By Kendall Robertson

Huge Turnout For Northern Aboriginal Education Symposium

Jan 29, 2018 | 1:52 PM

PRINCE GEORGE – The fourth biennial Northern Aboriginal Education Symposium was held today at the Civic Centre. More than 700 educators took part in the conference, that dealt with a number of topics within aboriginal culture and history.The BC curriculum changed in 2016 to include more indigenous perspectives and programming and the symposium gives educators resources to better teach those subjects. “It’s really about how we’re trying to close that gap between aboriginal and non-aboriginal learners,” said District Administrator of Aboriginal Education, Shelly Niemi. “It’s important that we’re all here in this room together because we need to build that collective knowledge, we need to build our cultural competency.”

School District 57 has one of the largest aboriginal populations in the province. Since 2010, that population has seen an increase in graduation rates from 39.9% to 62%. That may be thanks to more aboriginal programming in schools. “If we don’t talk about Lheidli T’enneh and we don’t talk about McLeod Lake, and we don’t involve them in the conversations and the curriculum development for these resources where in the world are they going to talk about them?” added Niemi,”it’s important to know that Canada’s history starts here, and whose territory that we’re on.”