Noah D. Arney

Tag: Indigenous

  • Maslow’s Changes

    Based on a twitter thread

    Patty Krawec on twitter pointed out something that has been discussed by Indigenous education theorists and philosophers for decades even as it’s mostly been ignored by non-Indigenous educational theorists and philosophers.

    And she’s right. Maslow’s work is elite capture, his work before visiting the Blackfoot is so incredibly different from his work after that he clearly had to fully transform his understanding of people because of it.

    You can see much smarter people than me discuss it here and here.

    But we also need to remember the difference between what Maslow originally wrote, as he was trying to shift western education away from an oppressive system, and how it’s been used since then, in many ways to entrench an oppressive system.

    Maslow talks about how by hierarchy he means that the things higher up the hierarchy require and include the things below it. So in his conception of the hierarchy self actualization includes the other needs, inverting the common diagram that we use for Maslow’s hierarchy into something much more resembling what a Niitsitapi knowledge keeper or educational philosopher would say.

    His writings when they discuss how culture should support self actualization, based on it doing that among the Blackfoot he lived with briefly, make me think that though he is doing elite capture, the rest of western psych has spent the 70 years since trying shift it away from what he learned from the Blackfoot.

    It makes me think of a man seeing his psychologically broken culture, then seeing a culture that wasn’t broken despite being subjected to worse conditions than his own, and trying to make sense of it. His understanding of the world was that his culture and context was the natural result of the conditions within which it existed, but here was another culture who hadn’t gone down that path.

    The rest of psychology seems to have just taken what he wrote and said “but what if we ignored how broken our culture is…”

    Maslow isn’t perfect. He is very clearly taking concepts from the Blackfoot, and while he does credit them to a certain extent, it’s still a very colonial elite capture of the concepts.

    But he is also the person who tore Terman’s work on IQ to shreds back in 1944, decades before the rest of Educational Theorists realized that it was worthless. He is on record as the person, like Dewey before him, pointing at the education system and saying “that’s not how it has to work, it can be better”.

    So yes, Maslow’s hierarchy maybe not quite bullshit, but it is problematic. But it’s problematic not because of what it is, but because of how it’s been extended, implemented, and stripped of its connection to the Indigenous philosophies and culture on which its based.

  • Indigenous Students in BC

    I was considering Indigenous student recruitment this week and I decided to check to see if we have data about where Indigenous students go to post-secondary, and because BC’s PS data system is pretty good, we do have that data. Take a look at it here. Here’s the highlights. FYI I’m using 2019 as the stable year because it is both pre-pandemic but still recent enough to be similar to today. We could do this again using 2022-23 data when it comes out in two years.

    First, the average Indigenous student enrolment at a public PSI is 6%. That’s actually a good thing because Stats Can tells us that that is also the percentage of Indigenous people in BC. So we get a win there, in that Indigenous students are no longer underrepresented in postsecondary. The work of Indigenous PSI staff in this between recruitment, mentoring, and supporting initiatives off the side of their desk cannot be ignored. They have done amazing work to shift college’s and university’s perspectives on Indigenous students and remove barriers.

    Now for where Indigenous students go. 19 public Post-Secondary Institutions make up 90% of Indigenous student enrolment, and all of the research universities are included in that group. Of course, that means that the other 7 institutions only make up 10% of provincial Indigenous student enrolment. Specifically I’d like to call out the abysmal recruitment of Langara College, especially because they used to have good Indigenous student recruitment, but their new numbers are under 2% Indigenous students while 30% of their students are International.

    In student recruitment the students are often classified by Domestic Non-Indigenous, Domestic Indigenous, and International for better targeting of recruitment money. There is a lot more breakdown depending on the strategic enrolment management done by the institution. Because of that I’m looking at number and percentage of Indigenous and International students at the different PSIs to determine who’s doing what type of recruitment.

    Top recruiters from a percentage standpoint are:

    • NVIT**
    • Coast Mountain*
    • College of New Caledonia
    • Northern Lights
    • UNBC*
    • North Island College*
    • Vancouver Island University

    All of whom have more that 12% Indigenous students. Those starred also recruit more Indigenous students than International students, an important number, because the average institution recruits three times more International students than Indigenous students. NVIT gets special mention as the only institution that is majority-Indigenous.

    The worst recruiters are:

    • Langara College*
    • SFU*
    • UBC*
    • Kwantlen Polytechnic*
    • Douglas College
    • Emily Carr

    All of whom have 3% or fewer Indigenous students. Those starred recruit 10 times more International students than they do Indigenous students.

    Now, percentages aren’t everything. Here are the Institutions with the largest Indigenous student populations:

    • Thompson Rivers University
    • JIBC
    • Vancouver Island University
    • Okanagan College
    • BCIT*
    • UBC*
    • College of New Caledonia
    • UVic*
    • NVIT
    • University of the Fraser Valley

    UBC and BCIT both have poor Indigenous student recruitment and UVic has below average recruitment, but all three are such large institutions that they make this list anyway.

    Thompson Rivers University is the single largest Indigenous student enroller at nearly 3000 students, but Justice Institute (JIBC) isn’t far behind. In fact when you add in VIU and Okanagan College you have 1/3 of the provincial Indigenous student enrolment.

    Now to just call out the top universities for Indigenous student recruitment and worst recruitment.

    Thompson Rivers University recruits the most Indigenous students, while University of Northern British Columbia and Vancouver Island University recruit the highest percentages of Indigenous students.

    Simon Fraser University and University of British Columbia do the worst job of recruitment percentage wise, but SFU is the worse recruiter because they have fewer than 800 Indigenous students even though they’re the second largest university in the province.

    So, I’ve talked about recruitment, but what should a good target for Indigenous students at a post-secondary institution be? You should be using the larger of two numbers. Either the provincial percentage of Indigenous people (6%) or regional percentage (7-9% depending on the region). That’s for starters. If you’re below that then you need to re-assess your recruitment. And just a note, that the percentages are for *total current* students, so recruitment means nothing if you don’t retain students. Also, once you’ve reached that percentage the next step is to look at what will make a difference to your community both inside the institution and to the regional community.

    A quick idea here is to look at your percentage of Indigenous students compared to your percentage of International students. If you have parity with your region’s Indigenous students but many of them are still the only Indigenous student in their classes, that’s an issue. This could look like targeting somewhere between 1/2 as many or just as many Indigenous students as International students. And for 11 PSIs they’re already there (star means they are at or above parity with both regional population and International students):

    • NVIT*
    • Coast Mountain*
    • NIC*
    • JIBC*
    • College of Rockies*
    • UNBC*
    • VIU
    • Northern Lights
    • Okanagan
    • CNC
    • Camosun

    Two universities have regional parity and are working on closer parity with International students (UFV and TRU) and two institutions are above provincial parity but not yet above regional parity (Selkirk College and UBC-O). The remaining 11 institutions are below provincial parity and need to do some serious work. Perhaps they need to call up those who seem to be doing this the best? For colleges that’s Coast Mountain College, College of New Caledonia, and North Island College. For universities that’s UNBC and Vancouver Island University.

  • Supporting Indigenous STEM Students

    This is a snippet of Michelle Pidgeon and my post at Supporting Student Success.

    The disparity of post-secondary education (PSE) completion between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians (40% vs. 55.3%) continues to persist (Statistics Canada, 2016). Unfortunately, the disparity is wider when we compare undergraduate degree completion between Indigenous (8.6%) and non-Indigenous Canadians (23.25%). The gap of post-secondary completion (certificate, diploma, degree, and above) specific to the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) fields is even wider. Indigenous people are half as likely to have STEM based PSE (4.1% vs. 10%), and for those with STEM Bachelors degree and above, the gap moves to being a fifth as likely (1.1% vs. 5.7%).

    In 2012 Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta created the Aboriginal Science & Technology Education Program (ASTEP) to support the growth of Indigenous STEM students in the Faculty of Science and Technology. This program operated from 2012-2019 and represented one of three Indigenous specific STEM programs offered specifically at the university level in Canada.  To understand the impact and influence of this program an external review was conducted in 2017 following Indigenous research processes (Kovach, 2009; Pidgeon & Hardy Cox, 2002). This process included an analysis of institutional data, comparisons with similar programs, and interviews and sharing circles with students, staff, and faculty who were closely associated with ASTEP.

    Read the rest at Supporting Student Success

  • Review: Pathways for Remembering and Recognizing Indigenous Thought in Education

    This was originally posted at SA-Exchange, but the site has since shut down.

    Sandra D. Styres 2017 book Pathways for Remembering and Recognizing Indigenous Thought in Education: Philosophies of Iethi’nihsténha Ohwentsia’kékha (land) is a key addition to the literature around understanding core concepts in Indigenous philosophies of education.

    The audience of this book is academics who want to be able to express the specific philosophies that Indigenous people bring to education. It is not a book aimed at practitioners so much as researchers. Although it touches on story as a teaching method (Archibald, 2008) it does not utilize that as a primary method itself. There is some teaching through story but not nearly as much as a book like Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. This book falls somewhere between western academic writing and Indigenous teaching through story, and that is one of its strengths. In addition, while Styres is trying to explain concepts that are common to many Indigenous peoples, she is approaching educational philosophy from a Haudenosaunee perspective.

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  • Dispelling Myths about First Nations Chief’s Salaries

    First nations chiefs are essentially CEOs these days. And with the First Nations Financial Transparancy Act we can see how much they’re making – see here for the data.

    Now that list includes counselors so I pulled only chiefs and based this on the results.

    Remember, these are CEOs. In addition to managing Treaty & Indian Act money coming in from the government they also manage various band run businesses, land and many other organizations.

    Average salary: $80,00
    Median salary: $75,000 (median Canadian salary is $70,000)

    # paid less than poverty line: 76 (11%)
    # paid less than canadian average salary: 179 (26%)
    # paid less than middle class salary: 230 (34%)
    # paid less than canadian median salary: 286 (42%)
    # paid middle class salary 185 (27%)
    # paid more than canadian middle class salary: 264 (39%)
    # making it into the top 100 highest paid CEOs: 0

    The highest paid chief made $930,793 but remember most of that (86% to be exact) was a bonus for negotiating a $8 million land deal for the band.

    Only 15% of chiefs are even classed as “rich” (earning over $125,000 per year). To put that into perspective, more chiefs are earning less than $30,000.
    So it looks like in general the “rich chief” myth isn’t just misleading, it’s completely wrong.

  • Education and the Indigenous wage gap

    The National Post had an article this morning titled “Government stumped as report shows aboriginal wage gap widening, unemployment growing”

    The federal government touted a number of initiatives Wednesday for improving First Nations’ well-being but could not explain why a new report showed the prosperity gap between aboriginal and non-aboriginal people was widening in some cases.
    source

    There are a lot of reasons for the wage gap but I’m going to focus on one. And yes, it’s education. I discussed this earlier but I want to go into a bit more detail.

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  • Indigenous Access to Post-Secondary

    Aboriginal people make up 6% of BC and the percentage is rising quickly.

    From an economic standpoint there’s a huge wage gap between aboriginal and non aboriginal workers pay based on looking at full time workers with the same career classification. But the good news is that the more education an aboriginal person has the closer that gap is. In fact the gap almost disappears for aboriginal people with a masters degree or higher. But Aboriginal people are less likely to go to post secondary, with only 45% of working age aboriginal people having a post secondary certificate diploma or degree compared to 62% for non aboriginal residents.

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  • #MySAPath – My Path to Student Affairs via Indigenous Education

    The full post of this is over at The Student Affairs Collective blog.

    I am a student advisor (both academic and career advising) at a small aboriginal college in Vancouver B.C., Native Education College. The issue I have with describing a non-traditional student affairs path is that I have very little reference for what a traditional path is; there are so many routes to the field, at least among my colleagues here in Canada. Mine may have been a little unusual, though.

    My plan when I went to University was to be a high school English teacher. There were many reasons my plan changed but most of them come down to being unaware of my options. I went to university thinking I had one option, came to realize that I had three, and wound up taking the first option anyway only to change my direction two years later.

    Please go here for the rest of the article.