ANTIGONISH: Jeneva Dennis says she was extremely honoured to be one of four recipients and the only representative from her community to receive the Sister Dorothy Moore Mi’kmaq Education Scholarship.
Dennis, who is a first year StFX Faculty of Education student and originally from Potlotek First Nation, received the prestigious scholarship earlier this month during an awards ceremony held at Government House in Halifax on Treaty Day, Oct. 1.
“There’s four given each year, for education students only and I was one of them,” she told The Reporter proudly. “Three of them were from Eskasoni First Nation, so I felt even more honoured to represent my community.”
According to a release from StFX, as a gesture of reconciliation during the 2011 Truth and Reconciliation event held in Halifax, the Government of Nova Scotia announced the creation of an annual $6,000 scholarship fund to assist Mi’kmaq students in a recognized teacher certification or education program.
Mi’kmaw Kina’matnewey named the scholarship program after Sister Dorothy Moore, an educator and respected elder who devoted her life to enhancing educational opportunities for Mi’kmaq people.
The single mother said it’s nice to be recognized for all the hard work she’s put in to get to this point, and to be acknowledged by influential people in the Mi’kmaq nation.
“Being Mi’kmaq as well, I come from a small community, and it feels nice to be that role model for my peers,” Dennis said. “I’m always (advocating) for people to attend university or to go to school, when they feel stuck in their life, and am always that type to be there for people, especially the Mi’kmaq people.”
She toured StFX while she was still in high school and looked at other institutions in Nova Scotia, but said StFX felt more meaningful.
After living on-reserve all of her live, she moved to Antigonish and started attending classes at StFX when her daughter was only 10-months-old.
“I took that big step to be a role model for my daughter, and I don’t want her to be afraid to take those big steps even if it is out of your comfort zone,” Dennis said. “StFX is a beautiful university, I love it a lot, and it made me want to pursue education. I just finished my BA there and now I’m onto my BEd.”
Dennis graduated from StFX last spring, completing a Bachelor of Arts degree with a major in political science and a minor in philosophy and is currently the president of the Indigenous Student @ X Society, which strives to create a spirit of friendship and partnership with both the university community and the surrounding Mi’kmaq communities.
“That’s what I like about StFX,” Dennis said. “There is that comfort zone that I have there in being Mi’kmaq, and being able to interact with other Indigenous students.”
In addition to being awarded the Sister Dorothy Moore Mi’kmaq Education Scholarship, she was also a recipient of the Sherman Deveau Scholarship with the Bachelor of Education program.
As a research assistant, she learned more about Indigenous course content and it made her realize this could be incorporated into all kinds of courses.
“I feel that there’s not a lot of Indigenous course content in the curriculum in Nova Scotia right now,” Dennis said. “So I wanted to be that little change hopefully in trying to add more Indigenous course content, because I felt there wasn’t a lot of content in the studies that I had.”
While she’s in the secondary stream, which would allow her to teach at the high school and junior high levels, she hopes to teach for a couple years in her community, and incorporate more course content with an ultimate goal of obtaining her Masters and PhD to one day be a professor at the university that helped her find her passion in teaching.
Dennis explained her time at StFX had been made a little easier with familiar Mi’kmaq resources such as StFX’s Elder in Residence, Kerry Prosper, and Coordinator of Indigenous Student Affairs, Terena Francis, who are both described as being awesome at what they do.
While asked if there was any teachers she had growing up that influenced her decision in becoming a teacher, she highlighted one in particular from her time in high school.
“I had a non-Indigenous teacher, but I respected him a lot, because we was non-Native, but he really was open to our culture and traditions,” Dennis said. “His name was Roland McCarthy, and he was actually one of my references for the program.”
McCarthy, who is now the school’s principal, was her social studies teacher at Allan Lafford High School in Potlotek.
“It’s nice to see he’s still on my reserve, teaching my people,” Dennis said. “And I liked how he taught, because it was really influential, by having someone acknowledge your culture and doing their best to being open to it as well.”
Being Mi’kmaq, she hopes that she can be the change in the education system, by adding more Indigenous course content to the curriculumand she wants the same attention Indigenous course content gets on-reserve to be represented throughout all levels of education.
“I feel there wasn’t a lot, I graduated in 2015 from high school and I went to an on-reserve school,” Dennis said. “But when I went off-reserve there wasn’t much content at all, like I didn’t learn much about my peoples at all and it was mostly from a non-Native perspective.”