Even though 150 years have passed, and despite government efforts to improve the situation, Indigenous people in Canada continue to endure hard living conditions, such as higher rates of unemployment, poor education, bad housing, and poor job prospects. Several government efforts have tried to solve the problem, but these programs had limited success rates. One of the key issues is the lower levels of education and the higher level of dropout.
We propose, in this project, to follow a society-society approach to improve the situation of Indigenous people in Canada by using Astronomy as a tool for the development of young Indigenous people. Canada has numerous Indian reserves for its Indigenous people: in this Pilot Project, we will target one of the Indian reserves in the Province of Quebec, in order to benefit from its proximity to the Mont-Mégantic Observatory. Our target are young students (8-14 years old). Our project has two components:
(i) Visiting schools in the Indian reserve(s) to reach young Indigenous students;
(ii) Bring a group of students to visit the Observatory of Mont-Mégantic during the Popular Astronomy Festival of Mont-Mégantic.