Diane Hill, who is from the Oneida Nation of the Thames in southwestern Ontario, talks about the barriers she faced as an Indigenous student while attending UTSC. Diane reflects on how the history of Indigenous peoples and their education has shaped her peers and her own experiences with education.
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0:03
I wake up every day and it’s like I have to fight colonialism, but it’s like, I’m in it, I’m swimming in it.
0:21
Coming to Scarborough from a reserve was a really, almost a giant leap that I didn’t even realize myself in my first year.
0:30
Coming to UTSC as a bubbly first year student, I was like oh, cool, I’ll find the Native Student Association. So I look around campus, look wherever.
0:40
Where’s the room? I don’t see it. Where’s the elder on campus? I don’t see them. Why don’t we have an elder here all week? Why don’t we have space on campus? Why don’t we have even a course? We don’t have an Aboriginal studies course here. So, it’s like asking these questions and what are the answers to them?
0:58
Every time I was faced with a question of what’s your background, I always had to come with a history lesson. “Well, what tribe? Well, from where? Do you go to school for free? Do you know how to say anything in Native?” Or like, “oh, can you explain to me this?”
1:17
And the thing is, what people don’t realize is Aboriginal people are pretty much the only people in Canada that get asked these questions.
1:29
Like, do you go to school for free? Do we ask any other group in Canada that question? Do you go to school for free? No. [Laughs]
1:36
In all honesty, probably no space on campus makes me feel 100% comfortable. I was in the Student Centre and I was handing out flyers, was talking about what the Elder Cat [Criger] does on campus,
1:49
and someone came up to me and they were like, “Oh, these are cool flyers”, and I said yeah, you know, they have a small teaching on them, and so they said to me “Oh, are you Native?” And I said yeah, and they’re like “Yeah, I read about you in my anthro book”.
2:07
And I was like okay, I need to go away from here. [Laughs] Because I am not in the mood to explain to this person how wrong that is to say to someone.
2:23
Before, [Indigenous] people weren’t allowed to be on this land or this land was taken away from them, but now, I’m on this land and I’m taking everything I can out of it. [Laughs] If that means going to school for five or six years.
