Inuk student David Nassak left his community of 500 people a few months ago to study business administration among thousands of students at John Abbott College in Montreal.
For his entire life, he’d known the names of everyone around him. After the move, he discovered a strange new sense of isolation.
“There’s a lot of people but for some reason you feel alone,” he says.
Aboriginal Resource Centre celebrates 25th13:10
Like many aboriginal students, Nassak found a new community at the school’s Aboriginal Student Resource Centre, which today celebrates its 25th anniversary.
Mike O’Connor, pedagogical councillor, and Louise Legault, coordinator, have been working at the centre for eight years. (Marika Wheeler/CBC)
The centre organizes extracurricular workshops and activities as well as provide academic counseling and support to Aboriginal students.
Nassak says he made many friends at the centre, and spends some of his free time there playing chess. He’s rarely able to beat the pedagogical coordinator at the centre, Mike O’Connor.
“Essentially we are there to help them get through, but to also help them become more independent and achieve success on their own,” O’Connor says.
Celebration of Aboriginal culture and success
To mark the 25th anniversary of the centre, which started off as a resource center for Cree nursing students, a number of activities will be going on all day at the college common space, the Agora.
“Mainly we want to celebrate the students — all those [who] through the years came through here and graduated, or all those who didn’t graduate, they all went back home and had learned something,” says Louise Legault, the center’s coordinator.
Xina Cowan, who organizes many of the student activities at the centre, says she hopes the anniversary will show the greater student population what great work is being done there.
“We’re on the fourth floor in the corner. I don’t know how much other non-indigenous students know about our centre,” she says.
“It’ll be a chance to expose it to everybody and say, ‘Hey guys, this is what we are doing, [look] how awesome we are!'”
Inuk, Zoe Kroonenburg (left) , Mohawk JaymeLee Alfred (centre) and Youth Fusion Coordinator Xina Cowan (right) can be found most days at the Aboriginal Student Resource Centre. (Marika Wheeler/CBC)
Zoe Kroonenburg, an Inuk student from Kuujjuaraapik, says the coordinators at the centre have been invaluable during her time at John Abbott College.
She says leaving a small community to study in the south, where culture, language and academic expectations are vastly different, is very difficult.
“I love this place because everyone here knows what I’m going through,” says Kroonenburg.
Celebrations on campus
During the celebrations, which begin at 11:30 a.m., students will perform throat singing and drumming as well as present a 14-minute film they made about how important the centre is to them.
‘It’s not really all about school here. It’s like a family.’- Student JaymeLee Alfred
“It’s not really all about school here. It’s like a family” says JaymeLee Alfred, a Mohawk student who was very involved in making the film.
“If you think about at your home, you offer all these different qualities, and the centre does the same thing for us.”
She says her favourite parts of the film are the responses they got from a half a dozen students who were asked to choose one word to describe their time at the college. Hers would be “memorable”.
“I have so many moments that I’ll take with me after this experience, and after graduation,” she says, adding she hopes the friendships she has forged here will follow her through life.
Watch the video produced by students who use the Aboriginal Student Resource Centre:
[embedded content]
