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native study

Kevin Chief, co-ordinator of the Innovative Learning Centre at the University of Winnipeg, talks with students there last week. Helping aboriginal people find their way to postsecondary education has become his life's work.John Woods

Kevin Chief's father was educated to Grade 5 before graduating to a trap line in northern Manitoba. As a young man, he couldn't vote and couldn't set foot in many hotels because he was aboriginal.

Mr. Chief, his youngest son, was born in 1974, and, though a middling student, he was something of a playground legend for his talent on the basketball court, which allowed him to win an athletic scholarship at the University of Winnipeg.

He went on to receive a BA and is now completing a Master's degree in education. He is also jointly responsible for creating an innovative program designed to attract inner-city aboriginal children to postsecondary education. In one generation, the son of a trapper has become the pied piper of higher education for aboriginal people.

The subject could not be more current. Roughly half of Canada's 1.2 million natives, Métis and Inuit now live in cities, and their hopes, values and experiences are the subject of the Urban Aboriginal Peoples Study, a major research survey released today by the Environics Institute. It found that, despite statistics that show significant gaps in aboriginal university and high-school graduation rates, the foremost life aspiration for urban aboriginal people is to pursue higher education.



They describe it as a route to empowerment and a way to learn more about their history and culture, topics they say are ignored in the elementary and high-school curricula. Which is where Mr. Chief comes in. Helping aboriginal people find their way to postsecondary education has become his life's work.

As the co-ordinator of the University of Winnipeg's Innovative Learning Centre, Mr. Chief is constantly thinking of ways to break down barriers. He says one of the main reasons aboriginal children don't go to university is that no one in the academy is making the effort to connect them with the university in a meaningful way.

He and University of Winnipeg president Lloyd Axworthy devised a program that brings inner-city children, primarily aboriginal, in Grades 4 to 6 to the university campus for a month of classes given by tenured faculty. Many of those same kids can enroll in a program that allows them to earn, through academic success and participating in extra-curricular activities, up to $4,000 toward their university tuition before they finish high school.

Mr. Chief said most people like the program because it removes an economic barrier to education. But he sees it as a way of instilling in students a sense of their own potential. It plants the idea that university is for them. It brings families together at a graduation ceremony sponsored by the university, where parents and grandparents can see the pride and excitement the children take in their studies.

"Two astrophysicists are teaching inner-city kids science. Now, if I was in Grade 6, that would have been a meaningful way of tapping me on the shoulder and saying, 'Postsecondary is for you'," he said.

Such a scenario would have been unthinkable to his father, Mr. Chief said. He died of organ failure related to alcoholism three months before he could see his son receive his high-school diploma.

"My dad would've never believed that I could have a university degree. Never in a million years. It was never part of his thought process, never part of his experience," Mr. Chief said. "I probably would have been the first person he knew, literally knew, who had been to university."



If there is one experience common to all aboriginal people, according to the study, it's the feeling that they are stereotyped negatively, discriminated against or treated unfairly. There is also the horrendous legacy of residential schools, which saw more 150,000 aboriginal children forcibly removed from their families and placed in schools whose aim was to "kill the Indian in the child." Two-thirds of the survey respondents say the residential schools affected them personally or affected someone in their family. Mr. Chief says he understands and appreciates the history of racism visited upon aboriginal people, but he doesn't want it to interfere with his focus on the future.

"I believe that my dad carried a set of burdens for me that he didn't want me to carry," Mr. Chief said. "I think we have to be careful with [aboriginal] young people that we don't give them the sense that they have to carry those same burdens. They have enough reasons already to not be successful… I'm not looking for reasons why I'm not doing well. I'm looking for ways I can do better."

Mr. Chief says in his own case, his life has been forever enriched by his exposure to higher education. He takes it for granted that his children will get a first-rate education because it's something he and his wife, a teacher, will emphasize.

"It's going to have a major impact for generations to come," he said. "That's the major factor in levelling the playing field and leading to success in mainstream society."

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