Ontario public servants to get mandatory sensitivity training on indigenous people, history
2016/02/19 Leave a comment
While sad that this is needed (it’s 2016!), better late than never and likely one of the more significant TRC recommendations that will be implemented in the long-term.
Not sure what other provinces with large numbers of Indigenous peoples are doing but this approach should be considered by them if not already in place. The same applies to the federal government:
More than 60,000 members of Ontario’s public service will soon receive mandatory sensitivity training regarding the history and experiences of the province’s indigenous people, the Star has learned.
Premier Kathleen Wynne is expected to announce on Wednesday that every OPS employee will receive mandatory indigenous cultural competency and anti-racism training. Ontario’s public servants work in all government ministries from finance to child welfare, agencies and Crown corporations.
Wynne is also expected to further outline mandatory learning expectations in the province’s public education curriculum to include the impact of residential schools, the history of colonization and the role of treaties signed between the Crown and First Nations.
The changes push Ontario toward addressing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC) 94 recommendations, released last June, which are meant to incorporate indigenous culture and teaching throughout Canadian society.
For 100 years, residential schools — run by churches and sanctioned by the government — took nearly 150,000 First Nations, Métis and Inuit children away from their families and communities and sent them away to school. Thousands of children never made it home and died while at the schools.
TRC chair Justice Murray Sinclair called this dark period in Canadian history an act of cultural genocide as the impact of the mass removal of generations of children from their families left a legacy of broken families, poverty, mistrust of government, abuse, alcoholism and fractured lives.
A key component of the sensitivity training will be focused on violence against indigenous women and girls.
…The sensitivity training will instruct employees on terminology, colonial history in Ontario from treaties to child welfare and Indian hospitals such as the Fort William Indian Hospital Sanatorium, which operated from the 1940s to the 1970s. The training will discuss how social disparities and inequities grew from these experiences.
The training will include interactive cultural activities, the harm of stereotyping and the legacy of colonization. It will also teach better “communications and relationship-building skills to promote positive partnerships with indigenous people,” according to information on the event obtained by the Star.
Other courses required for Ontario public servants to take include workplace violence prevention and training on Ontario Human Rights Code requirements regarding persons with disabilities.
The premier is also expected to discuss further progress on collaborating with First Nations, Métis, and Inuit partners on how they are incorporating indigenous history and culture into the public school curriculum.
About Andrew
Multicultural Meanderings 