Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples – Education

A note on navigation: when navigating the RCAP site there are two menus. The main menu features all of the elements of the RCAP report. The secondary menus feature the detailed contents of each item in the different parts of the report. If you are on a page and want to get back to the menu outlining the table of contents for the education section of the report, select “secondary menu.”

The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) was a public inquiry into the relationship between Aboriginal people and Canada. It was initiated in 1991 and completed in 1996. The final report is over 4000 pages long.

The section on education presents a framework for lifelong, holistic learning which presents valuable concepts about the relationships involved in learning and the nature of learning from Indigenous perspectives.

RCAP was intended to be a twenty year roadmap for addressing a number of ongoing injustices between Aboriginal people and Canada, however, as this 1999 update explains implementation of the report’s recommendations was only partial even in the early stages. The Assembly of First Nations produced a report card in 2001 echos the concern that while solutions have been formulated through community consultation, implementing them has not been a priority for governments.