Open Access“You feel you don’t actually belong:” Attending High School in the Sioux Lookout Zone, 1969-1996
Author(s) -
North de Pencier,
Ian Puppe,
Carrie Davis,
Drishti Dhawan,
Mithila Somasundaram,
Gerald McKinley
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
uwomj/medical journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2560-8274
pISSN - 0042-0336
DOI - 10.5206/uwomj.v87i2.1116
Subject(s) - indigenous , perspective (graphical) , sociology , medical education , pedagogy , medicine , ecology , visual arts , art , biology
From 1969-1996, in the Sioux Lookout Zone of Northwestern Ontario, there were no local high schools, and teenagers travelled to boarding schools in larger communities further south. During these years, the University of Toronto coordinated medical services in the Sioux Lookout Zone, and many documents in the University of Toronto Archives capture the challenges faced by adolescents from the Zone while pursuing a high school education. In this paper, I use Indigenous voices in the records of the Sioux Lookout Zone Hospital to study the experience of going to high school from the perspective of the Social Determinants of Health. I argue that the poor quality of on-reserve elementary schools and the isolation of leaving home for high school combined with less time to learn traditional skills to set students up for failure in their academic studies.