Encourage students

Page 10

Education is important to Margo Vermillion, the Aboriginal liaison at Keyano College in Fort McMurray. For the last five years she has worked at the college where she stresses its importance. She tells the Aboriginal student population at Keyano she is glad to have them attend the college, and if she is not in her office, then she is out visiting the First Nation communities in the area.

"I like giving the students a feeling that they are important, because I believe that they are important as people and they do need more people out there encouraging them. I also work with other people at the college who do a lot of work to make this a reality," she said.

During the third week in September, Vermillion will co-ordinate community orientation lunches in Janvier, Conklin, Fort McKay First Nation, and in the Fort McMurray First Nation at Gregoire Lake. She said that the orientation is for the whole community to get together and support the adult students.

"We would like to see the whole community promote the students and for the students to meet each other and have a chance to support and encourage one another. They really do need to have support from their husbands, boyfriends, their kids, and their extended families and from the whole community. These students actually go through a lot. They are not just coming to school and sitting there. I believe that the more encouragement that you give a person the better that person feels, because if you are not acknowledging them and not recognizing them then they sometimes feel 'Oh, what is the use of me doing this or that?' Encouragement just gives them a brighter light, so that they can walk on a right path because we do not want them walking in the dark anymore," she said.

Born and raised in Fort Chipewyan, Vermillion spent eight years in residential school.

"Being so confined in the residential school, I just did not have any freedom to breathe, so when I came out, I just ran. It was almost like the wind. I was here and there and all over. I was not the perfect angel. There was alcohol and I was in relationship after relationship, trying to find myself and trying to find me. I was really angry, trying to fight everybody. Sometimes, I did not know who I was angry with. I just knew I was angry," she said.

Vermillion felt like this until she took a 32-week life skill course in the early 80s.

"The program really switched my life around... I really learned about me, on who I was as an individual, who I really was. And I learned that if I do not look after me, no one else is going to. And I had to learn how to love myself. I had to learn how to love and how to show affection, because I did not know how to be nurturing in residential school. That is why I'm a really strong believer today that before any person can really move on and succeed they have to find themselves and they have to know who they are. They have to know their weaknesses and their strengths and they have to know how to forgive others and themselves," she said.