Educating people about Treaty Recognition Week

The Indigenous Resource Centre at Loyalist College services 350 students who identify with Indigenous ancestry. Photo by Evan Doherty, QNet News

By Evan Doherty

BELLEVILLE – This week is Treaty Recognition Week which is meant to educate and inform people about treaties between Canada’s settlers and its Indigenous peoples.

Treaty Recognition Week has been celebrated since 2016. More recently school boards have been have been trying to educate their students through activities such as Indigenous guest speakers and videos.

Hastings Prince Edward District School Board’s communications officer Kerry Donnell said the school board is providing resources to schools to encourage education around Treaty Recognition Week.

“We have someone here at the board who is responsible for Indigenous education and we put out information about the number of resources to our schools,” Donnell told QNet News in a phone interview.

Donnell said the board has been implementing Indigenous education into its curriculum for about three years. She said that a new course was put into secondary schools courses this past spring that teaches students about Indigenous affairs.

“Students in grade 11 all take an English course that has an Indigenous component to it and we’re always looking for ways to expand and infuse Indigenous awareness and culture into the curriculum,” she said.

Donnell said the school board has a large Indigenous community and this is why they want to continue to support Indigenous education in their schools.

“We have 842 elementary school students and 496 secondary school students who have identified as Indigenous,” she said. 

Even with efforts to raise more awareness around Indigenous issues, Paul Latchford manager of the Indigenous Resource Centre at Loyalist College said people need to keep learning.

“People aren’t aware of treaty agreements because they aren’t taught about it,” Latchford said.

Locally the Crown Grant to the Mohawks of the Bay Quinte was issued in 1784. This was when the Mohawk Chief John Deserontyon led a group of Haudenosaunee people to settle on the Bay of Quinte in what are now the communities of Deseronto and Shannonville.

Although the college isn’t hosting any events for Treaty Recognition Week, Latchford said the college is promoting Indigenous education in other ways.

“We (the Indigenous Resource Centre) supports cultural awareness and training to 70% of the courses at Loyalist. In addition, there are currently two general education courses running and two more are planned for January 2020,” he said.

“We need more awareness leading to reconciliation and for people to understand the attributes that Indigenous peoples have brought to the world,” Latchford said.