I used to work as the attendance person at the catholic school in Yellowknife in the early 2000s. My job was to take attendance for the entire school daily.
I would stand at the front doors of the office next to the unwelcoming receptionists and greet the students who came in late. I would hand them each pink slips to give to their teachers who would have already marked them late keen on doing role call right after the national anthem. After the teachers were done calling out each student’s name, they would hand in the attendance sheets to the office where I would pick them up and go back to my desk to do the morning calls.
For each student’s name on the absent list, I had to call their parents to find out what the reason was for them being late (in case you are wondering there was a human that did this job before automated phone calls were created). Through this manual system, I quickly learned which students were repeat absentees, most of them Indigenous.
School was made to be mandatory in the days of residential school and it still is today under the Education Act. If a child doesn’t go to school for a long period of time, social services and the police can get involved. If it were my job to call social services every time a student missed school, I would be “opening up a can of worms” as my boss so aptly put it.
I was naive at the time that I worked at the catholic school and now looking back I see that I was further perpetuating a deep-seated issue that has impacted Indigenous peoples since the imposition of residential schools. When I did attendance, I had a very limited understanding of residential schools, let alone that I was working in a modern institution modeled after residential schools being that it was and still is affiliated with the church.
I was almost entirely in the dark about the history of residential schools because it wasn’t taught to me. No one talked about residential schools back then and that was not that long ago.
As the attendance cop, I had a book of taxi vouchers that I used often so that kids could get rides to school but some students didn’t go because they were out on the land hunting for six months out of the year and some students didn’t go because their parents didn’t want them to attend due to trauma from residential schools.
As we are all now quite aware, the education system has had a grievous generational impact on Indigenous peoples throughout history. School was not a safe place for my grandmother who went to residential school, it was not a safe place for my mother who went to day school, it was not a safe place for me because I was bullied by my peers and did not feel protected by my teachers.
School is finally starting to be somewhat of a safe place for the up-and-coming generation of Indigenous students. My son just graduated, is going off to college and breaking the statistics of his demographic. My daughter just started high school and has a lot of great friends. Both have finally been able to go to school and they can honestly say they enjoy it but they too still experience discrimination and racial bias.
For instance, a few years ago, my son wasn’t able to participate in hand games at the school because he was suspended for letting a stray dog in the school. I raised a complaint and questioned the logic. Taking away a student’ access to their culture while at school in the very place it was stripped away somewhat similar to how Phyllis Webstad’s orange shirt was confiscated in 1973 is one of the worst, most implicating decisions a school board can make.
For the very fact that Indigenous people were separated from their families, their homes, their traditional lifestyles to attend school in the past only to have the idea of their culture nearly brainwashed out of them, schools today need to go above and beyond to make sure that they are incorporating Indigenous world views through cultural activities as much as possible and trying to include students at whatever level they are at - especially those with behavioral issues or repeat absenteeism.
The best way to do that is by offering students the opportunity to reintegrate into their culture. If educators continue to make uneducated decisions such as banning a child from participating in activities that link them to their inherent rights and continue to teach false theories and one-sided histories in the classroom then school shouldn’t be a place where students must attend and instead should be optional until the institution of education becomes a fair playground, one where perfect attendance is not the solution to the problem.