Southern Alberta Council on Public Affairs (SACPA)

To date, there has been very little work done or literature available on the stories, the narratives of experience, of those Aboriginal individuals who have journeyed through post-secondary, Eurocentric paradigm-based Western education successfully. This is a critical missing (qualitative) piece in the literature. So much quantitative data and attention around the issues of Aboriginal success focuses on the lack of success, on Western education, on the negatives or deficiencies, on how poorly Aboriginal students do relative to non-Aboriginal students. Seldom do we hear how they have excelled, what has enabled them. In understanding the post-secondary experience of Aboriginal students, it is important to hear the story from their voices and from their perspective such that it will lead a better understanding of success rather than always focusing on the deficit. The speaker’s research entailed collecting and evaluating the oral, educational, experiential narratives of perceived both “successful” and “unsucc