thesis Abstract

Text Box: First Nations Education and Emancipation Through the Four Seasons Curriculum

Wandering Spirit Survival School:

Thesis Abstract

This text offers an account of an emancipatory process in the story of Canada's first Native Survival School. Archival research is woven with a collective narrative in a reminisce of Wandering Spirit Survival School (WSSS) that draws its significance from the painful history of Native Education in Canada.

Founded in 1976, WSSS was adopted as an Alternative School by the Toronto Board of Education in 1977. Pauline Shirt, a Cree visionary and founder of the school, played a critical role in designing and reviewing the research for this thesis. It develops her narrative within the collective testimony of former students and teacher-volunteers, unfolding as a unique, collaborative methodology-in-process that blends two cultural approaches to research.

An account of the impetus for the school's inception places WSSS in context with (a) the story of Wandering Spirit (the War Chief of Big Bear's Plains Cree band), (b) the 1885 incident at Frog Lake that shifted the dominant culture image of the Indian with punishing changes to Canada's Indian Act, (c) a history of Native schooling that illustrates the partnership between Church and Crown in the acquisition of land in the New World, and (d) the cross-border activism for Native emancipation through education during the 1970s.

Beginning with the missionary model established in the 1600s, Canada's Native Education policy is explored as it shifts to acculturation-in-isolation (through the Residential Schools) after 1886 and shifts again, to acculturation-through-integration (in provincial schools), after 1951. The failure of Native students to thrive in the dominant schooling system led to a two-fisted demand for Native control of Native Education in the 1970s through the band directed reserve schools and the Native Survival Schools.

In this text, the Medicine Wheel at the heart of Aboriginal culture is given definition as a responsive healing pedagogy that integrates mind, body and spirit. Also known as the Teaching Wheel, it guides a regionally responsive articulation of the Four Seasons Curriculum developed at WSSS. The story of WSSS is the story of a community and a model for emancipatory education which remains relevant in contemporary time.

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