Carleton’s Academic Student Government (CASG) unanimously passed a motion to strike an Indigenization committee at a Nov. 5 council meeting.
The new ad-hoc committee aims to advance the causes of the Truth and Reconcilliation Commission—a federal government study outlining calls to action so that Canada can move towards reconciliation with Indigenous people in the country.
Sheldon Parathundyil, CASG’s public affairs and policy management faculty representative who proposed the motion, said the committee marks an important step for the organization in highlighting Indigenous voices at Carleton.
“There are no self-identifying Indigenous students on CASG’s council,” he said, “and that’s a problem that persists throughout the whole university, not just at council.”
Parathundyil said the committee hopes to decrease the trauma for Indigenous students at Carleton by making recommendations to Carleton administration for increased accommodations.
“Indigenous students have already been subject to a lot of post-colonial trauma,” he said. “The fact that Indigenous students represent so much of students that annually drop out of university is clearly a failing on behalf of the institution.”
“Ultimately it’s partially a legacy of trauma from within the educational system—from residential schools that have kind of marked Indigenous students’ pysches.”
Matt Pelletier, CASG’s vice-president (internal), said he hopes the committee will complement initiatives by the university’s administration and other student groups on campus.
“This will act as a sort of facilitating ground to see what everybody’s doing and how we can advance that moving forward,” Pelletier said. “We risk being left in the dust if we don’t move forward with the trends in education right now.”
“We’re an organization that’s supposed to represent all undergraduate students on academic issues, and we can’t be fulfilling that mandate if we’re not considering the Indigenization of curricula not just at Carleton, but across post-secondary institutions in Ontario and Canada.”
Parathundyil said the initiative comes in light of the recently launched Ontario arm of a ReconciliAction campaign at Carleton by the Canadian Federation of Students and the Graduate Students’ Association.
He added the new committee will work towards some of ReconciliAction’s goals—including hiring more Indigenous faculty, developing multi-year degree programs for Indigenous languages, and bringing more Indigenous-focused sites on campus for student use.
Benoit-Antoine Bacon, Carleton’s president and vice-chancellor who addressed the council at the meeting, told the Charlatan he was happy to see CASG’s interest in providing input for the university’s Indigenous strategy.
“I think it’s important for councils to be engaged in these matters because they represents student voices from across the faculties,” Bacon said.
The Indigenization committee was filled with members after the meeting, with Parathundyil elected as the committee chairperson by CASG executives.
Wolfgang Wüttke-Stanton, Summer-Harmony Twenish, and Jordan Grey were appointed students-at-large.
Karlena Koot, Daniel Meecham, and Sarah Shires were appointed as sitting councillors on the committee.
The committee will begin its term Nov. 10 and has an ad-hoc status on the CASG council until March 2019, after which councillors can vote to extend its term.
Photo by Temur Durrani
