2 neighbouring schools were given unequal funding. The difference? One was on reserve
Nikky Manfredi | CBC Radio | Posted: January 6, 2023 1:15 PM | Last Updated: April 1, 2023
Valley of the Birdtail chronicles the trials and triumphs of two neighbouring communities in Western Manitoba
In Western Manitoba, not too far from the Saskatchewan border, lies two neighbouring communities divided by River Valley. These two communities have co-existed for about as long as Canada has, but over the past 150 years, they've grown separately and unequally.
In the mostly white town of Rossburn, family income is near the national average and roughly a third of the population has graduated from college or university. Across the river in the Indigenous community of Waywayseecappo, family income is far below the national average and less than a third of the residents have graduated from high school.
Valley of the Birdtail by Andrew Stobo Sniderman and Douglas Sanderson charts the trials and triumphs of these neighbouring communities through the lives of two residents and their families. The book is on CBC Books' list of the best nonfiction of 2022.
Sanderson, whose Cree name is Amo Binashii, is a Toronto-based lawyer and associate law professor. He is a member of the Beaver clan from the Opaskwayak Cree Nation. Sniderman is a New York-based lawyer, writer and Rhodes Scholar from Montreal.
They spoke to The Next Chapter's Shelagh Rogers about what compelled them to write Valley of the Birdtail.
What made you want to tell this story?
Andrew Stobo Sniderman: I learned that 10 years ago, over 100,000 Indigenous students on reserves were in schools that were dramatically underfunded..
These two schools are just a few kilometres away — one in the town and one in the reserve — and there was this dramatic gulf in the funding and quality of these schools. I wanted to understand what that felt like from the point of view of an Indigenous family and from the point of view of a white family in a white community observing this from afar.
LISTEN | Douglas Sanderson on The Valley of the Birdtail:
This story is told through the very real and often very gripping lives of Maureen Twovoice from Waywayseecappo and Troy Luhowy from Rossburn. Who are Maureen and Troy?
Sanderson: Maureen is a young woman whose mother went to residential school. She experiences all different kinds of education systems on the reserve. She experiences integrated education off reserve. It's all really not good. She struggles hard as many Indigenous students do with education that is subpar and then being moved into schools that they're not really prepared for necessarily because they've had a subpar education in the early years.
Nevertheless, she overcomes. She goes to university and gets a master's degree, and she returns to the community to work in the school board as an Indigenous resource officer. Maureen takes us full circle in the story, and that's why I think she's so important.
Sniderman: Troy is just an ordinary guy. He's a hockey-playing young man who grows up in this small town. He lives right next to an Indian reserve and he knows next to nothing about the people who live there.
What's amazing about Troy is that as an adult, he begins to learn, and he eventually becomes a teacher on the reserve next door. Over time, he comes to learn all the injustices that people face there. He earns the respect of people in that community.
Through his journey of knowing nothing and not really caring, a lot of us can relate to the way that he learns and participates in this better future that they're trying to build.
Andrew, this story takes an amazing turn in November 2010, a few months after Troy Luhow became principal of the Waywayseecappo school. What happened?
Sniderman: Overnight, the school on the reserve got equal funding. There had been this local agreement to fund every kid on the reserve the exact same amount as every kid going to school in the town, which hadn't been true for decades in these places and all across Canada.
What's exciting is not just what happens in these two schools, but also what happens with these characters. They show a capacity for growth.
I don't think any of us should be surprised that as soon as they started getting fair resources, the students started having way better outcomes.
But it always struck me as a haunting success. There was this beacon of what was possible, and it made the inequality all across the country so much more glaring.
What's happening in this particular place gestures toward possibilities for the country. We didn't want to just pick another place where there were irredeemable racists and despair. There's enough trauma porn out there and there are definitely places where things have not actually gotten better.
What's exciting is not just what happens in these two schools, but also what happens with these characters. They show a capacity for growth and to work together to make things better.
WATCH | Literacy rates on Waywayseecappo First Nation soar:
Douglas, the book offers an even bigger vision, a plan for for everyone on this land, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, to live together fairly. How would that work?
Sanderson: One of the lessons we could draw is that we should just equalize the funding across schools and everything will be fine, but we quickly realized that funding like that is vulnerable. Indigenous populations are fairly small across the country; they don't have a lot of pull at the electoral polls and that means that a government somewhere down the road is going to let the funding slide.
The way that Indigenous children are not going to get shortchanged on education is when Indigenous parents are the ones who are making those funding choices. We wanted to think about how we could use the very tools of federalism to finance Indigenous communities in the same way that we finance provinces through the equalization formula.
The way that we're going to know that Indigenous children are not going to get shortchanged on education is when Indigenous parents are the ones who are making those funding choices.
We have a a constitutional commitment that every province should offer services at more or less the same level across the country. Because of this formula, the federal government provides extra money to certain provinces just so they have the same standard of care as the richer provinces.
We're proposing finding a way to draw Indigenous communities into this same system, because we have a national commitment to equality and we have tools to make that happen. We just want to see those tools extended to Indigenous communities.
Sanderson's and Sniderman's comments have been edited for length and clarity.
Interview produced by Lisa Mathews, Shelagh Rogers and Jacqueline Kirke.