Sandee Mitchell never finished Grade 11 and was once told by a teacher that she wasn’t “university material.”
That comment stuck, she said. “I thought, well, why am I here if I’m not going to be able to learn and be part of further education?’
“I didn’t have the kind of support that most people had, so it made it really difficult for me to engage in school.”
In 1992, when she was 30, however, Mitchell enrolled in an Indigenous teacher assistant program at the Saanich Adult Education Centre on West Saanich Road near Brentwood Bay.
Mitchell, who is Anishinaabe from the Kebaowek First Nation in Ontario, thought it would be easier to restart her schooling within an Indigenous community.
“It felt safer for me, so that’s where I started,” she said. “I was really nervous about going back.
“It’s part of the experience that Indigenous people have had [with] school … There’s a big fear of failure.”
She found the centre was unlike any learning environment she had ever experienced — welcoming, safe and unabashedly Indigenous.
“You can hear drumming and singing going on in the building first thing in the morning … starting the day in a good way.”
Mitchell ended up graduating with honours, went on to earn a master’s degree in social work and is now an instructor at Camosun College.
W̱SÁNEĆ community members will celebrate today the next era of the Saanich Adult Education Centre as it becomes W̱SÁNEĆ College.
College director Kendra Underwood said the name change is more than a rebranding exercise — it reflects the growing ambitions and scope of the adult education and post-secondary learning institute, which serves the four W̱SÁNEĆ nations in the Saanich Peninsula.
W̱SÁNEĆ College currently offers Dogwood diplomas for those finishing high school as adults — along with college prep and other courses and certificates accredited with Camosun and the University of Victoria — to about 100 learners in small classes with extensive support.
In the next four years, W̱SÁNEĆ College will look to create its own registrar system, hire its own faculty members, and increase its administrative staff by a third, Underwood said.
The plans follow a law passed last month that commits to funding Indigenous-led post-secondary institutes. The province has committed to $6.45 million in annual funding for eligible Indigenous-led institutes.
The details of funding distribution have yet to be decided, but Underwood said it’s likely W̱SÁNEĆ College, one of the larger Indigenous-led post-secondary institutions in the province, will be a recipient.
After decades of advocacy, the institution was among 10 Indigenous-led post-secondary institutions that began receiving one-off provincial core funding of $400,000 each fiscal year starting in 2021.
Starting with $12,000 and a handshake
What would become W̱SÁNEĆ College began around 1990 with $12,000 in funding and a handshake agreement with the then-Camosun president, the late Dan Cornish, to deliver Grade 10 adult basic education upgrades, said longtime W̱SÁNEĆ school board administrator Curtis Olsen.
Instruction began in a three-classroom portable at 7449 West Saanich Rd.
Throughout the years, the institution relied on one-off grants and program funding to deliver its educational mandate.
Funding sometimes came with distasteful names such as the “severely employment disadvantaged program,” Olsen said.
In the mid 1990s, Camosun College sold a two-storey building on its Interurban Campus — where the cafeteria now stands — to the W̱SÁNEĆ school board, then known as the Saanich Indian School Board, for $1.
The building, which would otherwise have been torn down, Olsen said, was split into 24 sections, transported by truck and reassembled on the West Saanich Road property.
“It was pouring rain outside when we first got it set up here. We took a walk through — all the joints weren’t sealed in yet and the floors were just soaked,” he said.
Olsen remembers walking on the water-soaked carpet thinking: “What did we get ourselves into?”
But the building became a welcome addition to the burgeoning W̱SÁNEĆ school system and was quickly filled to capacity, he said.
Look closely enough, and bolts from the reassembly are still visible inside the building, which is expected to get an exterior and roofing refresh by MAC Renovations.
This is the building that is most familiar to MENEŦIYE Elisha Elliott.
After experiencing years of C-minuses at Stelly’s Secondary School, Elliott was encouraged in 2006 to continue her studies at the Saanich Adult Education Centre by an employee.
At the centre, she began to realize what she was actually capable of when her teacher, Chaw-win-is Ogilvie, gave her an A on a college prep course essay, remarking on how her writing carried traces of her grandmother’s voice.
Before Ogilvie, no one had praised her writing, Elliott said. “She understood who I was when I wasn’t understood in other places.
“Having an instructor with the same worldview as me made a huge difference in my life.”
She would study for her bachelor’s and master’s degrees after she developed her passion for the SENĆOŦEN language at the centre. She’s now a SENĆOŦEN language teacher.
Joe Jones, 37, is a current W̱SÁNEĆ College student studying for an eventual career in counselling after a long stint in the trades.
He had been worried about his first day of school, after being bullied while attending Parklands Secondary School in the 1990s.
But like Mitchell, he said he was welcomed with open arms. “It was like coming to a home,” he said.
At W̱SÁNEĆ College, Jones, a member of the Tseycum First Nation, said he’s been able to work through some of the collective and personal traumas that stem from being Indigenous — such as racism in health-care — in a safe and understanding environment.
“The more and more that we can talk about it and deal with our own emotions, when we get out there into the community, we’re ready to help someone else,” he said.
W̱SÁNEĆ school board vice-president Don Tom noted that education for Indigenous people has not been a bright spot in Canadian history — children were removed from their communities and brought to residential schools or boarding schools “not by choice, but by force.”
“For us to be able to take up that education jurisdiction and deliver education directly to our membership by our own people … it’s a complete 180 from our original experiences.”
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