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SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
This past weekend, professionals from around the North gathered at Blachford Lake Lodge to participate in a special condensed course on leadership in sustainable communities offered by Dechinta Bush University Centre for Research and Learning.

Francois Paulette illustrated the Dene Chance model as a teepee, where Dene would enter from the right and turn left, starting with spiritual needs and ending with economic needs. - photo courtesy of Dechinta Bush University

Professionals in various sectors, including government workers and regulatory board advisers, filled the 20 slots open to students for the university's first weekend workshop.

There was also a long waiting list, said university director Erin Freeland-Ballantyne. Every cultural group in the NWT was represented, except for the Inuvialuit, she said.

"We took the key elements of our sustainable communities course and turned it into a workshop-style seminar," said Freeland-Ballantyne. One of the goals of the weekend was to serve people who have expressed interest in the school but cannot commit enough time to take other programs.

Because of the success of the weekend, there are other similar workshops being planned, said Freeland-Ballantyne.

The centre also plans to offer executive training courses in the spring as a kind of crash-course on Northern history, issues and cultures for executives from the south, said Freeland-Ballantyne.

"It was really inspiring to see people coming together with very different backgrounds but with a common goal of (discovering) what does a sustainable North look like and what principles and values that are rooted on the indigenous communities here can we draw on to make that happen?" said Freeland-Ballantyne.

Yellowknife resident Deneze Nakehk'o attended the weekend as a first-time student, although he did help to instruct a media course during Dechinta's pilot semester in 2010.

"Sustainable communities is something that's very important for me," said Nakehk'o about the weekend's subject matter. "I'm Dene, I'm from Denendeh, and sustainable communities is nothing new for the people up here - it's how people have been able to survive up to this point."

"This course was about trying to get back to that, but kind of with a modern twist."

Workshop students attended classes that discussed climate change, the Alberta oil sands, water quality and water safety, and the North's national and international role in these issues, among other topics.

Instructors included Francois Paulette, who talked about Dene history, the history of the North, and sustainability issues, among other things.

The main thing that Nakehk'o took away from the weekend is the importance of getting off of oil and gas dependency, he said.

"It's a process of colonization and those colonial practices have led us to where we are today. So, it's a process of decolonizing our minds and getting back to the practices that have sustained us for thousands of years," he said.

Instructor and participant Daniel T'seleie also spoke about the importance of decolonization. The workshop discussed trying to abandon the more corporate control of our lives, discussed the problems of climate change and petroleum dependence, and looked at alternatives currently available to Northern residents.

"It's really good to see people taking an interest in this type of thing. The biggest success of this weekend was all the knowledge that the participants brought to it," said T'seleie. "I learned so much this weekend, hearing what everyone else had to say based on their personal experiences."

While the weekend's program differed from the typical Dechinta semester, the learning model and hands-on approach remained the same, said Freeland-Ballantyne.

"Students engage in not only traditional academic activities like reading and writing essays, but also land-based activities that inform and ground those theoretical principals," said Freeland-Ballantyne.

"We assert that it's a very Dene model of education, which is learning by doing and learning in a community that is not just a single age," said Freeland-Ballantyne. "So, students bring their families and their children."

For example, during the 2011 spring semester, participants ranged in age from 18 months to 87 years old. When at the lodge, everyone participates in the hands-on activities, not just the registered students.

This practice of allowing all students to bring their families is in part to honour the intergenerational teaching practices of indigenous cultures and to remove the barrier of having to find childcare in order to pursue higher learning, said Freeland-Ballantyne.

"In the traditional (western) education system, learning just happens at a single grade level but what was reflected when we did our research that, especially in the North, learning happens intergenerationally," said Freeland-Ballantyne. "And there are major roles for the elders in teaching or for children in teaching the community. (These practices) have been removed in the western system, and were removed through the residential school system."

The class experience itself is also very different from the traditional western lecture-style prevalent in southern universities. Most classroom activities are conducted as round-table discussions, with all participants teaching and learning from each other.

"A lot of it is trying to redefine what learning means," said Freeland-Ballantyne.

Dechinta participants and administrators have been very involved in the ongoing political discussions about creating a university in Northern Canada.

"There is no university in Northern Canada, and there should be a university in Northern Canada," said T'seleie. "If we're going to talk about having a university here, we need to talk about whose needs that university will serve. We can't just start a university here and base it on the southern model."

This conversation should be about more than how to create infrastructure, it should be about changing the way post-secondary education is conducted, said Freeland-Ballantyne. "We don't need another building, we need a different way of thinking about education that's going to revolutionize what post-secondary looks like - not just in the North, but for Canada," she said. "We can provide an example for the rest of the country."

Whatever a Northern university looks like, there seems to be agreement that it is needed because Northern students tend to struggle at southern universities, which blocks their access to higher learning.

"Right now, when you take young people fresh out of high school from the North, and you send them down south to post-secondary education, it's not a good fit for them a lot of the time," said T'seleie. "It's a completely different culture in southern Canada than it is up here."

"I think there's a massive need (for a Northern university) because we have incredibly smart and talented youth who are not being supported enough to succeed and live their dreams."

"Youth across the North, they're discredited too often," said Freeland-Ballantyne.

"If we want the kind of North that people talk about aspirationally... that's going to happen by empowering people and supporting our communities."

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