Should the Peel District School Board be running a “Centre for Indigenous Excellence and Land-Based Learning”?

Maanwngiding Wiingushkeng Centre opened two years ago

The Maanwngiding Wiingushkeng Centre for Indigenous Excellence and Land-Based Learning. Image from PDSB

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By Igor Stravinsky (Teacher, commentator)

In 2022, the shuttered Creditview Public School in Caledon Ontario was re-opened as the Maanwngiding Wiingushkeng Centre for Indigenous Excellence and Land-Based Learning. According to the PDSB website, the centre’s mandate is to be

• the worksite for The Indigenous Education Team;

• a place to provide curricular learning grounded in anti-colonial practices and Indigenous ways of knowing in classroom settings for Indigenous and non-Indigenous students;

• an affinity space where Indigenous students can access cultural education;

• used as field centre for schools to access to receive experiential learning opportunities;

• a space for capacity building and professional development for staff toward Reconciliation; &

• a place to build partnerships and network with community and treaty partners.

Less than 1% of Peel Region’s inhabitants are Indigenous, but you could argue that this site is needed to facilitate reconciliation. Still, operating this site costs millions of dollars per year. Is this a wise expenditure when there are so many student needs in the system? Running a public service is always a matter of trade-offs. 

Now that the centre has been operating for two years, we need a public discussion as to what, exactly, is going on there, and whether the taxpayers are getting value for their money. The above list of bullets is not encouraging.

The Indigenous Education Team could work at the Central Board Office or one of the board satellite offices. That is, assuming you actually need an Indigenous Education Team. You would think that Indigenous education would be included in course curriculum and would be covered by teachers in the classroom with support from Board resource teachers. 

If it were a good idea for learning to be grounded in “anti-colonial practices”, then such learning should be the norm in all classrooms. But most Canadians would likely not be comfortable with that. It is one thing to educate kids about the pros and cons of colonialism but quite another to base learning on the presumption that we should be “decolonizing” everything. Democracy and human rights are colonial concepts. Do we want to go back to heredity-based systems of government and slavery, both of which were the norm in pre-contact Indigenous societies? As for “Indigenous ways of knowing”, they were pre-scientific: Indigenous people, like pre-scientific people everywhere, made observations and based their actions on what they observed. This is simply inferior to science in which observations lead to the formation of hypotheses which is rigorously tested. This explains why Indigenous people were still using stone-age technology while Europeans were developing modern materials and methods.  

“Affinity spaces” are all the rage these days in schools, colleges, and universities. These are spaces where only people of a particular race or identity are allowed, or where specific races or identities are excluded. The University of Guelph has a student lounge which white people are not allowed to enter. Do these spaces promote the idea that our future as Canadians rests on us pulling together and embracing our common humanity, or do they divide us into tribes who mistrust one another and compete for resources? 

According to a report in the Caledon Citizen, the Indigenous centre facilitated an activity in which Indigenous kids built a canoe, under the guidance of an Indigenous elder, using traditional materials and techniques. This seems like an interesting activity and a good way to learn about how Indigenous people lived in the past, but given the fact that Indigenous students typically struggle in school, you do wonder whether all the money being spent on the centre might be better spent on building literacy and numeracy skills among struggling students. This would disproportionately help Indigenous kids. After all, we do not have any programs where non-Indigenous kids learn how to make buggy whips, although I think that too might be very interesting. The horse and buggy were central to transportation among Europeans for centuries.  

Is it not colonialist thinking to suppose that Indigenous students would be more interested in learning obsolete methods to produce a low quality product than they would be to learn about modern, cutting-edge technologies?  Today’s canoes, made of high-tech materials such as Kevlar, are far superior to anything Indigenous people ever made, in the same way that modern farm equipment is lightyears ahead of the crude implements European settlers once struggled with. There is a good reason why 90% of Canadians once worked in agriculture, whereas today that number stands at about 2%.

Experiential learning (learning by doing) takes place in every school, every day. Do you really need to spend millions on a separate site to encourage it? Likewise, with a palatial central board office and hundreds of Board-owned buildings, do you actually need a separate space for “capacity building and professional development for staff toward Reconciliation”?

The fact is it is far from clear what true reconciliation should look like. What staff are being told is that Indigenous people always were, and still are, victims of white supremacy and colonialism; that these forces explain all the socio-economic ills from which so many Indigenous people suffer today. 

But reconciliation is defined as “the restoration of friendly relations.” While many political leaders and public service managers are happy to grovel at the feet of Indigenous activists and plead guilty to any accusations made by them (right up to genocide) in an effort to purge themselves of their original sin of being “settlers”, most Canadians do not see it that way at all. What most Canadians are saying to Indigenous people is “you are suffering- how can we help you to help yourselves? We want you to get a good education and adapt to 21st century reality; to engage in the modern economic system so that you can enjoy all the benefits of living in the best country in the world during the most prosperous era humanity has ever seen”. 

What most Canadians don’t want is to continue to pay out more and more of our tax base (now over 7% of our GDP- more than national defence) on handouts to people who insist on living at the end of a dirt road in the middle of nowhere, living an archaic lifestyle utterly dependent on the rest of us for their meagre existence. 

Reconciliation can only come when we all agree on a common way forward in which each of us can be proud of our heritage while living independently in modern reality. 

The Peel District School Board’s “Centre for Indigenous Excellence and Land-Based Learning” is only digging us deeper into the hole of Indigenous exceptionalism, victimhood, and dependency. And, as always, it is your tax dollars doing the digging. 

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Thanks for reading. For more from Igor Stravinsky, read Doug Ford Feigns Outrage over Students being Recruited as Activists

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