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IQALUIT
With the theme "It Starts at Home," the first Circumpolar Conference on Education for Indigenous People started at home, in Iqaluit, last Tuesday.

Despite the one-day delay due to bad weather, Premier Eva Aariak welcomes delegates from across Canada, the United States, Sweden, Greenland and Norway to the Circumpolar Conference on Education for Indigenous People, Nov. 27. - Peter Worden/NNSL photo

"We face many changes," said Premier Eva Aariak, also Nunavut's Education Minister, in welcoming close to 125 delegates from across Canada's North, Alaska, Sweden, Greenland and Norway. "It's important we don't work in isolation."

A blizzard delayed the conference by one day, so Aariak and other keynote speakers were quick to break the ice on such hard topics as early childhood education and parental involvement - focal points of the conference.

"How do we engage parents in their children's education?" asked Aariak, stressing a need to combine traditional knowledge with modern technology. "Parents are children's very first, most important lifelong teachers. In the Inuit perspective, they're a key element in helping our children learn."

Speaker Jana Harcharek, from the North Slope Borough School District in Alaska, echoed Aariak's and others' remarks, touching on challenges to language, culture and self identity in indigenous education.

"Even though we had local control over education, we hadn't exercised local control over content," said Harcharek. "We as a school district had never gone to the people," she said, explaining her school district, like so many others, was "a system developed in urban America suited for urban American students.

"We had been saying, 'This is what you need to learn and this is how you're going to do it.'"

Harcharek said she and others with the school district travelled to communities far and wide to meet with elders. She said breaking down the generation gap was key.

"We didn't just pop in and pop out," she said. "One of the things we asked was, 'What does a well-rounded, well-balanced teenager look like?'"

By the end of the team's travels and interviews, they had a list of expected knowledge and skills for a teenager with a wide-ranging spectrum of abilities, from knowing trigonometry to knowing how to fix a snow machine and sew.

"There is a history of collaboration between the circumpolar regions," said Aariak. "Relevant programs will help them engage in learning, gain the skills to become self-reliant, and build their confidence and identity as modern indigenous people.

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