Wiky’s Cecil King chosen for Aboriginal Achievement Award

by Jim Moodie

SASKATOON-Again this year Manitoulin will be proudly represented when a select group of First Nations standouts are acknowledged by their own people for career accomplishments and contributions to Aboriginal culture.

Cecil King, a veteran Wiky educator currently serving as resident Elder and Ojibwe language teacher at the Saskatoon campus of the First Nations University of Canada, is among 14 notables selected to receive a prestigious National Aboriginal Achievement Award, which will be handed out during a ceremony in Winnipeg on March 6.

Last year, when the gala was held in Toronto, theIsland counted three Aboriginal achievers: filmmaker Shirley Cheechoo, lawyer David Nahwegahbow, and hockey icon Reggie Leach.

“I’ve been given a number of awards out here in Saskatchewan,” noted Mr. King from his Saskatoon home. “But I’m kind of proud of this one.”

As well he should be. As the National Aboriginal Achievement Foundation (NAAF) points out in a press release, the award is considered “the highest honour the (Native) community bestows upon its own achievers.”

The organization describes Mr. King as tireless champion of culturally appropriate education. He “has fought hard to see his belief that First Nations children need not sacrifice their culture and teachings in school come to fruition,” the foundation notes.

Other recipients this year range from a hereditary chief who is a fierce advocate of Mi’kmaq culture (Stephen J. Augustine) and a doctor of veterinary medicine in northern Manitoba (Candace Grier-Lowe), to a Top-40-under-40 entrepreneur (Allan C. McLeod) and a member of the Canadian Olympic Swim team (Adam Sioui). Awards are given out in a variety of categories, including Arts, Sports, Politics, Health, Law and Justice, and Technology and Trades.

Mr. King, unsurprisingly, received the nod in the Education category. It’s a field he’s been involved with all his life, beginning with his own schooling at Wiky’s now-defunct Buzwah School and the equally obsoleteGarnier School for boys in Spanish.

Shortly after graduating from the North Shore residential school-which Mr. King describes as a more positive learning experience than do some pupils-”I was among a group nabbed, so to speak, by the Department of Education, and shipped to Toronto to be trained to be instant teachers,” he recounted.

He would later gain a teaching certificate from the Normal School in North Bay, bachelor’s and master’s degrees in education through the University ofSaskatchewan, and a Ph.D. through the University ofCalgary. His master’s thesis explored “animistic thinking as portrayed through the Ojibwe language,” he said, while his doctoral research focussed on “Indian control of Indian education-local control of curriculum development in Aboriginal schools.”

Through such academic positions, and his later role as a professor with Saskatchewan’s First NationsUniversity-an institution with which he’s been involved since its earliest days, as the Saskatchewan IndianFederated College, in the 1970s-Mr. King has been a pioneer of the shift towards a First Nations-specific form of education.

“I’ve been through the whole process of it to what you see today,” he said. “There’s been a tremendous change in the whole field of education. Before, the non-Indian systems felt that unless we stopped being Indians, we’d never become as educated as non-Indians. That thinking is now gone.”

While he hasn’t lived in Wikwemikong for many decades-almost half a century, in fact-Mr. King has regularly returned to his Island home. He was pleased, and proud, to see the ribbon cut on Wasse-Abin High School-he was, naturally, invited to the opening-and has been a keynote speaker for education conferences hosted by his home reserve.

He suspects he’ll eventually retire back to Wiky, but who knows when that might occur? “I’ve retired three times now in my life,” he said with a chuckle. Each time he gets sucked back into fulfilling some sort of role within the realm of education and academe.

In the 1990s, he served as professor emeritus at Queen’s University in Kingston, developing a teacher-training program for Northern Ontario; at present, he’s still teaching at the Saskatoon campus, versing students in his language, which is described on the prairies as Saulteux, but is basically the same tongue as Ojibwe.

Mr. King has been fluent in this first language for a very long time, although “I didn’t begin my life being fluent,” he noted. “It was something I picked up at elementary school in Buzwah, because all my peers were speaking it outside of the classroom.”

At the Garnier school in Spanish, “we were generally not allowed to speak our language,” he added. “Some cultural dislocation was definitely there, but it wasn’t that big a deal-if you wanted to speak Ojibwe, you just did it in the basement.”

Still, when he arrived as a young man at the Universityof Calgary to work on his Ph.D., his plan to focus on spoken (and written) Ojibwe for his thesis proved unworkable, “because there were no people fluent in the Ojibwe language,” he noted.

These days, of course, every First Nation school across the country includes at least some form of instruction in the language of its respective peoples, be they Cree, Iroquois, Ojibwe or members of another linguistic group, and Mr. King can take some credit for that.

He’s also proud to see many of his people now pursuing post-secondary education-a relative rarity at the time when Mr. King was doing this himself-and emerging as professionals in a variety of fields. “There are lawyers, doctors, and teachers-an army of teachers-which I’ve seen, and I like to think I’ve had some influence there,” he said.

With the Aboriginal Achievement Awards shindig slated for Winnipeg this year, Mr. King will have a relatively short commute from his Saskatoon home (certainly shorter, at any rate, than the ones faced by co-recipients who hail from New Brunswick and Nunavut), as will a couple of his children who plan to attend.

Daughter Alanis, of Debajehmujig (and other) fame, “is here in Saskatoon, working as artistic director of the Native Theatre School,” he noted, while another daughter, Analeah, is in an adjacent prairie province, serving as co-director of the language program at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. Two other children remain in Ontario-a third daughter is working for the Tyendinaga First Nation near Belleville, and a son is in Wiky-but they plan to fly west for the ceremony as well.

Convenient as it is to have his family either living nearby or travelling to be with him in his Western haunt, Mr. King figures he’ll eventually be heading back east to Wiky, where he was instrumental in reviving this community’s powwow in the 1960s, and has maintained many personal and professional connections over the years since.

“When I came out here, almost 50 years ago, it was always with the intent of getting a higher education and returning back home,” he said. “I’m still here, so maybe I’m just a slow learner.”

Or a remarkably committed, award-worthy teacher.