When she switched from sciences to the Indigenous Teacher Education Program in her second year at the University of British Columbia, Bailey Johnson hoped to feel less isolated on campus. She didn’t expect the move to completely transform her life. “It was kind of like a breath of fresh air to feel safe in a space and safe in the educational system—and for that part of myself to be honoured and not ignored.”
Johnson, who is from the Métis Nation of B.C. Region 3 (Thompson-Okanagan), grew up in a small town somewhat disconnected from her Indigenous identity, after her mother was removed from her own Indigeneity and raised without her birth father. “I think that’s such a reality for so many Indigenous people.” It was only when she found the Indigenous-run teacher education program at UBC (NITEP) that “everything kind of fell into place.”
“When I was seen in that way and given the space to explore who I was in that way, it was such a game-changer for me. It was so validating,” says Johnson, who graduated from NITEP in 2022. Now she’s determined to uplift her own Indigenous students and give them the confidence to find their paths and flourish too. “I try to be the role model that I needed.”
Founded in 1974, 50 years ago this fall, UBC’s groundbreaking Indigenous Teacher Education Program set out to train more Indigenous teachers—who were vastly underrepresented within the profession in B.C.—and to imbue their training with Indigenous knowledge. It was the first such university program in Canada. The goal was to equip and empower a new generation of Indigenous teachers to go back to their communities, uplift their youth, and reinstil in them a sense of value for themselves, their culture, and their traditional knowledge.
Kristy Pittman (second from left) graduated from NITEP on November 23, 2023, with her friends and classmates Lois (left) and Rachel, Keisha, and Braydon (right), all proudly wearing their regalia. Photo by Jerry Miskenack.
NITEP remains a key program, says Verna J. Kirkness, one of its earliest directors, who just turned 89. “Unless a child knows his background and his language, they will never really know themselves as a person, as an Indigenous person,” she says. “So it’s really important for self-concept, and we did a lot of that.
“It’s important to know who you are, where you come from, what your people have done in history,” she continues. “Because there was nothing—there was zero before we [NITEP] started moving in these areas. Absolutely nothing.”
Kirkness, who is from the Fisher River Cree Nation in Manitoba, started teaching at NITEP in the program’s sixth year before taking over the reins a year later in 1981. “I was the first Indigenous person to teach in the NITEP program, as far as I know,” she recalls. Though there were Indigenous members of the program’s advisory committee, the courses were initially taught by allies, who actively encouraged Kirkness and other Indigenous educators to apply.
Her first priority: to travel to Indigenous communities, especially in remote areas of the province, to tell families about NITEP and recruit students to apply. By expanding the number of field centres operated regionally by the program, she also enabled many of these new students to train in or near their home communities, rather than forcing them to move to Vancouver for postsecondary education, far from their families and support networks.
At its peak, Kirkness’s team operated “seven and a half” regional field centres, as Kirkness describes it, including a part-time centre in the small island community of Bella Bella, off the central coast of B.C. and north of Vancouver Island. She also made an active effort to hire more Indigenous educators and field office coordinators as soon as positions became available, and to bring in elders, especially for the collaborative Think-In workshops she organized to brainstorm NITEP’s next steps. “I wanted role models. I wanted people that they could see,” she says.
Despite the lack of role models in her own childhood classrooms, Kirkness loved school from an early age. When she was growing up on reserve in the 1940s, “It was my secret ambition to become a teacher, but I never said it because I never saw an Indigenous teacher. We never had one.”
Unlike many of her generation, Kirkness didn’t go to residential school and was instead encouraged to attend high school in Teulon, a small farming town 142 kilometres from home. From there, she got her degree and began teaching in 1954, later becoming a principal and a school counsellor to support Indigenous youth. By 1971, she was working with the Manitoba Indian Brotherhood (now the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs) to draft a pivotal policy paper, “Indian Control of Indian Education,” to persuade the federal government to put Indigenous schooling back in the hands of Indigenous communities.
It was a natural next step to join NITEP. “If you’re going to have ‘Indian control of Indian education’—and have Indigenous knowledge and methodologies—we have to have Indigenous teachers,” she says.
Asked what kind of reception she received as an Indigenous woman on campus in 1981, she says her experience was positive. “I think I was treated very well. Of course, I would insist on it,” Kirkness says, laughing. She later developed the Ts”kel graduate program, helped establish the First Nations House of Learning to support Indigenous students in other UBC faculties, published numerous books, and received both the Order of Canada and Order of Manitoba. “I wasn’t to be pushed around.”
Nor was her successor, Jo-ann Archibald Q’um Q’um Xiiem, whose decades of contributions to Indigenous education and pedagogy, at UBC and elsewhere, would later earn her the Order of Canada, too. Q’um Q’um Xiiem was coordinating NITEP’s Chilliwack field centre, on the traditional land of her Sto:lo Nation, when she moved to Vancouver to become the program’s director in 1985. It would be the first of her three stints at the helm. By then “Verna had revitalized NITEP,” she says, with multiple field centres, updated Indigenous courses, and a crop of new teachers-in-training keen to improve learning for the Indigenous students they would soon serve. “It was very exciting.”
NITEP staff in the early 1980s. Top row (left to right): Gregg Batt, Celia Haig Brown, Val Friesen. Middle row: Linda Williams, Sheila TeHennepe, Verna J. Kirkness. Front row: Robert Anthony. Terry Hood, Roger Smith. Jo-ann Archibald Q’um Q’um Xiiem seated on the brick wall, flanked by an unknown man seated next to her, and Patti McMillan standing. Courtesy of NITEP Archives/Flickr page.
But it wasn’t without its challenges.
“There was still lots of skepticism about the quality of the program or the quality of the students in the program, and when they graduated there was always, ‘Are they as good as all the others who took teacher education? Are they really qualified to teach?’” she recalls. “So a lot of our time was spent rationalizing and advocating for the program.” While NITEP received fairly good support from the dean and leadership of the faculty of education, some of the sponsor teachers who selected student teachers for practicum assignments in their classrooms had questions, she says—as did the university senate committee, which required regular reports from the program to prove its worth.
“Trying to make institutional change takes a long time,” says Q’um Q’um Xiiem, who is now chancellor of the University of the Fraser Valley. But it was “quite a big achievement in 1974” just to get a university program dedicated to Indigenous teachers approved by the faculty of education. When she got her own teaching degree in 1972 from UBC, “there was nothing in the program that was Indigenous.
“NITEP has been groundbreaking,” she concludes. “It is an important model that has served Indigenous communities really well.” NITEP remains a model today—both in the Indigenous-grounded courses it teaches and the ways in which they’re taught—so students can learn in a supportive environment, rooted in community. Field centres continue to operate in Lake Babine in northern B.C. and in the Okanagan, and for students who opt for courses on the UBC campus, NITEP fosters a family environment there too, both inside and outside the classroom.
That collective sense of support meant a lot to Kristy Pittman, who graduated from NITEP last year. “It felt like a family, and it was so uplifting and empowering to see so many different Indigenous educators from all over Turtle Island,” she says.
Pittman, who grew up in California and is Yurok, Karuk, and Chetco on her mother’s side, and St’át’imc on her late father’s side, was 38 when she enrolled in NITEP. She was worried she’d missed her chance to follow her dream. Instead she found “a safe space for Indigenous people to nourish their thoughts and teachings so that they can help spread awareness and truth and knowledge.
“All that knowledge, they’re spreading out like medicine,” she continues. “They’re taking those seeds of knowledge and then spreading them throughout the world … to nourish people’s minds and bodies and spirits in a good way.”
Now teaching at a small community school on her late dad’s traditional St’át’imc territory about an hour from Pemberton, Pittman is determined to uplift and inspire both her students and her own two children to follow their dreams, too. She recalls a young girl she met while substitute teaching at another community school. “She was so excited. She was like, ‘You’re Indigenous! I’ve never had a teacher that looks like me.’”
Kristy Pittman (centre) says her family’s support uplifted her when she went back to school for NITEP. Her husband Jerry (left) and their children, Helomey’, eight, and Spánu, six, celebrated her achievement at the Indigenous graduation ceremony at the Longhouse at UBC on November 25, 2023. Photo by Wolfn Photography.
The NITEP program is vital, she says—and key to reconciliation.
Recent graduate Bailey Johnson, who now teaches Indigenous students in remote northern Albertan communities online, agrees. “Of course there’s been so much progression in our awareness of Indigenous history and issues, especially surrounding education,” she says. “But I think that having Indigenous spaces is going to be important for as long as we live and exist in traditional [western] systems. Indigenous people need spaces in which their voices are upheld, and I think part of reconciliation is maintaining and cultivating and uplifting those spaces and programs.”
Indigenous teachers are still underrepresented in classrooms, so NITEP remains “incredibly necessary,” says the program’s current director Dustin Louie, who is from the Nee Tahi Buhn Nation and connected to the Nadleh Whut’en of the Dakelh people in central B.C. “It’s such a foundational piece to Indigenous education in the province.”
He credits the matriarchs who came before him for doing the work to create this space. Since NITEP’s inception 50 years ago, it has graduated nearly 500 new Indigenous teachers. And this year’s incoming class of 32 students is the biggest yet.
“I think we’ve come a long way,” early director Verna J. Kirkness says, “and I think things continue to move along. We can’t stop. There’s no end to this. And I value the people that are involved and are taking over as those of us leave,” she adds. “There’s a new crop going all the time.”
“I think we’re just at the beginning of where we need to go,” Johnson says. “Fifty years, there’s been so much progression. But I think in the next 50 years, we’ll be able to see some amazing things. Let’s keep the momentum going, because Indigenous people and Indigenous voices are needed more than ever.”
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