>> Aboriginal Literacy
Aboriginal Literacy
In the months ahead, we will be holding more book drives, and I will be inviting the people of Ontario to participate in the aboriginal youth computer literacy programs. Until then, stay tuned!
“THE HONOURABLE DAVID C. ONLEY, O.ONT.”
TRANSCRIPT
In northern Ontario, we are faced with third-world conditions — young
people who are largely illiterate, and therefore will never be able to function
in the modern, globalized economy, where you need to have education.
My name is James Bartleman, I’m Lieutenant Governor of Ontario, and one of my passions is literacy. One of my great priorities as Lieutenant Governor in Ontario is to promote literacy and mental wellness among aboriginal youth. That’s because I come from an aboriginal background. I’m a member of the Mnjikaning First Nation.
I was really shocked when I became Lieutenant Governor and discovered, when I travelled in the north of Ontario, that there had been no progress, really, in terms of the situation from when I was a youth in the north, and the children, you could see, suffered accordingly. They are, on average, five years behind non-native kids in terms of literacy, and the suicide rates for adolescent kids are 10 times the rate for non-aboriginal kids. The kids lack self esteem, and I think there’s a link between literacy levels and self-esteem. If a person doesn’t know how to read and write, they have lower self-esteem, and so they have been just giving up and dying in huge numbers.
So I came up with the idea of summer literacy and mental wellness camps. With the help of the Trillium Foundation, and then with the help of other donors, in the summer of 2005 we ran five camps: Muskrat Dam, North Caribou, Neskantaga, Kingfisher Lake and Fort Albany. But I’m really happy that PhotoSensitive, an association of professional journalists who donate their time to good causes, agreed to go up to the five literacy and mental wellness camps this summer to take pictures to provide the reality of life in the north, in its joy and in its tragedy, to the broader public. These photographs are just fantastic.
Some 365 children participated. I think it was a great success. There was approximately $1,200 per child for three weeks, in which they had exposure to literacy, but in a fun way. We brought in books, kids maintained journals, they did writing, some of them even wrote poems. We had sports, we had crafts, and the joy in the faces of all these kids is just a treat to see.
This one I love. I think that his parents and educators anywhere would be happy to see a boy of his age taking the time and attention to learn to read, and enjoying books. In this one, Franklin’s Secret Club, there is a counsellor helping a girl read a book, and in the background, another girl is reading a book. This is exactly the sort of thing we want to see.
The Aboriginal Literacy Summer Camps initiative came about as sort of the culmination of the process which I had originally started with, collecting books for schools. They are for the purposes of literacy and for mental health in combatting suicide. What we need to do is to ensure that the native kids in the summer months, in which they are away from school, in which they are unemployed and in which they are at loose ends, remain in touch with books and literature, and also that they are involved in things which are fun and which raise their self-esteem.
This picture shows — I think it symbolizes the extremely close relationship that developed between the counsellors from the south and the native children. The summer camps give them hope. The summer camps show the aboriginal children that the non-aboriginal world in the south cares about them.
This picture of a young boy with a bird decal on his cheek shows, to my mind, the potential of the child, the potential to be reached through literacy, through nurturing, through self-esteem or, going exactly the other way, to go into despair and suicide.