N.S. drops controversial high school course

Assignment asked pupils to list the advantages of residential schools

HALIFAX — Responding to complaints from an Indigenous girl and her mother, the Nova Scotia government has scrapped a high school correspondence course that asked students to list the advantages of the residential school system.

Malaika Joudry-martel and her mother shalan joudry — a Mi’kmaq poet who writes her name with lower-case letters — were reviewing the chapter on First Nations on Wednesday when the 15-year-old warned her mother that some of the content in the English course was racist.

One assignment asked students to list, in chart form, the benefits and disadvantages of being placed in a residential school. “I just froze,” joudry said in an interview Friday from her home on the Bear River First Nation.

“I thought, no, we removed this years ago from the Canadian curriculum ... That activity makes it seem as though there could be a balance, that there are advantages to that legacy.”

The 170-page course offered other “passively racist” content, she said, including questions asking why poverty, alcoholism and unemployment are common among First Nations populations.

Given the recent reports from Kamloops, B.C., where Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation discovered what are believed to be the remains of 215 children at the former residential school there, it’s impossible to associate anything good with that system, joudry said.

“What is surprising is that in 2021, course material approved by the minister of education and sent to my daughter — a Mi’kmaq student — was encouraging her to talk about the advantages of these schools,” she said.

“When I read those questions, it does not look like they are asking the students to be critical thinkers. What this is doing is reinforcing negative stereotypes.”