SASKATOON, Saskatchewan—The students in the crowded hall fall silent as Darlene Speidel, an elder and “knowledge keeper” of native traditions, says a prayer in the Lakota language over soup and bannock, a kind of flat bread.
“It always makes me feel so good to see all of you students and the efforts you’re putting in to advancing yourselves,” Speidel adds, in English, speaking in the new Gordon Oakes Red Bear Student Centre at the University of Saskatchewan.
The price of this free lunch, under a ceiling designed to look like a medicine wheel, is to listen to a presentation about campus mental-health services.
When it’s over, there’s a dash for the buffet.
Giving them their own building and cultural activities, intensive personal and academic help, and even free food are among the measures Canadian universities are taking to increase the enrollment and graduation odds of native, or indigenous, students, who get university degrees at less than half the rate of the non-indigenous population.
Those odds are gradually improving. And policymakers say some of the same approaches could succeed for other groups that go to college at lower levels than whites for surprisingly similar reasons—including, in the United States, Hispanics, blacks, and Native Americans. “A lot of these things are transferable,” said Peter Stoicheff, the university’s president.
As in the United States, they’re also practical.
[For more of this story, written by Jon Marcus, go to https://www.theatlantic.com/ed...demographics/508505/]
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