THUNDER BAY — A recent $100,000 donation will help create Indigenous-led spaces and programming at Lakehead University.
The funding from insurance and financial services company Canada Life is for the school’s Gichi Kendaasiwin initiative, and was announced at Lakehead on Sept 29.
“Right now, (with) this project we’re looking at building various spaces across all of our three campuses that allow for cultural learning to happen … in a more appropriate way,” Denise Baxter, the vice provost of Indigenous initiatives at Lakehead, told Newswatch.
“Supporting student success is obviously really at the heart of all this and why we’re doing this, and then connecting our work with outreach to communities.”
More than a decade ago, Lakehead University planned to build its Gichi Kendaasiwin Centre as a stand-alone building for Indigenous-led learning, but the project scope has changed over the years. Gichi Kendaasiwin is Anishinaabemowin for higher knowledge.
Earlier this year, the school received $1 million from BMO towards a new indoor-outdoor space as part of the reimagined project.
Gichi Kendaasiwin now “also encompasses a constellation of programs and spaces across Lakehead’s campuses, reflecting the university’s long-term commitment to reconciliation and Indigenous student success,” the university said in a media release.
“We are looking at a few different spaces for building,” Baxter said of the planned new indoor-outdoor space.
“We’ve been meeting with the Elders council — we’ve been meeting with them for several months — and we also had meetings across the region with Indigenous people, faculty, staff and students to find out what it was that they were looking for in some kind of a space that would allow them to learn in a more culturally relatable way.”
Based on the feedback they received, Baxter said, they want to create a large enough indoor space that would feature a large circular room capable of holding 60 to 70 people, and which is near the water and has a fair number of windows to connect students with the outside.
“We’ve been connecting it to our new strategic plan evolution which has the North Star as a guiding principle so a big portion of those windows will be facing north and the other portion will be facing south,” she said.
“It gets dark here early in the winter time and if it’s a clear night, you should be able to see the Big Dipper and then the North Star coming out of those areas.”
Baxter said approximately 13 per cent of Lakehead’s students identify as being First Nation, Métis or Inuit, and over the last couple of years, the university has seen an influx of students from the far north to access post-secondary programming.
Improvements to spaces across the school’s campuses, including places like the Faculty of Education and the law school, are also planned as part of the initiative, she said, adding that it will also include utilizing spaces beyond all classrooms.
“I do a lot of outdoor learning, so we use the fire just outside by Lake Tamblyn that the student union has rehabbed, and it’s quite a nice space to do work,” Baxter said. “And so we smoke our hides out there — we’ll sit by the fire and sometimes we’ll have a knowledge keeper come and do some work with us.”
“All of these things really move it beyond Zoom or beyond the classroom,” she continued. “And when we talk about Lakehead, when we think about centring Indigeneity at the heart of the work that we do, I have students from all different backgrounds, all over the world, in my class.”
“But they’re all having an opportunity to engage in some beading — later, we’re going to be learning about the Seven Grandfather Teachings and doing some work with that, and so all of these things, I think, layer up over the course of a person’s educational time here.”
