A little over a year ago, Ontario brought in legislation to create the country’s first system of Indigenous universities.  In the upcoming federal budget, it seems possible that the Government of Canada may look at ways to finance Indigenous post-secondary education as well.  The question I want to look at today is what model or models of Indigenous higher education Canada might want to borrow from when developing its own system(s).

Internationally, there are essentially three models for systems of Indigenous institutions – the American Tribal Colleges, the New Zealand/Aotearoa Wānangas, and the Latin American Intercultural/Indigenous Universities (there are Indigenous institutions in Taiwan, Norway and Australia as well, but they are not really separate systems per se).  And of those three, we can more or less dispense with the Latin American model because almost no one outside Latin American understands it (or, it confuses the hell out of me, anyway).  So that leaves Wānangas and Tribal Colleges.

Now I’ve written a little bit about Wānangas before, and they certainly are an interesting model.  New Zealand has three of them: the largest of the three (Te Wānanga o Aotearoa) has over 20,000 students in 80 or so locations across New Zealand (they’ve largely avoided getting bogged down in campus infrastructure), with a set of program offerings not entirely unlike those of Canadian polytechnics.  The other two are smaller – 2-3,000 students – but with a more undergraduate focus in subjects such as arts and education.  The size and the scale of these institutions give them stability and prestige.  They also allow them to provide higher education at a reasonable per-student cost – each full-time equivalent student in New Zealand costs less than $10,000.  A tiny part of that comes from tuition fees – over 90% comes in a straight per-student subsidy from the New Zealand Government.

Contrast this with the US Tribal Colleges, of which there are approximately 30, only two of which receive operating funding from State governments.  The rest survive on a smattering of tuition fees, some support from tribal governments (which tend to be significantly larger in terms of land, population, and fiscal capacity than Canadian First Nations bands), and a truly astonishing array of federal subsidies, which include both per-student subsidies from the Department of the Interior and a bewildering variety of bespoke subsidies through avenues such as the Department of Agriculture, the National Science Foundation, etc.   Mostly, they focus on what we would call college-level education, and on average they are tiny: only a few have more than a thousand students, and the largest Tribal College is smaller than the smallest Wānanga.  And per-student costs are correspondingly high – $22,900 US per student across the system as a whole and considerably higher than that at some smaller institutions.

Now, at a first glance, if given a choice between the two systems most people would likely say “go Maori”: after all, Wānangas are bigger, more prestigious, and more effective than Tribal Colleges, so why wouldn’t that be the right way to go?  The problem is that an awful lot of the Wānanga model is based on demography and geography: there are a million Maori and Pasifika people in New Zealand and most of them are in the North Island, which is about the size of the island of Newfoundland.  With that kind of population concentration, it is indeed possible to generate some economies of scale.  It’s a lot tougher to do when you’re looking at dispersed populations in continent-sized countries like the United States or Canada.

Canada, of course, already has a set of Indigenous post-secondary institutions. Two of these (Nicola Valley Institute of Technology and First Nations University) are part of public systems, though neither has independent degree-granting powers.  It also has a couple of dozen institutions which deliver post-secondary programming, usually in partnership with mainstream universities and colleges.  Some of these are relatively sophisticated institutions (e.g. Six Nations Polytechnic in Grand River) with hundreds of students; others are considerably smaller and work out of extremely limited facilities.  In other words, the Canadian system already largely resembles the American one, only they are backed by financially weaker band councils and they don’t have access to the same kinds of federal funding.  The tribal colleges’ origin stories are similar to those of our Indigenous PSE institutions, too, though they tend to predate ours by a decade or so (for those interested, the book Capturing Education: Envisioning and Building the First Tribal Colleges by Paul Boyer, is a nice short primer on this)

Logically, one might therefore expect Canadian Indigenous PSE institutions to gradually resemble US Tribal Colleges more than Wānangas over the next few decades.  But the strengths of the Wānangas should not go unnoticed.  A key element for their largest institution is their capacity to deliver a standardized curriculum via community delivery in many different parts of the country at once.  To some degree that could also be done in a Canadian setting: to the extent that these institutions are delivering similar programs, it should be possible to standardize some parts of the delivery and thereby share costs. Still, given that part of the rationale for Indigenous PSE is about culture and language retention, one should not overstate the opportunities for cost sharing here.

In the end, of course, First Nations here in Canada won’t borrow anyone else’s model per se.  They will build their own system or systems, learning from experience as they go, which is as it should be.  But the journeys taken by other Indigenous people’s can still provide some enlightenment and hints about what paths might be most effective.