WHEREAS it is critically important that elders in the Northwest Territories share their knowledge and culture in our schools;
AND WHEREAS elders in most communities are willing to teach the young people in schools, or as part of school programs on the land;
AND WHEREAS the simple presence of supportive elders in school and the high degree of respect that they get adds to students’ sense of security and strengthens their ability to learn;
AND WHEREAS elders should be compensated for their work and time, like anyone else providing a valuable service to the GNWT;
AND WHEREAS the Government of Nunavut has organized the teaching role of elders in schools and made policies for their involvement, including compensation, in its “Innait Inuksiutilirijiit” program;
NOW THEREFORE I MOVE, seconded by the honourable Member for Weledeh, that this Legislative Assembly strongly recommends the Department of Education, Culture and Employment devise a certification program to certify elders to teach in NWT schools in time for the start of the new school year in the fall of 2011.
Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. A motion is on the floor. The motion is in order. To the motion.
Question.
Question has been called. The honourable Member for Sahtu, Mr. Yakeleya.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’ll be brief. I want to thank the Member for Weledeh for seconding the motion. I want to say a few comments here to this motion.
In this day and age and with the vast challenges that the youth have with the conflicting values that they are being taught at home and school and what they see on TV, and how the community is running these days, it’s critically important, it’s actually life and death that we start to enrol our elders into schools so that the youth can get valuable teaching and get some of the knowledge that the elders have and have held and want to pass on to the youth. I think the young right now are ready to learn. They’re willing to learn.
When I was up in the Sahtu I would witness some of the students who went out on the land and, man, you should have seen their eyes. They were happy, they were laughing, they were learning out on the land. They just came right to life. There were a lot of them.
The youth are asking and we need to listen to them. When they did a number of programs on the land and the elders were there, things were so good. The young ones are ready to learn. As legislators let’s help them. The elders are waiting to teach them. I think we need to put it together and get them into the schools. We need to get the elders there in time for the fall school year. Let’s put our minds to it and work hard so that all the barriers and things that could prevent them from being in the school, let’s deal with them. Let’s wash them away. I’m asking this government here to do that for the sake of our children’s lives, for the sake of our culture, for the sake of our languages. Let’s get our elders into our system. For too long they’ve been standing outside and being ignored and not being respected.
I ask, the young want these elders, the young need them right away. I’m asking for this motion, let’s create that environment that the elders can come in and out of our schools. Let’s create that environment to live, to know our beliefs and our cultures and our legends and know the value of our elders.
I say let’s do it with respect. Like professors that teach in universities and colleges, these elders are the university professors on the land. They know about life. If we don’t use them, we’re going to lose. Elders have always said that. Listen to us. If you take a part of the story that they tell you, you’re going to live a long life. Elders have said if you’re not going to listen, you’re not going to last too long. It’s very important what the elders say to us. It’s very important that we take what they have to teach us and use that in the future.
I want to say how happy and proud I was to read that Nunavut had this program already and that they were certifying their elders through a certification process. That takes leadership. I think our Minister here has that with the Cabinet to put elders into our school, to get the real professors into our school, the real teachers. So we could do that through our smarts, through the certification and certifying them.
So I want to say I look very forward to the day that we certify elders through a certification program and hopefully we can do it by this fall by getting them into our school and start off a new way to teach our young people.
I do want to thank my seconder Mr. Bromley for this motion here. I look forward to the support from the Assembly to deal with this motion today.
Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. To the motion. The honourable Member for Weledeh, Mr. Bromley.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I too would like to make some very brief comments here. I also would like to give a big nod to the Member for Sahtu for taking the initiative to bring this motion forward.
There is a really key role for elders to play in our schools. I think the Aboriginal achievement programs will recognize that very early on. You don’t have to look beyond the K’alemi Dene School right in Ndilo to see an example with Mrs. Fwasi, 70 years old this year, been in the school for a decade, and there’s a record of achievement there. K’alemi Dene graduated their first grade 12 students this year.
The simple presence of our elders in our community schools brings a security and a learning environment to the students that allows them to click in and start learning not just the languages and cultural benefits they get, which are added dimensions, but it allows them to develop the learning habits with the support of the elders that can lead to academic achievements as well. As the Tlicho have said, a foot in both worlds, the strength of two cultures.
Let’s get our elders in the school. I look forward to all our colleagues supporting this motion.
Thank you, Mr. Bromley. To the motion. The honourable Member for Tu Nedhe, Mr. Beaulieu.
Mahsi cho, Mr. Speaker. [Translation] Today I will be talking about education. [Translation ends]
Young citizens are learning how to speak the Chipewyan language, Denesuline, as I walk around the community now much more than it was in the past. Small kids are coming up to me and speaking the language and so on, and I think that putting the elders in the school will only enhance that and make it easy for the elders to communicate with the kids in the school in both Chipewyan and Denesuline and English.
Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. To the motion. The honourable Member for Nahendeh, Mr. Menicoche.
Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. I rise too in support of the motion for certifying elders in the school. We’re already using it there but it’s just the next level up certifying them and even providing them with some small remuneration. I believe that’s incentive enough. Just the positive experiences that the youth have when they interact with the elders bring a smile to everybody’s face.
Thank you, Mr. Menicoche. To the motion. The honourable Member for Yellowknife Centre, Mr. Hawkins.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I too rise in support of this motion. I’ve seen the fact that elders have a strong influence and a positive influence on our younger generation and I think at times people have gotten away from it and have missed out on great values that could be taught to them. Some of them are spiritual, but certainly emotional connections to family and practical connections that tend to get missed by people’s thirst for going forward with new technology and forgetting about the past. It’s the things about the past that link us as we go forward to the future to understand it. It’s those types of foundations that give us a good stability in our life, be it family values that are very important to me as well as I know many of the Members here and that type of connection I think is good for everyone. I support this motion and I think it’s a real valued contribution to our schools and certainly our younger generations that we’re trying to support who are following us.
Thank you, Mr. Hawkins. To the motion. The honourable Minister responsible for Education, Culture and Employment, Mr. Lafferty.
Mahsi, Mr. Speaker. [Translation] The knowledge of the elders is very important. [Translation ends]
[English translation not provided.]
Mr. Speaker, I would just like to thank the Member for putting this motion forward. As I stated in my language, it is because of the elders of the past and the elders of the present that I still speak my language. I would like to thank them for that. I am a firm believer in having elders in school as well. We do have elders in schools and we’ll continue to provide those services.
I think this motion basically provides us more strength to move forward on what we have done in the past and where we are now. As we move forward, we need to strengthen our stand as the GNWT as the Department of Education, along with the Members, along with the communities, the leadership, the educators in the communities, because it has to start from home, as well, at the community level. We’ve heard over and over at the Aboriginal Student Achievement Initiatives, regions that we visited, that elders should be in schools. They carry the tradition. They carry the stories. We’re firm believers in that and we want to carry that message forward. We need to revive the stories of the past, Mr. Speaker.
The Member alluded to the Government of Nunavut, the elders handbook to support their elders certification initiatives. This is an area that we are exploring and work is underway. Mr. Speaker, this is an initiative that’s before us in various aspects of the work that we do and it’s just giving us more to strengthen our role as a department.
Mr. Speaker, this motion is instruction to government, Cabinet, so we will be abstaining from the vote. Mahsi.
Thank you, Mr. Lafferty. To the motion. I’ll allow the mover of the motion closing comments. Mr. Yakeleya.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I do want to say that with this motion, hopefully we would legitimatize, I guess, the elders into our education system. We do have them in our schools, yet they’re still struggling in terms of compensating them. They still are nice to have but not really essential. This certification would make it just like a teacher or any other profession in our education system. They will be equal partners. Right now it’s just listen to the elder and if they’re there, they’re there; if not, we’ll do something else. It doesn’t put them on the same level playing field in our education system. This certification would do that. It’s like asking the elders to come to our meetings and say a prayer and then asking them to sit down because we’ve got business to discuss that would not include the elder.
What I’m saying, from our point of view from our small communities, the elders need to take their rightful place in our education system. They need to be in their rightful place in our community. We need to lift them up to a place where they once stood, with high esteem, in our community. Over the years we have put them through a rough system. We have done it ourselves. This motion is one step to move them to their rightful place in our society. They bring that knowledge of truth.
I read in an article in the Calgary Herald the other day that Imperial Oil was discovered by a geologist, Ted Link. I was reading that and that’s what’s printed. I said, oh, my God, do they not know the real truth about the Norman Wells oilfield and the Aboriginal people and the elders that knew about this oilfield for thousands of years? This is how history is portrayed. That’s what this motion will do, is bring the knowledge and the truth so kids who now are able to read, maybe one of them is going to read the newspaper and that’s what he or she is going to believe. The elders will set the road straight and say no, it is the Aboriginal people, the Northwest Territories and Denedeh that knew about the Norman Wells oilfield right down the whole valley. They knew a lot of things that is in their oral tradition. It’s not written. This is what this will do for them such as raising the young ones. The elders will set it right.
Hopefully this Minister, this government can say yes, we can. We will put the elders in through a certificate program, we will design one and have it ready for the fall of 2011, we would do that. That’s how much we owe it to our elders. And we would fix their compensation.
For the last seven years the Minister knows when he was on this side when we were fighting to have elders in. Now he’s on the other side still. So I’m asking the Minister and this government here to put the certificate program in place like Nunavut. Just do it like them. You can do it. We can do it. It’s a matter of all of us here together say yes, and it’s done.
