Hanes: Rebuff of Indigenous CEGEP students is heartless, hypocritical

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There’s a powerful moment in a video released by five English CEGEPs last week that features Indigenous students pleading with the Quebec government to exempt them from onerous new French requirements under Bill 96.

Cameron Biron, a Cree student at John Abbott College, tells Kim Tekakwitha Martin, the school’s dean of Indigenous studies, how hard it is already to be 18 hours away from her community of Wemindji to pursue her education. She explains how adding three extra French classes to her course load next year will put her at risk of failing, since she had no French schooling growing up. So her only choice, she feels, is to leave Quebec and move even farther away to study.

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“You come here wanting to make your family proud. You don’t want to go back. You don’t want to give up,” Biron says as the tears begin to flow. She apologizes and tries to regain her composure.

Martin interjects, before choking up herself: “Don’t feel bad that you’re crying, because it’s a very sad thing that’s happening to us.”

But the line that truly hits like a sucker punch to the gut is when Biron says: “Quebec is my home too … and we deserve to stay in Quebec.”

Too.

There is so much meaning carried in that three-letter adverb: millenniums of existence for a people; centuries of being subjugated by settlers who arrived to start a new country in their ancestral territory; the traumatic legacy of forced assimilation through residential schools; even the recent history of having their lands flooded to transform Quebec into a hydroelectricity superpower.

But fast-forward to present-day Quebec and the matter at hand. All this young woman is asking for — like the others who gave testimonials in the video — is a fair shake at higher education after all the challenges she and her people have had to overcome. And the Quebec government, in pursuit of its own linguistic and nationalist goals, is throwing a new roadblock in their way by upping the number of French courses needed to graduate from CEGEP.

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The fact Biron even has to remind the powers that be of her own incontestable claim to Quebec in this day and age speaks to an ongoing failure to learn the lessons of history.

Yet rather than listen to the brave Indigenous students explain the injustices in Bill 96; rather than be moved by their heartfelt pleas for an exemption from the measures; rather than negotiate with Indigenous leaders to try to find a solution, it took all of a few hours for Quebec Higher Education Minister Pascale Déry and Indigenous Affairs Minister Ian Lafrenière to give them the brush-off.

The answer was a cold, uncompromising “non.”

That’s no to a blanket exemption from having to take a total of five language or subject courses in French to graduate from English CEGEPs. That’s tough luck for concerns that many Indigenous students lack the training to meet these requirements, that some might have to spend longer in college taking catch-up classes and that young people are being set up to fail — if they’re not deterred from going to CEGEP in the first place. That’s a shrug to complaints that the whole process for applying for a dispensation from the same final French exam francophones and allophones take is offensive, and that the limited exception offered is discriminatory because it is only granted to Indigenous students who lived on reserve.

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Perhaps this isn’t shocking given this government’s contempt for the rights of English-speaking Quebecers and their institutions. The video was intended to amplify the voices of Indigenous youth and let them speak for themselves. But it was produced by five English CEGEPs — Dawson, John Abbott, Vanier, Champlain and Heritage colleges — and accompanied by a letter from their directors calling on the government to consider the best interests of Indigenous students.

You’d think that in this era of truth and reconciliation, apologies and reparations, Déry and Lafrenière would have at least feigned enough compassion to take the request under advisement. Instead, the rebuff was swift. The Coalition Avenir Québec government then switched to patting itself on the back for driving down enrolment in English CEGEPs.

Perhaps this isn’t surprising from a government led by a premier who recently suggested Quebec was founded 400-odd years ago when the explorers arrived. First Nations groups were outraged in April when François Legault unveiled plans for a museum devoted to the history of the Quebec nation that will make little mention of Indigenous Peoples, calling the snub “systemic erasure.”

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Maybe it’s par for the course with Legault, who has always denied there is systemic racism toward Indigenous Peoples in Quebec, despite the Viens Commission coming to just that conclusion, along with the inquest into the death of Joyce Echaquan, who filmed herself being verbally abused in a Quebec hospital.

Legault may condemn bad things when they happen and acknowledge there are racist individuals who do and say bad things. But his failure to recognize any systemic harms is the kind of head-in-the-sand thinking that wilfully blinds his government to the disproportionate effect of policies — like the onerous new French requirements on Indigenous students at CEGEP.

But lest Legault get his back up over loaded phrases like systemic racism, colonialism or assimilation, using his umbrage as a shield to deflect criticism, here are a few other descriptors.

Heartless. What kind of government purposely trips up students who already face formidable obstacles to get to college — from disparities in the school system to travelling long distances to go to institutions far from their communities, to culture shock, not to mention the intergenerational trauma of residential school? Jeopardizing the success of Indigenous students is just cruel.

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Obtuse. The lack of understanding about how a rigid, one-size-fits-all policy limits the opportunities for Indigenous youth smacks of narrow-minded inflexibility.

Illogical. How does it make sense to subject Indigenous students attending English CEGEPs to different rules and procedures than anglophones who hold eligibility certificates? Why do Indigenous students living on reserve qualify for an exemption from the French exam given to francophone and allophone students, but not those who live in nearby communities or urban areas?

Useless. Why do students from non-French-speaking Indigenous communities, who plan to return home to work and serve their people in a professional capacity, need such a high level of French if they are never going to need it?

Dogmatic. Giving a few hundred Indigenous students a full exemption is not going to make or break the government’s efforts to protect the French language. Putting responsibility for the decline of French on the shoulders of Indigenous people who have already been robbed of their own languages and cultures is unfair and unconscionable.

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Selfish. In its singular crusade to increase the amount of French at English CEGEPs, the government doesn’t seem to care about the casualties. In some cases, courses on threatened Indigenous languages and cultures are being squeezed out of the curriculum.

Exclusionary and disrespectful. Piling new and unreasonable language requirements on Indigenous students may drive them out of Quebec for their higher education. Perhaps that is the nefarious motive, as it was with the decision to raise tuition for out-of-province students, who mainly attend Quebec’s English universities, and raising the bar on how much French they have to learn to graduate.

Condescending and disingenuous. The government attributed the concerns of Indigenous students about applying for the exemption to a lack of understanding and blamed the English CEGEPs for not doing a good enough job explaining the derogation process for the exit exam. Never mind that the colleges say they’ve struggled to get answers about how the new dispositions of Bill 96 will affect Indigenous students, with a deadline fast approaching for the new rules to be implemented.

And last but not least, hypocritical. Angela Ottereyes, a Cree student from Waskaganish who attends Dawson, puts it succinctly in the video when she says: “They’re talking about preserving their language, but what about ours?”

ahanes@postmedia.com

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