Benefits of Integrating Aboriginal Education

Some of the benefits of integrating Aboriginal education into the curriculum would be for Canadians to truly know about their first peoples here. Incorporating Aboriginal education into the curriculum, especially social studies, could have a huge benefit for future generations. It is important that we know everything we can about the Aboriginal people, and what their way/quality of life was like before the settlers arrived and after. We need to understand what our history has done to the first peoples of Canada, such as how they did not have the right to vote, and how we put them through the residential schools. They have so much that we could learn from, such as their relationship with nature for instance. We could learn a lot from the way they interact with the land.

Learning about Aboriginal education can enhance our curriculum. For instance, in geography we could teach about their settlement patterns and their relationship with the land. You could implement their worldviews into geography, and how all living things are interconnected. We could develop a better sense of and relationship with land if we enforce Aboriginal education into the curriculum, and learn to get to know the land and community on their level.

In history we could teach about assimilation. Aboriginal education should definitely be involved in the history curriculum because this is rooted in our history in Canada. Learning about things such as the Indian Act, the traumatic Residential schools, reserves, status, right to vote, the diversity of Aboriginal people, and cultural differences are all important moments/facts in history that should be mandatory to learn here in Canada. They should devote a unit of history to Aboriginal people so that Canadians learn more extensively the history, as opposed to just bits and pieces.

Therefore, it would be very beneficial to start to integrate Aboriginal education into our curriculum because Aboriginal peoples are such a huge factor in Canadian history and should be recognized as such. You could incorporate Aboriginal education into other curriculums too such as science. And why shouldn’t we? They were the first peoples here before the settlers came in. If the settlers never came, then Aboriginal education would be the way of learning here in Canada. We can at least respect that and implement some of their teachings with ours to make Canada more universal between the Native and non-Native peoples. I think it would be an excellent idea to enhance our curriculum with Aboriginal education.