Free Indigenous classes could be coming to BU

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This article was published 26/06/2023 (833 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Brandon University’s administration is mulling over the idea of providing its Indigenous students with free classes that emphasize their cultural and linguistic heritage.

The topic was brought forward during BU’s most recent board of governors meeting over the weekend through a motion that provides this option to Indigenous students enrolled in the school’s faculty of education.

However, BU president David Docherty opted to table this motion for now, since he wants to investigate the viability of extending these free classes to Indigenous students at every faculty, not just education.

After all, the driving force behind this initiative is to provide Indigenous pupils with the opportunity to reconnect with their language and other cultural elements that were unfairly stripped away through the residential school system and centuries of colonization.

“Anyone who wants to take a language course in Cree should be encouraged to do so,” Docherty told the Sun following Saturday’s meeting. “If we can make that affordable and they can get a credit for it, that’s great.”

Board member Mary Jane McCallum, BU’s first Indigenous and woman chancellor, agreed that tabling the motion for now was the right course of action, since it only passed the university’s senate on June 13.

To McCallum, the board of governors hasn’t been given enough time to finalize such an important initiative, especially since variables like Indigenous identity fraud must be taken into account.

“I think that we need to approach this cautiously,” she said during Saturday’s meeting. “Sometimes people want to be the first ones to do something, even though they haven’t taken all the ramifications into consideration.”

This kind of initiative isn’t unprecedented in Canadian post-secondary education.

University of Waterloo administration recently announced that it will offer a full tuition waiver to all qualifying students from two nearby Indigenous communities starting in September.

Docherty told the Sun he isn’t ready to commit to a similar tuition waiver at BU, since the Indigenous student population at the school is around 14 per cent.

“The financial impact of having to do something like that would be huge,” Docherty said. “If we did something that big we would have to talk to the province and see if they would be willing to cooperate and help.”

However, the BU president said he is definitely on board with providing these free language and cultural classes, especially since it falls in line with the university’s recent move to require all students to take at least one Indigenous course starting this fall.

But for right now, Docherty said the topic will require more discussion before it is officially passed by the board in the form of a motion.

“It’s a great move by the education department. Kudos to them for being really proactive,” he said. “But we have to do something that impacts every Indigenous student in the university.”

BU CARES gets a new name

Brandon University officials have changed the name of a major research centre to be more inclusive to members of the Indigenous community.

While BU CARES has traditionally been known as the “Centre of Aboriginal and Rural Education Studies,” the university’s board of governors approved a motion Saturday to officially change the acronym to the “Centre for Applied Research and Education in Indigenous, Rural and Remote Settings.”

During Saturday’s meeting, Docherty explained that this change was made to follow similar renaming initiatives over the last couple years, where “Aboriginal” is being swapped out for “Indigenous” since the former term does not include Métis or Inuit people.

The federal government, for example, spearheaded a similar initiative in 2017 by renaming “National Aboriginal Day” to “National Indigenous Peoples Day.”

“So recognizing the changing nomenclature, the senate passed this motion at their June 13 meeting,” Docherty said minutes before the board of governors unanimously passed their own motion. “It does better reflect what they do and their mission.”

BU CARES was originally founded in 2008 to advance education-related research focusing on rural and Indigenous communities.

Using the university’s faculty of education as its base, BU CARES provided a space where students and educators can collaborate and develop their ideas, with the group’s website also serving as a resource where community members can access this research for free.

Some of the most recent research published on the BU CARES website includes studies that examine topics like inclusion in the classroom, eco-education and crafting public policy from a rural perspective.

Because of this hard work over the last 15 years, BU CARES director Michelle Lam said it was important to maintain the same acronym with this name change to signal that the centre’s overall mission statement will not change moving forward.

In fact, Lam believes that adding “Applied Research” to the CARES acronym is more reflective of how the group operates, since it emphasizes the centre’s community-based research and practical application of its findings.

“It is a little bit funny that, in one way, we’re changing what CARES stands for, literally, but in a deeper way, we wouldn’t dream of changing what we actually stand for,” she said in a June 23 news release.

Lam also mentioned that keeping the BU CARES acronym intact will allow the centre to maintain its use of current signage, logos and website address.

However, Docherty told the Sun following Saturday’s board meeting that BU officials will have to modify some signage on campus to accommodate this name change.

» kdarbyson@brandonsun.com

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