Chapter 12: Schooling on the Canadian Prairies: Aboriginal Peoples and the Quest for Social Justice Through Treaty Education

Canada has always presented itself as a nation built on values of fairness and tolerance (Mackey, 2002). Yet across the entire country Aboriginal peoples are severely marginalized. Statistics suggest that the situation in Saskatchewan, one of three Canadian prairie provinces with an enormous landmass and an abundance of natural resources, is perhaps more dire than in any other province. The evidence for this can be seen in the comparatively low secondary school graduation rates (Saskatchewan Ministry of Education, 2010), the extremely high incarceration rates (Gebhard, 2013), and the deep levels of poverty experienced by Saskatchewan’s Aboriginal peoples¹ (Douglas Gingrich, 2009; Hunter Douglas, 2006). Approximately 16% of the province’s one million inhabitants claim Aboriginal status as descendants of the Indigenous groups who occupied the area in precontact times (Waiser, 2005). Colonization and the racialization of the province’s Aboriginal population have been instrumental in keeping the majority living far below the poverty line. This chapter focuses on the promise of Treaty Education to help address the social injustice experienced by the province’s Aboriginal peoples.

The chapter begins with an overview of the challenges posed by colonization and the government’s reneging on its treaty promises both in the historical context and in present-day Saskatchewan. This discussion provides the context for the main purpose of this chapter, namely, to discuss recent developments around the most promising strategy to help Aboriginal students, and by corollary, Aboriginal peoples in Saskatchewan. This section focuses on Treaty Education, a government policy mandating schools to teach Treaty Education to each student every year from kindergarten to the twelfth grade. It describes a study we conducted at the University of Saskatchewan to use the admissions process into the Teacher Education Program as a way of gaining insight into the collective understanding of the treaties negotiated between the federal government and prairie First Nations in the 1870s. Particularly helpful in this endeavor is the taxonomy of racial discourses described by Frankenberg (1993): essentialist, color-blind, and race cognizance. This study comprises the chapter’s last section and examines the efficacy of 5 years of Saskatchewan’s Treaty Education initiative.