WUNNUMIN LAKE – Wednesday was back-to-school day for the young learners at John George Martin Memorial School, where about 150 children and youth are enrolled in kindergarten to Grade 10.
“I was surprised,” said Tommy Sainnawap, the school’s education director. “Every classroom was packed. They were all looking forward to going back to school.”
This year’s student rolls include more than 30 in the ninth and 10th grades, he said.
After Grade 10, those students will have to leave the Oji-Cree community if they want to get high school diplomas.
Grade 10 is the end of the line in on the Wunnumin Lake First Nation reserve, so students finish secondary schooling in Sioux Lookout, Thunder Bay or another urban setting.
It’s like that for almost all Treaty 9 communities, where school programming typically ends at Grade 8 or 10.
Sol Mamakwa, an NDP member of provincial parliament who hails from a First Nation northwest of Wunnumin Lake, wishes it were otherwise.
Every First Nation in Northern Ontario should have a high school, he told Dougall Media in an interview.
Mamakwa, the MPP for Kiiwetinoong, said he has “mixed feelings” about back-to-school time and many northern Indigenous teens coming to cities for high school.
“You want to encourage them to try and be successful and attend school … but over the last 20 years we’ve lost students that have gone to school (in Thunder Bay),” he noted.
“I think not having high schools in the North is a big issue,” he said. “Every First Nation should have a high school.”
Mamakwa said leaders “need to start looking at” having high schools in First Nations so youth don’t have to leave home.
“When you leave the reserve, you leave your language, your family, your ways of life, the teachings, identity,” he said from Windsor, where he was participating in an Ontario NDP Caucus retreat.
“You leave the land, so it’s … taking you away from who you are. And so that’s why I have mixed feelings.”
The arrival of First Nations students in Thunder Bay will once again be marked by a Wake the Giant Music Festival on the city’s waterfront.
The lineup for this year’s festival, set for Sept. 14, includes the Arkells, Chester Knight and Coleman Hell.
“I always try to be part of it, just to welcome the students that are there,” Mamakwa said of the festival.
“I’m very happy for the people that are organizing that, just to welcome them.
“I encourage Thunder Bay to welcome the students that are coming from the North, to take care of our children, to make sure they are safe.”
