Mohawk graduate has uniquely Native problem

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Working hard in school and getting good grades should be enough. But sometimes, if you're a Native person, it just isn't.

Kahnawake Mohawk Pam Stacey graduated from CEGEP (as community colleges in Quebec are called) with strong marks and high hopes for a career in nursing, but the Quebec government won't let her get to work.

The young mother of three children said the province is putting up a roadblock to her career because of a language issue. The vast majority of Mohawks in Quebec speak English, in part because they were allied with English forces against the French during colonial times. Tensions from those days still crop up from time to time as the Parti Quebecois fights for recognition of its sovereignty within the Canadian federal system and the Mohawks fight for recognition of their sovereignty within Quebec and Canada.

Stacey graduated in 1998 from Kahnawake Survival School, a high school on the reserve (located on the southwest edge of Montreal) that aims to ensure the survival of Mohawk culture, language and traditions as part of the education process. The school was established in 1976 as a direct response to Bill 101-Quebec's controversial language law enacted by the then newly elected Parti Quebecois. As French was being aggressively positioned as the official, dominant language in Quebec, English speakers frequently found themselves at odds with the new provincial government.

Kahnawake students were pulled out of provincial high schools and brought home to be educated in English, the working language of the community, and Mohawk, a language that is being aggressively re-invigorated in the community.

All of this, at first blush, seems to have very little to do with Stacey. She just wants to get on with her career. But now she's going to get an unexpected addition to her education, learning about the politics of jurisdiction, an age-old fight that all First Nation politicians wage on any number of fronts.

It was on the same day that Stacey discovered that she had made it through to the end of school and passed her exams to earn the right to become a nurse that she also discovered that she had run head-on into the jurisdictional wall.

"In order for me to get into the John Abbott college nursing program, I had to fulfill pre-requisites-high math, physical science, which is chemistry and physics. I prepared myself for this entrance into John Abbott at survival school. I took the pre-requisites required to get into the program and they accepted it."

As frequently happens, one provincial bureaucracy didn't know what another provincial bureaucracy was doing when it came to dealing with First Nations issues. The college reviewed her qualifications, decided she had the skills and knowledge to handle the nursing course and let her in, not thinking about what would happen when it came time to apply for a provincial license.

"I was accepted into John Abbott College. I went through the three years. At the beginning, the order of nurses, the OISU, had licensed me as a student in the program to go and work in the hospitals and it wasn't a problem," she said. "After I graduated John Abbott College, then I had to fulfill the requirements, prepare documentation, pay registration fees to the order of nurses to see if I'm allowed to write the provincial examination in nursing."

In September of 2002, the OISU granted her a seat to write the exam. "I wrote it and I passed it," she said.

Then another Quebec bureaucracy, the Office of the French Language, got involved. They told her she may have graduated from college but she couldn't be licensed as a nurse because her high school diploma wasn't recognized. She was told she must write a French language exam in order to get her license.

"Which I should be exempt from because in their exemption criteria from this exam [it states] if your mother tongue is French, if you were in a French immersion school or if you graduated after 1986 in Quebec from a high school you're exempt. So, technically, I should be exempt because I graduated from survival school in 1998," she argued.

But that exemption only applies to graduates of Quebec ministry of education operated schools. The Kahnawake Survival School, located on a federal reserve territory, isn't one of those schools.

"The problem is that we don't write provincial examinations there, which means I only found out after [her college education]."

Stacey believes she should be exempted from having to pass any further exams. She has been working as a student nurse at Montreal's Children's Hospital for almost a year and has had no trouble looking after the needs of all patients, English or French speaking. She has taken her situation to the media and become involved with several provincial agencies and her band council in seeking a solution.

Sources in Kahnawake say progress, although slow, is being made, but the politics of the situation are quite complicated. The biggest sticking point is that Stacey relies in the argument that she graduated from a Quebec high school after 1986 and should therefore be able to rely on the exemption policy. But Kahnawake politicians have long asserted that their territory is sovereign and not part of Quebec. It's a Catch-22 that Stacey believes should have been sorted out a long time ago.

"The reason why I'm doing all of this is because I'm looking out for the kids that are coming out of survival school," she said.

She believes the system should not have allowed her to drop through this crack. As one government branch after another has come to the end of its jurisdiction and pointed the finger at some other government branch, Stacey finds herself in limbo. The simplest solution would be for her to write the French exam, but she's not going to do that.

"I don't have doubts that I can pass," she said. "[But] I should be recognized like everybody else. I've known nurses who graduated in 1991 from a high school in Chateauguay, an English spoken,taught high school. There's another girl who graduated from Lachine high in the same year I did. She didn't have to write the French exam."