Chapter 4: Categorizing the Data -- Late 20th Century Documents --1987 Yukon's Kwiya

4.4b

Categorizing the Data -- Late 20^th Century Documents --1987 Yukon's Kwiya

    Yukon’s 1987 Report is called “Kwiya.” This report produced by the Joint Commission on Indian Education and Training has a “local” orientation in terms of its presentation. Many full-page photographs of participants and the "stakeholders" are available in the document. This representation sends a message to the reader that the document is a product of First Nations and intended mainly for their consumption. The transcribed version, however, makes this document more powerful, lifting it up from the local and territorial to the national level, placing it in comparative relation to Northwest Territories’ 1982 document “Learning: Tradition and Change in the Northwest Territories.” This would certainly be the case in terms of the development of Canadian First Nations’ policy positions as understood through “public” commissions and related inquiries. Yukon’s 1987 document articulates Yukon’s First Nation position in regard to First Nations control over education.  The documents states, “We have also sought to put in place a process for consultation leading to the new partnership in education between Indian people and the Governments of Canada and Yukon." The commissioners state, “Canada had borrowed generously from European cultures in building our present system of education.  It is time to accept the cultural traditions of Indian people within our contemporary education system." This documents makes a significant contribution to what I argue should be constitutionally recognized as the third legitimate domain of education policy production in Canada and one that should be protected at the national level under a revised Section 93 in the 21^st century – First Nations/Inuit/Metis should be protected as a separate but equal educational sphere. The Yukon commissioners ask in Recommendation 4 for considerable bureaucratic readjustment to recognize First Nations needs in education: “That the Government of Yukon, in partnership with Indian people initiate specific legislative, policy and structural reforms of Yukon’s education system." Situating that request into a new national framework regarding First Nations/Inuit/Metis 'education' as a separate and equal jurisdiction to French and English public education policy protection is preliminary in my opinion. 

   At this time of writing, the Yukon report appears to be the 20^th century end-point to Yukon’s “public” (or “First-Nations” since Yukon is predominantly First Nations in its indigenous population) education policy documents. This 1987 Yukon documents cites both the 1960s document and the 1971 documents, both transcribed for the purposes of policy analysis, in an effort to provide linear historical construct Yukon’s "public" education policy history.