Educator marks three decades at Lakehead

Page 11

Dolores Wawia flunked Grade 11 twice because of poor marks in physics class, leading the Thunder Bay resident to give up on her academic dreams.

As a Native teenager growing up in the northwestern Ontario city during the 1950s and 1960s, she never had any Native role models to look up to. She never saw Native people with jobs in the city.

Wawia thought the hassle of school wouldn't be worth it if there was no work for people like her so, at the age of 17, she went back to her reserve located about 200 kilometres north of Thunder Bay at Gull Bay.

Over the next five years she would struggle with an abusive husband and manage three pregnancies, but none of that was enough to keep her dreams of having a career from resurfacing.

Now 61, Wawia has spent the past 30 years as an educator at Lakehead University. She is an assistant professor with tenure in the four-year bachelor of arts/bachelor of education degree program.

When asked if other Native people now look up to her as a role model, she said: "I'd be very arrogant if I said, yes."

Wawia's academic career has seen her achieve many firsts. She said she became the first Native student to graduate from Thunder Bay's Hammarskjold high school when she finished courses there in 1967. In 1972, she became the first Native woman from Northwestern Ontario to earn a bachelor of arts degree, and in 1975 she became the first Native woman to teach at Lakehead University.

In 1982, she became the first Native woman in the region to earn a master's degree, and in 1984, she started the first Native education course in northwestern Ontario. The course, offered at Lakehead, was designed to help non-Native people to understand how to meet the learning needs of Native children. From 1993 to 1996, she helped form McMaster University's Native studies program.

Despite all her accomplishments, Wawia maintains that, throughout her career, she's been focused on achieving her goals, not on making history.

"They didn't really mean anything to me," she said.

Her modesty and determination grew out of a life that began with illness and continued as an act of personal survival.

She suffered from tuberculosis between the age of 6 and 11. During that time, she was removed from her Gull Bay family to fight off her illness in a sanatorium in the south side of Thunder Bay.

She remembers having about as many visitors as fingers on one hand while in the facility, where she was required to lie flat on her back most of the time for about three years.

"It made me into a reader, because what else could you do when you are flat on your back," she said.

When Wawia turned 10, she had to be retrained to walk again, and was soon after sent to live in a Thunder Bay boarding school.

That relocation introduced Wawia to another kind of struggle for survival, dealing with nuns at the school who banned students from speaking in the Ojibway language. Wawia spoke it when the nuns weren't around and spoke English whenever they were present.

"I learned how to beat the system," she said.

Wawia later started Grade 9 at St. Patrick high school. Fear of the new teachers made Wawia study "like crazy," which paid off for her on her first report card. It ranked her in first place out of 45 students.

A year later, she discovered life in a new boarding home, where access to movies and television and increased personal freedom became a part of the picture. Her grades began to suffer in Grade 10, and in Grade 11, she started running into trouble in Physics class. Failing it once caused Wawia to repeat the grade the following year at another school, where she failed it again.

That's when she left school altogether and went off to get married in Gull Bay.

When her husband became abusive, Wawia tried getting away by becoming more independent, taking any job she could, sometimes even planting trees on the outskirts of her reserve to help feed her two babies. When she was 21, se began to substitute teach at a school in her community.

A Native teacher who came from Manitoba to teach at the school was the first educated Native person Wawia ever saw.

She soon left her husband to escape his abuse and wound up going back to high school in Thunder Bay to achieve her dream of becoming a teacher.

Her husband came back and tried to make up with her.

"Stupid me, I took him in," Wawia said.

The relationship resulted in Dolores Wawia having a third child while she was trying to complete high school.

Her husband left to take a job out of town not knowing she was pregnant. Wawia's two boys and baby girl stayed in a foster home and she wound up working as a nanny to keep her room and board, all while attending school.

None of it was enough to keep her from graduating and getting into a one-year teaching college program and then going on to teach grade school in Peterborough and nearby Hastings.

After three years of teaching, she went on to earn a bachelor of arts degree from McMaster University in Hamilton.

A stint of teaching in Gull Bay followed, which led to her being hired to teach in Lakehead University's first Native teaching program when it started in 1975.

The rest is history.

In addition to her numerous other academic firsts, Wawia also became the first Native person to start storytelling in local Thunder Bay schools, in an effort to spread Native culture to children.

She also launched the storytelling circle, Storytimz, at a Thunder Bay public library during First Nations Public Library Week in February. It is a monthly gathering at the Waverley Resource Library for anyone from any cultural background to share a story.

"It can be as big as it wants to be, as long as people are coming," Wawia said.

Wawia was given the name Muk-Kee-Queh, which means "frog lady." Some of her stories are about the symbolism of the frog as it relates to the Earth's well being.

She believes that whatever happens to th Earth, happens to the frog. The frog is mutating, which signals that the world is in trouble, she said.

Wawia is also writing an autobiography, From Tipi to Penthouse, which symbolizes her childhood dream of living in a penthouse and focuses on what it's like living two different cultures.

"I had to learn about being on time," Wawia said, giving an example of the differences between the two worlds. "Time is meaningless in reserves."