Saddle Lake Post Secondary
provides career and personal support and financial assistance for students of the onicikwapowin Cree Nation, with the expectation of personal success and academic excellence.
Bernadine Houle-Steinhauer, Amberly Makokis & Betty Ann Cardinal
Student Education Experience
Expectations and
Well-Being Survey 2024
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The Treaty 6 Post-Secondary Education (PSE) is conducting a comprehensive student well-being survey to hear from you about your current, past and expected post-secondary education experience, impacts (e.g. employment, skill development) and expectations. As well, we want to know about your sense of personal mental, physical, emotional and spiritual well-being to give us a better sense of how PSE can help contribute best to your overall well-being through a positive post-secondary education experience.
The Transition Year Program (TYP) is a University access program for First Nations, Métis, and Inuit students who may not be prepared to enter a faculty through the regular admissions route. This is not an upgrading program, but a
full-time University of Alberta program in Open Studies.
Application Deadline is May 1, 2024
University of Alberta
Aboriginal Teacher Education Program
2023 - 2024
Saddle Lake Post Secondary
Cheque Distribution Dates
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For February 2024
For March 2024
For April 2024
Aug. 24
Sept. 27
Oct. 27*
Nov. 24*
Dec. 22
Jan. 26*
Feb. 28
Mar. 27
Sept. 13
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Nov. 08
Dec. 06
Jan. 10/24
Feb. 14
Mar. 13
Apr. 10
Intersession 2024
For May 2024
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Apr. 26*
May. 29
Jun. 26
Jul. 26*
May 15
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Aug. 14
Month End
Mid-Month
* Friday Distribution
WANISKA
Biennial Education
Round Dance
March 2023
Upcoming Events
Saddle Lake's Terri Cardinal is new VP of Indigenous initiatives at MacEwan University
Spotlight
Mario Cabradilla - Lakeland Today
In an effort to seek greater participation from Indigenous and underrepresented learners, MacEwan University established its first associate vice-president, Indigenous Initiatives and Engagement position.
SADDLE LAKE – In an effort to seek greater participation from Indigenous and underrepresented learners, MacEwan University has established its first associate vice-president, Indigenous Initiatives and Engagement position.
Terri Cardinal, originally from Saddle Lake, is taking on the role.
The position requires Indigenous knowledge, establishing and fostering connections within Indigenous communities, and a clear grasp of the needs of Indigenous students at MacEwan, states Dr. Annette Trimbee, president and vice-chancellor of MacEwan University, in announcing the role - all areas Cardinal exemplified since joining the university in 2017.
Cardinal has been involved in various works both within and outside of the university, helping ensure Indigenous initiatives in many different spaces, and helping Indigenous youths to be confident in who they are.
In 2022, she also took a leave of absence from the university to help search for unmarked graves at a former residential school located just a few miles west of St. Paul.
At MacEwan University, she’s worked as the manager of the university’s kihêw waciston Indigenous Centre; then as director of Indigenous Initiatives, where she worked to create safe spaces for Indigenous students at the university. READ MORE…
“It starts with a smudge”: Chantel Large shares how Indigenous knowledge has shaped her teaching
Spotlight
University of Calgary 2023 Indigenous Ways of Knowing Award honours Faculty of Social Work educator
Photo: Elyse Bouvier, Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning
Love what you do, and you’ll never work a day in your life. That’s what they say, right? For Chantel Large, it rings true.
“I love the field of social work. I think it is one of the greatest privileges of my life that I get to earn a living by helping people. I can’t understand why everybody is not a social worker,” says Large, a sessional instructor in the Faculty of Social Work.
“We talk in class a lot about the history of social work and the ways in which it has been oppressive against marginalized people and Indigenous Peoples in particular, and the ways in which the field sometimes still is oppressive,” she says. “We all have a lot of learning and growth to do, myself included.”
Large is the 2023 recipient of the University of Calgary Teaching Award for Indigenous Ways of Knowing, an institutional award launched in 2022. It recognizes an individual or group who has advanced Indigenous Ways of Knowing, and supported truth and reconciliation, decolonization, Indigenous engagement and transformation in an academic course or program.
“I’ve been teaching now at the university since 2018. When I think back to my very first class I taught, I started with a smudge. Back then, I couldn’t smudge in classrooms here at the University of Calgary, so I would smudge in my vehicle before I went to class, and I would pray that I was able to teach in a way that these students who I was encountering would go out into the world as social workers and not cause harm,” she says.
“They're going to be working with my nieces and nephews and my relatives. And I want to ensure that they understand Indigenous Peoples and their experiences and understand that different way of knowing and different way of being, so they can go out in the world and do work in a good way, in a way that's not going to harm them or impose anything on them.”
Large connects with her students through storytelling, sharing personal pieces of her own life and bringing in Indigenous Peoples to her classrooms to offer their own lived experiences.
“The feedback that I’ve gotten is that it really hits different,” she says. “I often get my mom to come into the class and talk about her experiences in residential school, and the students' feedback is always that it’s very different when you’re reading it in a book, to when you’re talking to someone who has experienced it.
“It connects them to this part of history that isn’t really history. It’s a part of history that we still have to navigate, learn from and heal from today,” she says.
One of the biggest inspirations for Large is the students she works with in her courses.
“They come with so many gifts and so much knowledge and very strong voices for advocacy and for change and for a real yearning to want to do this in a good way. And I think that that's what excites me most.”
SLPS News
Some CDI College recruiters are misleading students,
CBC Marketplace investigation finds
CDI says it’s ‘possible’ some employees may do things ‘not condoned by the school’