Dawn Martin-Hill began lobbying for a Native studies program during the final year of her undergraduate degree at McMaster 23 years ago. Her departure as director from the Indigenous Studies Program (ISP) in July was bittersweet; she leaves her post just as the program turns 20, and now takes on the new role of the Paul R. MacPherson Chair in Indigenous Studies.

But the future is uncertain for the program she once headed.

The position of director has been vacant for four months, with McMaster’s Associate Vice-President (Academic) Peter Smith stepping in as acting director.

In October, the McMaster First Nations Student Association hosted a send-off for retired elder-in-residence Bertha Skye, as well as professor Hayden King, who has accepted a position at Ryerson.

Martin-Hill’s role as Chair in Indigenous Studies is an exciting development for her, but it means her new office is in the Department of Anthropology in Social Sciences.

The ISP does not reside under any faculty, nor does it offer a degree to its students – only a combined honours option.

“There are many discussions underway on how the Indigenous Studies Program could evolve, including the possibility of a four-year degree,” said Smith.

The program is expected to get some new space in the Wilson Building, to open in 2014. Its current department office is in the basement of Hamilton Hall.

The early years

Since its infancy, the Indigenous Studies Program has stood on shaky legs.

Martin-Hill began the paperwork to set up a Native studies program shortly after former McMaster president Peter George set up a committee on Native issues.

“The program didn’t go anywhere for three years,” said Martin-Hill, who said she wanted to start a program, not simply a wellness or student services centre for Native students.

Things were also difficult for Martin-Hill at the time on a personal level.

When she was writing her dissertation, Martin-Hill was homeless and lived in a friend’s basement. After getting her PhD in anthropology, Martin-Hill was teaching 18 units, developing the program and raising two daughters.

Upon returning from maternity leave, Martin-Hill found that her contractually limited appointment no longer existed, and the position of ‘academic director’ was widely posted.

“I didn’t know if I was going to have a job,” she said.

“I look back on [that time] and I was struggling with poverty. I don’t know how I did it,” she said.

Martin-Hill applied and ended up getting the job, but the hardships didn’t stop there.

Funding troubles

It’s an elaborate process to apply to the provincial government for Aboriginal funding. There’s more paperwork than other faculties are required to complete, said Martin-Hill. And although ISP has been successful in receiving funding, she says it has been a bittersweet triumph.

ISP currently runs on Aboriginal Post-Secondary Education and Training (PSET) funding.

“PSET tripled our budget, and it was so exciting because we were going to be able to have our own recruitment officer, elders-in-residence and everything we’d dreamed of over the years,” she said. “But we pretty much lost control over where the funding was going at that time.”

“The funding is for student services – not exactly what we wanted, which was someone to promote indigenous studies. You see it all the time; no one knows we’re here,” said Martin-Hill.

“The President’s Committee wanted us to open the doors to health sciences because there were no Native doctors [at McMaster],” she said.

Martin-Hill wrote a proposal to start the Aboriginal Student Health Sciences (ASHS) office, and ISP received funds to pay a salary for someone to have an Aboriginal office in the Faculty of Health Sciences.

“It was a lot of work and it didn’t benefit ISP financially. But it was something the community [component of the President’s Committee] wanted,” said Martin-Hill.

The ASHS team works to help promote the success of current and incoming Aboriginal students in the health sciences.

What will the future hold?

In her new position, Martin-Hill no longer has the same administrative responsibilities.

“As senior faculty, I’m still here to assist in key decisions,” said Martin-Hill, who has been doing work on a stand-alone degree for the program.

“Research shows that the students want to complete a degree, and the President’s Committee has agreed. We have the application pretty much ready to go, but it needs to go through budget approval,” she said.

“We really need faculty. We’ve been asking for a very long time and it’s been a dream of ours for 20 years,” she said.

She expressed concern and hesitation about where things will go with provincial funding geared toward student services.

Still, Martin-Hill says she has faith in the Program and the views McMaster’s president Patrick Deane has expressed.

“There’s also discussion going on for a graduate program, which would be thrilling. I do think we have an excellent program and I hope we can build on that. That’s my goal.”

By Jodie Scoular

McMaster is part of an agreement between seven Ontario universities to launch a new credit transfer initiative.  McMaster students taking first-year classes will now be able to take arts and science courses from participating universities in their hometowns that will contribute towards a bachelor’s degree.

The new credit transfer consortium will come together to create one master list of 20 first-year courses that will make transferring a simpler process.

Previously, it was difficult to tell if other schools would accept credits from other institutions without being subjected to a long, drawn-out affair.  Now, some universities are looking to create a database of widely accepted courses that students can take to get rid of the guessing game.

Sevan Taghelian, a third-year social science student at Mac, commutes to school each day all the way from St. Catharines.  She says that an initiative like this has the potential to help students in her type of situation, and that distance prevents her from taking summer courses at Mac.

“It would cut down commuting time, which is less stressful because that’s less of my time and money wasted on travel,” she said. “Distance is one of the reasons I hold back from summer school because it’s too far and not worth the commute for one class a day.”

At this point, the initiative will only benefit people taking first year courses; the rationale being that these courses cover general subjects that are not specific to one institution.

Ryan Kinnon, executive director of the Ontario Undergraduate Student Association, and the MSU’s Huzaifa Saeed pointed out that the new system will not benefit students who don’t live in the vicinity of Ontario’s ‘leading’ universities.

“Northern and rural students will not benefit from this because all these universities are central. So you can’t really say that we are improving mobility for them,” said Saeed.

Peter Smith, McMaster’s associate vice president (academic), says that eventually the university hopes to include upper-year classes and expand into programs other than arts and science.

Upper-year classes will take more work to convert into universally accepted credits because each institution has their own tailored curriculum.

Ultimately, the new credit transfer system provides a boost to McMaster’s “letter of permission” program, which already has many of the benefits the new system offers.   The letter of permission allows all students to take courses from other universities, perhaps in their hometowns, including online classes.  A consultation with an academic advisor is necessary to find out which credits are transferrable.

A more streamlined credit transfer plan may benefit summer students and those taking courses through correspondence.

Currently, McMaster does not offer online courses or courses in “distance format” of any kind for undergraduate degrees, so this type of credit-transfer program could be beneficial for students who wish to take online courses offered at other universities.

School officials say that meetings to determine the finer points of the plan for this program have just begun, and specific details will be released once all participating institutions confirm them.

The other six universities involved in the consortium are Queen’s University, University of Guelph, University of Ottawa, University of Toronto, University of Waterloo and Western University.