After writing about Ryerson the other day it occurred to me that I should take a look at what institutions have been committing to do with respect to the Truth and Reconciliation Calls to Action.

When Justice Murray Sinclair issued his 2015 report on Residential Schools and issued his calls to action, a few of these calls related to post-secondary education.  A couple were simply calls for federal funding, but four very specific ones were included with respect to post-secondary operations.  They are worth quoting in their entirety.

16. We call upon post-secondary institutions to create university and college degree and diploma programs in Aboriginal languages.

24.  We call upon medical and nursing schools in Canada to require all students to take a course dealing with Aboriginal health issues, including the history and legacy of residential schools, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Treaties and Aboriginal rights, and Indigenous teachings and practices. This will require skills-based training in intercultural competency, conflict resolution, human rights, and anti-racism.

28.  We call upon law schools in Canada to require all law students to take a course in Aboriginal people and the law, which includes the history and legacy of residential schools, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Treaties and Aboriginal rights, Indigenous law, and Aboriginal–Crown relations. This will require skills-based training in intercultural competency, conflict resolution, human rights, and antiracism.

86. We call upon Canadian journalism programs and media schools to require education for all students on the history of Aboriginal peoples, including the history and legacy of residential schools, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Treaties and Aboriginal rights, Indigenous law, and Aboriginal–Crown relations.

Got that?  TRC’s calls were not really about access or representation or naming and anything like that.  Those might all be good ideas, but they are not what Justice Sinclair was talking about.  His concern was a) language preservation and b) that people entering certain key professions in Canada understand residential schools, Aboriginal-Crown relations and to be versed in intercultural competency and anti-racism.  He wanted universities to educate anti-racists in three professions that are important to Canadian public life: law, medicine and journalism. 

(There are a couple of other Calls to Action which, read broadly, impose obligations on universities and colleges, notably calls 1 re: social workers, 62 re: teachers, 67-70 re: museums and archives and 87-90 re: sports.  But I will restrict myself here to the places where Justice Sinclair made specific requests of post-secondary institutions).

The question is: how is this all playing out?  Well, about two dozen or so universities adopted some kind of Indigenous Strategic Plan since 2015 (until about 2018 Indigenous Strategic Plans tended to be framed specifically as a “response to the TRC”; since then they tend to be framed as being “informed by”, but not, strictly speaking, a response to the TRC).  Other institutions have incorporated specific initiatives related to indigeneity in their larger strategic plan, and everyone else still has some part of its website devoted to highlighting Indigenous-focused initiatives.  But only two dozen or so have actual plans/reports to look at, so we’ll focus on those.

The first thing to notice here is that there is a ton of stuff going on related to indigeneity in the academy.  Almost every institution which has a plan – and indeed many who don’t – have engaged in various measures to improve representation of and service to Indigenous students and scholars.  Nearly all the strategies speak to issues of symbolism and governance and to the need to hire more Indigenous scholars, to prioritise Indigenous research, increase Indigenous content and viewpoints across the curriculum, and hire more staff devoted to advancing an indigeneity in the academy (usually referred to as an “Indigenous Lead”).  Other common themes include increasing student recruitment and transition programs, providing more specific Aboriginal space on campus, providing more space and compensation for elders, and fostering greater engagement with Indigenous communities. 

Some of these calls seems to be plagued by slow implementation, but there are lots of good messages and impulses here.  The problem is that the actual TRC Calls to Action are being ignored.

Let’s look at languages.  Very few institutions with a plan made an actual, specific commitment to increase the provision of Indigenous language courses; in fact, Laval seems to be the only one to have made a commitment to introduce a new, previously untaught language into the curriculum.  One or two others claimed they would make a commitment to do more research on Indigenous languages, which is maybe the most U-15 thing ever.  Now, I kind of get this one, because if you’re going to hold classes, you need people to sign up, and enrolment in Indigenous language classes is not always very high even where there are a lot of indigenous students.  I on a project at First Nations University (FNU) about a decade ago and I was kind of stunned how most of their classes (at the time, I think they offered programming in six languages) had single-digit enrolment, which meant they were losing money on pretty much every class.  And this was FNU!  But presumably one of the things reconciliation demands is at least occasionally losing money in a good cause.  So, I am not sure this is really an excuse (McGill was on to something when it said it would make investments not in Indigenous language provision on campus, where demand was uncertain, but rather to support programs of study which would help people revitalize languages in Indigenous communities themselves).

Let’s look at law schools.  Several law schools either already taught or have recently introduced new courses in Aboriginal approaches to law.  However, judging by the course descriptions, they are literally about law and approaches to justice.  All that stuff about learning the history of Residential Schools?  About human rights and anti-racism?  Well, it’s possible these courses cover those things, but it isn’t obvious from looking at the course descriptions and my guess is that they don’t.  And as far as I can tell, no law school has made such courses mandatory, which was in fact what the TRC recommended.   

At schools of medicine, it’s even worse.  The number of institutions claiming as part of their TRC report that they were going to create a mandatory class that met Sinclair’s call is, as near as I can tell from these documents, zero.  I mean, OK, one should allow for the possibility that universities are taking these steps outside of a strategic plan and not telling anyone, but come on.  Journalism is harder to evaluate because Sinclair did not call for a mandatory course, but rather “to require education” on a variety of topics.  But again, within these strategic plans, there is no mention of journalism schools.

So, why are the actual TRC recommendations being ignored and why, at the same time, is there so much stuff in these plans that is beyond what the TRC called for?  Well, it’s tempting to blame this on paternalist/colonialist administrators, but I think it’s more complicated that that.  I think it’s actually a weird combination of central administration impotence at the level of curriculum combined with the political objectives of universities’ Indigenous staff members.

The first half of that equation is pretty simple: over the course of putting together these plans – or really at any point in the last six years – universities could have put faculties on notice that they needed to comply with the TRC.  They chose not to, because no one wanted the implied hassle/fight of dealing with the politics of curriculum change, particularly with the professional faculties of law and medicine (the latter of which, at most institutions, barely recognizes the authority of the university to do anything other than issue paycheques).  UBC did – in 2020, five years after the TRC – include a statement in its Indigenous Strategic Plan that all faculties would be required to comply with TRC but there was no timeline attached to it and one gets the impression that oversight on this will be slow. 

Indigenous staff, interestingly enough, appear not to have pushed very hard on this front.  You can tell because nearly all the Indigenous strategic plans were written in the main by Indigenous staff.  And when you think about it, this isn’t all that surprising.  There aren’t *that* many Indigenous faculty in medicine, law, journalism, and not that many full-timers in languages either.  If you think about where the bulk of Indigenous staff are, it’s outside these subject areas, so their commitment to change in this area is lower than it is to changes which would more directly affect their own working conditions. Emphasized areas include governance, more research on topics relevant to Indigenous people, greater efforts to hire/retain Indigenous staff etc.  I suspect that many of these staff viewed the TRC less as a call to a limited set of specific actions and more as a general call to remake institutions in ways that are more inclusive and welcoming to Indigenous staff.  Hence these plans’ coverage of almost everything *except* the TRC Calls to Action.

Now, I am not saying here that the lack of actual TRC progress negates all the good and interesting work being done in universities concerning Indigenous peoples.  Much good will come out of all these initiatives, and in the main they are long overdue.  Reconciliation of a sort will emerge over the long term from these initiatives. 

But I’d really be interested in knowing what Justice Sinclair thought of this.