Aboriginal Youth Forum in Montreal creates space for dialogue
“The idea is to work from the bottom up,” said Philippe Tsaronsere Meilleur, executive director of the Montreal Native Community Development Centre (MNCDC), describing the basis for Make Yourself Heard, the first-ever Aboriginal youth forum in Montreal.
Kicking off March 21 at the Montreal Science Centre, the forum was designed to consult with Aboriginal youth from all Nations and backgrounds living in Montreal to find out more about what they wanted and needed. It was jointly hosted by Quebec Native Women and the MNCDC.
“We want to create programs that really correspond to the needs of the youth,” said Meilleur. Participants tackled a series of issues – and every discussion was being recorded.
The recordings, he said, “will be delivered verbatim to researchers, who will give us conclusions and recommendations based on them.” That’s where working from the bottom up comes in. Meilleur says too often Indigenous organizations impose ideas on youth because they don’t know how to find young people to hear first-hand what they need.
“[Indigenous youth in the city] are spread out on a huge territory and it’s hard to reach them sometimes,” he admits, “but that’s not a good reason for doing top-down kinds of approaches.”
The forum would also be holding an election for a youth council to represent the participants and their wishes. The MNCDC has an official youth representative on its board, and Meilleur said that person is mandated to take direction from the youth council. The role of the youth council will be to “initiate projects and recommend things, and also we’ll try to train them to become delegates on other boards around the city.”
Meilleur was pleased with the turnout, between 70 and 80 people on a wet, slushy day.
In the hall outside the main forum room, partner organizations were set up offering information about their services. Among them was Quebec Native Women, the event’s co-sponsor.
Jaimie Dubé from the First Nations Human Resources Development Commission of Quebec (FNHRDCQ) explained the role her organization plays in helping Indigenous people in urban areas find employment. You don’t have to be from a Quebec Indigenous community to get help from their office in Montreal (or their other offices in Val-d’Or, Sept-Îles and Quebec City).
“We have employment development officers who handle our clients who are looking for jobs. We can provide advice and support for people seeking work. We also have a multi-service centre in the office with computer access for online job searching, plus a bulletin board with job offers and information about other programs in Montreal.”
She stressed that the FNHRDCQ’s on-site employment counsellors provide an array of services to clients, whether clients have a specific employment goal in mind or not. Maybe they want to go back to school to learn a professional skill, or maybe they’re looking for a particular kind of job. Maybe they need any job they can get. Whatever they’re hoping for, Dubé said, Indigenous people in Montreal looking for work should contact her organization.
But especially for young people, the organization offers a broad range of services, including arranging general or professional training – with funding for tuition and materials. The FNHRDCQ also offers an Aboriginal-specific version of Emploi-Québec’s summer career placement program for full-time students who need summer jobs.
Dubé says her organization is a good option for those who quit high school and now want to get the equivalencies they need for professional training.
“Even if the objective isn’t definite,” she said, “we can still help that person get a clearer picture of what their options are, and help them get a sense of how to develop their professional potential and also get some experience. It could mean getting a TDG [General Development Test, which allows people over 18 to access professional training courses], going back to school at the level where they left off, at an adult high school. It could be doing some preliminary courses to get ready to do a TDG test, and after, if the person decides they want to get their DEP [Vocational Studies Diploma], we have access to a variety of DEP programs.”
At her table a few booths down, the Montreal Native Friendship Centre’s Ashanti Rosado explained that her organization does many similar things to help Indigenous people in the Montreal find and deal with the services they need, and also builds a community with other Indigenous people experiencing the sometimes-alienating world of the urban metropolis.
“Our community is not only Nations from Quebec – it’s across Canada,” Rosado explained. “It’s very diverse and very supportive. I could pretty much say that it becomes a family. You have that sense. Not only of a community of friends, but a real family.”
For Crees and other Indigenous people coming into the city, said Rosado, “approaching places like the Friendship Centre is a good start, because you’ll find a lot of people sharing the same fears and anxieties about living in the big city. Some people are not sure what to do, and I see many of them end up supporting each other. Those who have more experience share their tricks and the steps to follow. It’s definitely something that our staff does, but when your friend tells you about it or is willing to help with the things you have to do, that makes it easier.”
She encourages newcomers to Montreal to drop by the centre and simply say hello, so they can get information on services like education, employment and health care. There’s also a social aspect – Wednesday nights are cultural nights with a meal, some arts and crafts and beading, and drum practice. Inuit stone carvers are at the Centre every day teaching the art of stone carving.
“Believe it or not, at the centre we’ve met Indigenous people from all over the world – like Australia and Finland. It’s pretty much the same experience, they feel alienated so they come there to have a sense of what it’s like closer to their own community.”
Across the hall, three members of the Canadian Roots project introduced themselves as an accidental display of Indigenous people from around the world coming together. They were Shane Kelsey (an Ojibway from Shore Lake, Ontario), Ivan Arturo (Colombia), and Moussa Sène (Senegal).
Canadian Roots, explained Kelsey, works “to raise awareness about decolonization in Native culture, and help close the gap between non-Indigenous and Indigenous youth.”
“For reconciliation between non-Indigenous and Indigenous people, the first step before that is talking about the problem, before we talk about solutions,” Sène said. “The relationship between Indigenous people and non-Indigenous people has been greatly impacted by colonization. We have to somehow start talking about the impact of colonization on people – on their history and on their present culture – while also talking about how we can build new relationships that are outside this framework.”
He notes that the French colonized his country for more than 200 years. Arturo nodded that the Spanish had colonized his country.
“Creating spaces of dialogue where we can value diversity and Aboriginal culture, and seeing the positive ways in which we empower one another, that’s a very good way to share experiences and learn from one another,” Arturo said.
Canadian Roots specifically sets up exchanges of Indigenous and non-Indigenous youths throughout Canada to help them understand one another. Sène said that their next exchange, in the coming week, would be between youths in the Mohawk Nation of Kahnawake and young people from Montreal’s Côte-des-Neiges neighbourhood, which has a large population of immigrant families from Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
“Of course, the funny thing is when we first met with the youths from Côte-des-Neiges, most of them didn’t know what a Native person was,” Sène laughed. “They heard about it in class, but they didn’t know exactly what it meant. They’re coming from far, but we’re talking about two communities that are only a 30-minute drive away from one another.”