A CBC Q&A: Thomas King talks classroom challenges for indigenous students

Acclaimed author and always outspoken scholar Thomas King shared his thoughts on the challenges indigenous students face in the classroom.

• Ignoring indigenous culture leads to classroom disconnect

King arrived Thursday to give a guest lecture during humanities week at the University of Windsor.

He is best known for writing about the aboriginal experience in North America through novels, but also through his recent work, The Inconvenient Indian, which won the 2014 RBC Taylor Prize for non-fiction.

Though he agrees to very few interviews these days, King joined Windsor Morning host Tony Doucetteto talk about indigenous challenges in Canada and all of North America.

You have taught at universities in Lethbridge, Minnesota and most recently at the University of Guelph. How many aboriginal faces do you see on campus?

If you want to go through my academic career, you'd have to go back to the University of Utah and HumboltState University.There were no Aboriginal faces there, by and large. There were very few Aboriginal students on campus and that continued through my tenure. They'd come in, but there weren't many supports in place, so then they'd go out. Some would stay, but most of them wouldn't.

At Lethbridge, we had a pretty good program for bringing Native students to campus. We had support programs in place as well as academic programs. The Blackfoot reserve was right there on the edge of thecampus. Of the situations I'd been in up to that point in time, that was the very best situation I'd seen.

People tell us a difficulty they face is not seeing themselves in the curriculum. How do you feel about that?

It's not just that they don't see themselves represented in the curriculum. They don't see themselves on campus. Fifteen years ago, the joke used to be that every campus had one native scholar. So, if the University of Guelph had me, they didn't need anybody else and, besides, there weren't many of us to go around, so we'd put one on each campus, which was as ineffective as hell.

If students come on campus and see other native native professionals and they're able to talk to those people who've come through the same sorts of thing they did, that's a great benefit to the school and to the program.

How informed do you think young people are, be they Indigenous people or the population in general, about our native history and native culture?

They're poorly informed about contemporary politics, so I can't imagine they have any facility with Native history. I'm laughing, but I'm saddened by that. But the fact of the matter is, that we spend most of our time just simply trying to make a living, trying to raise our kids, trying to get a job, keep that job. Is there a sale on cars? Do we need a new car?

I think that Native issues are very far down on the agenda, both politically and socially. The average person on the street doesn't have a clue. I don't know what would change that because, from the perspective of the main Canadian society, there are other issues that take precedent.

Is there any one thing that you think is paramount that would lead to this country better understanding our Native people?

No, I don't think there's any one particular thing. I think it's a bunch of small things, beginning with an interest in that area and an interest in what a great many native people have been trying to tell Canadians and Americans for years, which is land issues. The big issue that has been with us since the beginning of our relationships with Europeans has been land and that hasn't changed.

No matter what the era, it seems as though we have somebody coming at us for the land we have left. If it's not railroads, if it's not highways, if it's not pipelines, it's something else. We're trying to keep the land we've got, we're trying to maintain our control over that land so we can say how it's going to be used. It's very difficult in this world and that hasn't changed. The push by corporations and political forces still is to move native peoples off their lands.

In light of that, how do you push education forward?

I don't know if I agree with it that way. Education is important and it has helped us because now we have more lawyers, we have more teachers, we have more medical professionals than we ever had before and all of that has led to more politically resilient reserves. We're better able to defend ourselves for the most part.

I don't know if it's the be all and end all. Education's part of the package. Is it the answer to everything? No. There are lots of people on reserves who have stayed there and who are working hard within their communities to make their communities strong. We've got other people who have gone off to university and who've either come back to the reserve to help out there or they've stayed within the urban areas and are working as they can to improve the lives of Native people. It's a package, it's not just one thing.