Education

The training of a would-be shaman under an experienced angakkuq was the only type of formal education that existed in traditional Inuit society. General knowledge was informally transmitted from father to son and mother to daughter by enlisting the children’s participation in hunting, fishing, and domestic tasks.

The first schools in the Canadian Arctic were established by the Moravian missionaries in Nain, Okak, and Hopedale (Labrador) around 1790. They provided basic courses in reading, writing, arithmetic, and religion. Inuttut was the sole language in use. By 1840 all of the Labrador Inuit were literate and a few of them even acted as teachers.

In the rest of Inuit nunaat, however, it was not before the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth that literacy was introduced by the Anglicans under the form of syllabic characters in the east and of a non-standardized alphabetical rendering of the language in the west. Even in the absence of formal schools, reading and writing skills spread rapidly, most people acquiring them from their relatives and friends.

After 1920, mission schools were established with the support of federal subsidies. There were thirty of them in 1950, including two boarding institutions in the Mackenzie delta. In the eastern Arctic, the missionaries partly taught in Inuktitut, but the Mackenzie boarding schools, which catered to the entire western Inuit population, completely forbade the use of this language. English was also the unique teaching medium in the federal day schools that began to spread throughout the west Territories and Arctic Quebec from the late 1940s on. When Newfoundland joined Canada in 1949 and as a province acquired responsibility for education, English became the language of instruction in Labrador schools as well.

During the 1950s and early 1960s, the federal establishments progressively replaced the missionary schools. In most settlements, teaching was limited to the primary grades, but in larger communities some secondary classes were also offered. Those children wishing to complete high school, however, had to go to the newly created boarding institutions in Inuvik (Mackenzie), Chesterfield Inlet (Keewatin), Iqaluit (Baffin), and Churchill (Manitoba).

Between 1964 and 1968, the Quebec government established its own primary schools in the north of the province, where teaching was conducted in both Inuktitut and French. The federal schools continued to operate, but from 1969 on they had to introduce some Inuktitut in the early grades. However, it was not until the 1970s that northern education came under the control of local people. In 1973 the government of the Northwest Territories became responsible for its school system, the administration of which was entrusted to elected boards of education, one for each region. Five years later, all Arctic Quebec schools were transferred to the Kativik School Board, an Inuit-controlled organization established under the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement.

In most Quebec and eastern territorial schools, Inuktitut has now become the sole teaching medium from kindergarten to grade three. The second language (English in the Northwest Territories, English or French in Quebec) is then introduced, but some Inuktitut courses continue to be offered throughout the primary and secondary levels. The native language is also sporadically taught in several Labrador and western territorial Inuit communities.

In a majority of the Canadian Arctic settlements, education is now available up to grades eleven or twelve. Post-secondary technical training is provided by Aurora College and Nunavut Arctic College (with six campuses in the Northwest Territories), Kativik School Board’s adult education services (in northern Quebec), and the Labrador Community College (in Happy Valley). These establishments also offer some university-level courses in the fields, notably, of teacher and interpreter/transla-tor training. Grants are available to Inuit students who wish to enrol in a southern Canadian institution of higher learning.

Yet, despite these incentives, the level of formal education remains lower than the average. During the early 1990s, those who had completed grade nine accounted for less than 60 percent of the Inuit population (compared with 80 percent for Canada in general), while individuals with some college or university education did not exceed 6 percent of all Inuit (as compared with a Canadian average of almost 20 percent). Nevertheless, progress had been made since the early 1980s, when the respective percentages had stood at 39 percent (grade nine) and 4 percent (college education).

Dropping out of school still constitutes a major problem in the north. Still, almost all Inuktitut speakers can read and write their language, and most individuals under forty or fifty are also literate in English, at least to some degree. Education appears appropriate to a majority of the Inuit, and new curricula, more respectful of aboriginal culture than the current ones, are now being devised in various areas of the Arctic.

The principal problem with formal education in the Arctic is that it generates among its graduates professional expectations that cannot be met by the current labour market. Many young educated Inuit, confronted by the lack of job opportunities – and also by the gap that separates them from their more tradition-oriented parents – tend to feel useless. They then often turn to alcohol and drugs, which may open the door to violence and suicide.