Large development projects are coming soon to northern Manitoba. Education—some now underway; some the missing piece so far—will be crucial in determining who benefits.
First, Indigenous rights and the north’s fragile environment will have to be protected. Failure to do so should be a deal breaker.
Equally important, governments and the private sector will have to be pushed to ensure that it is northerners who are hired to do the work, and that it is northern Indigenous communities that benefit from these projects.
Too often this has not happened in the past, largely because the resource extraction economy has for decades transferred massive amounts of wealth south, rather than investing it in the needs of the people of northern Manitoba. Consequently, poverty levels are high and labour shortages are the norm across the north.
To solve the labour shortages and to produce benefits for northerners and their communities, exciting educational initiatives are emerging. Many involve the University College of the North (UCN), although Brandon’s Assiniboine College is also doing important work. UCN is physically located in the north and has the unique legislative mandate “to serve the educational needs of Aboriginal and northern Manitobans, and to enhance the economic and social wellbeing of northern Manitoba,” and has campuses in The Pas and Thompson and twelve regional centres, nine on northern reserves where it works closely with Indigenous communities.
For example, UCN’s Kenanow Faculty of Education is a northern-focused, largely Indigenous-created method for training northern teachers. Kenanow merges the Manitoba curriculum with the cultural realities of northern and Indigenous communities, including land-based activities and experiential learning. The program is delivered in The Pas and Thompson, but also in many smaller communities across the north. Of crucial importance is that most graduates stay to teach in their home communities, at a time when those communities are desperately short of teachers.
Bunibonnibee Cree Nation (Oxford House) is working to develop their own decolonized educational strategy to fit the needs of their fly-in community. UCN is working with them in a supportive role. Rather than saying, “here are the courses we offer,” UCN has said, “what are your educational needs and how can we work with you to meet those needs?”
UCN has created a four-week Mining Readiness Training Program. The first cohort began in September 2024 at Sagkeeng First Nation. Four cohorts have completed the program. Almost all have been employed, albeit in entry-level jobs. Northern Indigenous people benefit, but so do mining companies because the cost of importing “contract miners” has skyrocketed.
Many such creative efforts are underway to decolonize and “northernize” education. Made in the north, by and for northerners and especially Indigenous peoples, this is the path to the development of a skilled northern labour force and to multiple benefits for northern communities.
A limiting factor is that high school graduation is the essential starting point in creating a skilled northern labour force, and high school graduation rates in the north are low.
What is needed to overcome this limitation is more adult basic education—adult learning centres that offer the mature high school diploma to those who have not previously completed high school, and adult literacy programs that bring adults’ literacy and numeracy skills up to a high school entry level. These are highly successful across Manitoba. The successful program in Nisichawayasihk (Nelson House) shows this can be done in northern Indigenous communities, although it is expensive.
The cost of doing nothing, of course, is far more expensive, as can be seen in Manitoba’s homelessness crisis.
Adult basic education meets the needs of those many adults who did not graduate high school, and makes possible their transition into post-secondary education, which leads to the production of skilled workers and to improved lives for northerners.
In this way adult basic education becomes the necessary foundation for a “made in the north” labour force development strategy that will benefit northern communities.
Yet adult basic education is underdeveloped in Manitoba’s north, trapping many in poverty, depriving the northern economy of skilled workers, and preventing northern communities from making the changes they want to make.
Expanded public investment in adult basic education will build the pathway into the various forms of post-secondary education and training that will create a skilled northern labour force, and expanded public investment in UCN and other northern educational institutions will enhance their ability to respond to the many requests from small northern communities for support in developing local, decolonized educational strategies.
After decades of extracting wealth from the north, it is time to reverse that flow and invest in the creative educational initiatives driving northern Manitoba’s made-in-the-north labour force development strategy.
