-learner relationships with kin were replaced by relationships with Euro-Canadian teachers; and Inuit social, cultural, and land skills were replaced by knowledge reflecting the society, culture, and skills of the South.

The fourth chapter discusses the period when responsibility for education moved from the federal government in Ottawa to the territorial government in Yellowknife. This coincided with the beginning of Inuit political mobilization. A territorial survey of education provided some acknowledgement of the need for more attention to local culture in Northwest Territories classrooms, inspired by the multiculturalism then being promoted by the Trudeau government. Missing from the survey were the opinions of parents and elders. New policies brought Inuit classroom assistants and teachers into the schools. This period saw a great deal of "good intentions" by the Territorial government to move towards less assimilationist schooling, and there were some attempts to provide direction for more culturally responsive curriculum. Generally however, the goals of education were unclear, teacher support in was communities inadequate, and no mechanism existed for Inuit parents to influence decisions made by Euro-Canadian administrators that affected their children's schooling. At times, Yellowknife appeared little closer than Ottawa had been.

Chapter 5 discusses the serious attempts at rebalancing Inuit education so that those most affected by schooling—Inuit parents and communities—would have some say in the goals of education and how it was carried out. Territorial hearings on education, held in communities, gave voice to Inuit and Dene concerns. The report, Learning, Tradition and Change (1982) recommended "local involvement in, and responsibility for education as the basis for the future school system" (p. 119). New divisional boards of education created a political dimension of school governance which gave decision-making authority to parents and other community members. McGregor provides an analysis of the Baffin Divisional Board of Education, which was the first divisional board established, modelled after northern Quebec's Kativik Board of Education.

The Baffin Divisional Board centered schooling on Inuit culture. Learning, Tradition and Change also recommended improved teacher training and production of materials to support bilingual education and curriculum development. The Baffin Divisional Board employed elders in schools, produced several hundred children's books in Inuktitut, expanded community-based teacher education programs, and established kindergarten to grade 12 education in all communities. After extensive community consultation it produced a curriculum framework document, Piniaqtavut ("where we are going"), and a curriculum project Inuuqatigiit ("people to people"), which represented a holistic approach to Inuit knowing, being and doing, and reflected a methodology more closely tied to the Inuit way of education. It was more experientially based, student-centered, and dependent on close relationships between teacher and student. In spite of these advances and improving graduation rates, the high school completion rate for Inuit students remained well below national norms. Providing resources to support bilingual education remained a challenge.

The final chapter deals with the integration of Inuit education and schools in the Nunavut period (1999 and beyond). The author quotes the northern education specialist Ann Vick-Westgate, who states that "one of the greatest challenges facing communities, educators and researchers in the Arctic is that of developing genuinely Inuit, Dene and other approaches to education, not just sprinkling cultural materials into approaches designed for southern systems. Native and other Northern educators, most of them trained in southern systems, will have to think outside the boundaries of those systems" (p 165). There is huge irony in the fact that just as Inuit were gaining more control of schooling through the divisional boards, which arguably helped keep priorities focused on Inuit education, the newly established Nunavut government dissolved them. The reason given was that because Nunavut is a public government divisional boards were redundant. McGregor's book does not venture into the Nunavut years but she finishes her last chapter by concluding that parental and community involvement in governance is necessary if education is to reflect Inuit aspirations. "Until parents, community members, and local educational leaders, with access to an appropriate framework of support and resources to implement local decisions and goals, are meaningfully engaged and in control of education, the Inuit of the Eastern Arctic will be hindered in their efforts to deliver education that manifests an Inuit vision of the past and future" (p. 169).

McGregor's work has many strengths. She does a thorough job of describing the context in which Inuit education was set during each period, providing a sense of both the micro and macro politics of each period without drowning the reader in historical detail. She writes with freshness and injects passion into her writing so that it does not feel like a purely academic text, and will appeal both to lay people and educators. Direct quotes from Inuit elders and educators help bring authenticity and veracity to her work. Though not an educator herself, McGregor has created a work that has a great deal of educational insight. Having spent 15 years as a northern educator during the Local period, I recognized that the book captures much of the challenge and excitement that I lived through during that time.

I have only two regrets after reading the book. I would have loved to have seen more photos, as the ones included enhanced the book. Photographs, particularly of the earlier periods, help the reader unfamiliar with Nunavut to gain a deeper sense of the geographic and cultural differences of a region so dramatically different to other parts of Canada. Secondly—though it was clearly outside the scope of her work—I was disappointed that the text ended with the creation of Nunavut and did not explore more fully the judgments made that led to dissolving the divisional boards. Additionally I would have liked more about the decision by the negotiators for Nunavut not to place education as a priority item in the first round of negotiations—which set Nunavut apart from other First Nations and Inuit groups. I would have been interested in information that would help in understanding these puzzling decisions and their impacts.

In summary, Inuit Education and Schools in the Eastern Arctic is an important read for anyone wanting to understand the Inuit experience of education and schooling in Nunavut, past and present, and the book will resonate with those working in Aboriginal, Metis or Inuit education. McGregor's work provides important historical evidence to demonstrate that when Inuit have access to political power and decision-making, they can make their voices and aspirations integral to education development—and begin building an education system that meets their needs.

Joanne Tompkins is an associate professor in the Faculty of Education at St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, Nova Scotia. She was a teacher, principal, board consultant, and teacher educator in Nunavut's Qikiqtani region from 1982 to 1996.

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