Inuit education a priority

Page 13

Only a bilingual education system that allows Inuit people to become proficient in both English and Inuktitut can make it possible for Canada to keep a commitment it made in 1993 in the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement.

So says federal mediator Thomas R. Berger in his report submitted March 1 to Indian Affairs Minister Jim Prentice. It's the final portion of the report that Berger was commissioned to write after studying ways to help Canada and the Nunavut Tunngavik Inc., the group that manages the land claim agreement, to break the impasse they had come to in trying to negotiate the renewal of the land claims agreement. The renewal should have come into effect in 2003 but fights over funding brought things to a halt. The interim report was submitted on Aug. 31, 2005.

After travelling throughout the north and conducting interviews in Nunavut and Ottawa, Berger found that one section of the agreement, Article 23, required a special treatment in a separate report.

Article 23 is a promise that Inuit people will have a representative share of Nunavut public service jobs. Nunavut's population is close to 30,000. Eighty-five per cent are Inuit. Under Article 23 the Inuit ought to have 85 per cent of the positions in the public service. But only 45 per cent of the employees of the government of Nunavut are Inuit.

"This figure was more or less achieved early on, as Inuit took up mainly lower level positions in government, and has not been improved upon for the simple reason that only a few Inuit are qualified for the executive, management and professional positions that make up the middle and upper echelons of the public service," Berger wrote. "The result is that, although most of the elected members of the Government of Nunavut are Inuit, the great majority of the higher level positions in the public service are held by non-Inuit; in fact, these latter constitute a large part of the 15 per cent of residents of Nunavut who are not Inuit.

Only 25 per cent of Inuit children graduate from high school, Berger found. That means few Inuit people go on to acquire the advanced skills required for senior bureaucratic positions.

Inuit is the first language for 75 per cent of Inuit people but the language of government in Nunavut is English.

"Article 23 therefore raises the question: What has to be done to qualify the Inuit for employment in all occupational groupings and grade levels in their own government?" Berger asked.

"There will have to be major changes in the education system in order to vastly increase the number of Inuit high school graduates; in my view a new approach is required, a comprehensive program of bilingual education."

He dismissed arguments by federal officials that it's not Canada's problem.

"Canada, represented by Indian Affairs, has in the past adopted the position that it has no further obligations under Article 23, that by conducting a labor market survey and developing plans for Inuit employment and pre-employment training, it has done all that it specifically agreed to do under Article 23," he wrote.

"It is true that Article 23 does not say anything about the schools, about education. It is quite apparent, however, that Article 23, which deals with employment, cannot be discussed intelligently without discussing education. The schools are supposed to equip students with the skills to obtain employment. But in Nunavut they have not produced an adequate pool of qualified Inuit. The schools are failing. They are not producing graduates truly competent in Inuktitut; moreover, the Inuit of Nunavut have the lowest rate of literacy in English in the country."

In the current education system, children are educated in Inuktitut up to Grade 4. Then the language of instruction switches to English.

"In Grade 4, they are starting over, and they find themselves behind. Their comprehension is imperfect; it slips and as it does they fall further behind. By the time they reach Grade 8,Grade 9 and Grade 10, they are failing (not all of them, to be sure, but most of them)," he wrote.

"This is damaging to their confidence, to their faith in themselves. For them, there has been not only an institutional rejection of their language and culture, but also a demonstration of their personal incapacity.

"In Nunavut this reinforces the colonial message of inferiority. The Inuit student mentally withdraws, then leaves altogether. The drop-out rate is linked to Nunavut's unhappy incidence of crime, drugs and family violence."

A study shows that Inuit lose about $72 million per year by not having full employment under Section 23. Berger also estimated that tens of millions of dollars could be saved each year if Inuit people filled the jobs because it would be cheaper to recruit them and they would stay longer. He argued that those numbers justify expending the money needed to address the problem.