Students across the Northland School Division (NSD) are starting to see their own cultural heritage mixed into typical school classes like math or science, and the results are paying off.
In a June 4 ceremony, NSD received a province-wide award from the Public School Boards Association of Alberta (PSBAA) for its work addressing the Calls to Action from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada.
“The award recognizes the voices of the communities that we serve; over the last two years we’ve made going into communities and hearing everyone’s voices a real priority,” said NSD Supt. Cal Johnson.
“What the communities told us is what shaped our education plan and led to the priority connections that support reconciliation.”
In 2025, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission published 94 calls to action as part of a national effort to redress the legacy of residential schools and continue the reconciliation process.
NSD’s 2024-27 Education Plan address five of those calls: drafting new education legislation with the full participation of Indigenous peoples, working to preserve and revitalize Indigenous languages, creating curriculum tie-ins about Indigenous history, residential schools, and the treaties, and comparative religious studies on Indigenous beliefs, developed in collaboration with Indigenous elders.
“We found that through these conversations with community, with elders and with the youth themselves, that they needed to see themselves in our schools. They needed to have their culture and their ways of being recognized by us and be a part of what we do every day,” said Johnson.
Two years later, learning in the 17 Northland schools spread across northern Alberta has taken a turn for the better, with graduation rates for three-year high school diplomas rising almost 20 per cent. At the Mistassiniy School in Wabasca, students are inviting the community in for a kookum and mooshum day — the Cree words for grandmother and grandfather — to showcase what they’re learning and how it ties into traditional educational practices.
Cree teachers are also setting up weekly visits to the elders home, where kids get to read with the elders, or work on a cooking project together.
“The elders who, in the past, weren’t comfortable coming to the schools or being in the school because of their history in schools, they’re now coming back into the school and they’re having those conversations with the children,” said Johnson.
At the Calling Lake School, students are partnering with local elders to go ice fishing in the winter and rabbit snaring in the spring.
“A lot of the times, our teachers are also the students; they’re going out on the ice with the elders and they’re also learning their ways of knowing and ways of being . It’s creating a more trusting environment and opening up lines of communication that weren’t as strong in the past,” said Johnson.
Northland has also developed a one-year Cree language pilot project in collaboration with the University of Alberta based out of Wabasca that is helping students and the community re-engage with the Woodlands Cree dialect.
Now that the projects are starting to pick up some momentum, Johnson said its important the division continues its work, no matter how big or heavy it may be at times.
“It’s the kind of work that comes from the heart and I think that’s the reason why not everyone is taking it on. We knew that this would be something where, once we open this up, we can’t just okay, ‘Okay we want to hear from you,’ and then go away and not be seen again,” he said.
“This is changing the way we do business now. Our staff have been working tirelessly this first year to establish this new direction and now we can analyze the data and see that its having a positive impact.”
At the start of process, Johnson said NSD faced some anger and mistrust at the initial meetings with community elders, but that soon fell away once they were able to demonstrate to the community that they were listening and working to implement some of the requests.
“Now, I would say the conversations are more focused around students, and there’s a level of trust in the room that we can share honestly and openly about what we’re doing, and they can share what they would like to see,” he said.
Outside of the unexpected jump in graduation rates, Johnson said the division was seeing other data that indicated they were moving in the right direction, although he didn’t specify what the data points where.
“It’s everybody’s job to make sure that truth and reconciliation is a part of your school. We’re learning as we’re going, but we’re committed to what we’re doing,” said Johnson.
“The hardest part is that you’re making a drastic change division wide that impacts everybody — everybody now has a bit of a different focus, and change is hard. But, in our case, change is what was necessary and changes are what is turning our division around.”
