I have a major headache. Literally: I have a headache because of my major—or lack thereof, I suppose.

Most people are shocked to hear that there is no Indigenous Studies major at McGill—fellow students, my family back home, and even this university’s professors. In 2024, the Center for World University Rankings (CWUR) ranked McGill as the second-best university in Canada and 27th-best in the world. McGill cannot be a “world-class” university without adequately addressing the dismal state of its Indigenous Studies program.

Indigenous studies and contemporary Indigenous issues are the crux of my academic being—I live and breathe for Indigenous studies. My dad, Mi’kmaq from Listuguj First Nations reserve, started me off young. I was 11 years old, reading excerpts of Richard Wagamese’s Indian Horse to my seventh-grade class (which was definitely not age-appropriate for an 11-year-old). I’ve since expanded my library to include books like Suzanne Methot’s Legacy and Darryl Leroux's Distorted Descent, and a deep yearning has grown in my soul to learn more about this country’s relationship with the first peoples of this land to mark a path of decolonization.

When I committed to McGill, I knew that was no Indigenous Studies major, but I decided to make the best out of a mediocre situation. I accepted that I would have to cobble together a make-shift Indigenous Studies program through a Sociology major and Indigenous Studies and Political Science minors. Even though I couldn’t pursue the major I dreamed of on paper, I figured I would still get an excellent education at one of the best schools in the country.

But my God, is McGill’s current program a pain in the ass.

I greatly underestimated the disparity between the Indigenous Studies program and other disciplines. There are real academic gaps between the Indigenous Studies program at McGill and other departments in the Faculty of Arts. The difference between a full major program or “just a minor” in Indigenous Studies goes beyond what will be written on your diploma. Without a major, there is no opportunity to write a thesis for an honours degree, fewer courses available, and less incentive for professors to come to McGill to broaden the program’s reach.

Indigenous Studies is a highly interdisciplinary field, so when there are only a handful of professors available, students get pigeonholed into one or two areas of scholarship and don’t have the opportunity to specialize in what they are passionate about within the Indigenous Studies minor. For example, Nina Barry, U2 Arts, who is pursuing a Psychology and Behavioural Science double-major and an Indigenous Studies minor, believes that the increased array of courses that a fully-fleshed-out program could offer would open up more diverse learning opportunities.

“One thing I am really interested [in] is mental health facilities for Indigenous communities, and I would have loved to be able to combine my passion for psychology and my passion for Indigenous Studies, but that’s just not really something that’s offered here,” Barry said in an interview with The Tribune.

Comparatively, the Political Science department at McGill, which also takes an interdisciplinary approach to a complex discipline, contains five main fields that are all equally developed: Canadian Politics, Comparative Politics, International Relations, Political Theory, and Methods. While students in Political Science majors need to take classes in each area, you could easily focus on international politics of diplomacy in South Asia if that’s where your heart lies.

Meanwhile, in Indigenous Studies, there are only six courses with the INDG course code available during the 2024-2025 academic year, two of which do not have professors associated with them yet. Students in the minor program, like myself, are forced to fill in the gaps with complementary classes in adjacent departments. While these classes do present opportunities to learn more about Indigenous issues, they often have non-Indigenous Studies-related prerequisites that make filling your minor requirements just that much more difficult.

“It’s sad [because] I and other Indigenous students came to McGill expecting the Indigenous programming to be as strong as McGill’s counterparts. Unfortunately, that is not the case,” said Rune Hartgerink, U1 Arts, an Anishinaabe student majoring in Sociology and Archeology and minoring in Indigenous Studies.

Mateo Itzam Jimenez-Haham, Maya Mam U3 Arts student at McGill, began his academic journey here as I did: He wanted to major in Indigenous Studies but compromised by doing the minor instead and registering in Sociology.

“I barely took any classes in that major because it wasn’t really what I wanted to study,” Jimenez-Haham said.

However, with the help of Professor Noelani Arista, director of the Indigenous Studies program, and former professor Jimena Marquez, they created a 46-page proposal for an ad hoc Bachelor of Arts degree which allowed Jimenez-Haham to design his own course of study.

“If [McGill] really wanted to [create an Indigenous Studies major], they would, but they don’t. They’ve been reluctant. They’ve been dragging their feet,” Jimenez-Haham said. “[McGill] made a minor [and] said a major would just soon follow. It’s been about a decade, and even despite many people advocating for its implementation, it still is not a reality. I’m really hopeful that this ad hoc BA can show [McGill] that people are genuinely, really wanting this [major] to be a reality and hopefully speed up the process a little bit for everyone.”

In December 2023, A McGill hiring freeze issued “a complete halt of all new hiring, both academic and administrative.” The freeze, coupled with within-faculty tensions, led some professors to leave the university. My fears grew about the future of Indigenous Studies at McGill. Like many of my peers in more niche areas of study such as Music Composition, I worried that McGill’s current financial situation would disproportionately affect departments that are already struggling.

At Concordia, First Peoples Studies is a BA with a major and a minor. However, First Peoples Studies is not a department, as it is housed in the School of Community and Public Affairs. As it is not its own department, they do not have direct access to the budget, but these barriers are not unique to First Peoples Studies.

The Tribune spoke with Nicolas Renaud, Huron-Wendat and Québecois Assistant Professor and Director of the First Peoples Studies program at Concordia University, about the impacts of having a major program in Indigenous Studies.

“There are certainly other majors in culturally based studies, about a given people or nation in various parts of the world, so there’s no reason that the first people of this land wouldn’t be included in the subjects of this university,” Renaud said in an interview with The Tribune.

However, he advised caution around assuming that adding a major would automatically make the university more decolonial or inclusive of Indigenous students and faculty.

“Yes, it’s better if they can be a major, [but] it’s not the only criteria of how a university will offer something meaningful about Indigenous people,” Renaud said. “A university might not offer a major in the field and yet be a good place for Indigenous students and profs, based on other aspects of the environment it provides and the space given to Indigenous perspectives.”

Further west, the University of British Columbia (UBC) has an exemplary First Nations and Indigenous Studies (FNIS) program. One of the strengths of the FNIS program at UBC is their research practicum where students work to meet the research needs of one of over a hundred Indigenous organizations that have partnered with UBC. Not only does it prepare students to be effective researchers, but the projects are designed based on the unique research needs of local Indigenous organizations.

Linc Kesler, Oglala Lakota emeritus professor at UBC, was the first director of the FNIS program and developed its curriculum. After establishing an Indian Education Office at Oregon State University, Kesler was well-prepared to design the curriculum of a strong and meaningful Indigenous Studies program: Oregon State’s Ethnic Studies department, which Kesler helped to create in the middle of a budget crisis. At UBC in 2008, which was also in the midst of a budget crisis, Kesler explained that the new President made the “very wise decision that the university should address the budget crisis by forming a strategic plan to guide the priorities and funding.” Kesler used this opportunity to incorporate plans for an Indigenous Studies program into the revised budget.

“There’s no point in being daunted by a budget crisis,” Kesler said.

On their website, McGill states that they “will heed the call of the [Truth and Reconciliation Commission] by engaging and collaborating with Indigenous communities to identify, explore and advance ideas, initiatives and plans that will embed Indigeneity in the life and activities of the University while seeking to enhance the presence and success of Indigenous students, faculty and staff at McGill.” In the 31st of their 52 Calls to Action, McGill also states that its programs’ “success aligns with experience at other institutions in Canada and the United States where full-blown Indigenous or Native Studies programs have been proven successful for the past several decades.” While this language sounds encouraging, the lack of classes and no major program in sight makes one wonder how much institutional support there really is behind these statements.

Across North America, dedicated Indigenous Studies programs are still relatively new, and many institutions are still in the process of building comprehensive programs.

“There’s Indigenous nothing happening [at the University of Toronto (UofT)],” said Kesler, who received his PhD from UofT in 1981. “Of course, that was like 50 years ago, but I don’t think it’s a whole lot better now [....] You know, the bar is pretty low. You can become a leading institution by doing anything.”

When it comes to concrete plans, there is little information available online about the trajectory of the Indigenous Studies program. A Google search turns up little else other than information on the minor and two decade-old articles, one from Anishnbek News and another from The McGill Daily. Both articles are from when the program was first announced nine years ago.

Since the path forward is so vague, let’s do some of the work that McGill’s administration should be doing and imagine what a strong, durable, and meaningful Indigenous Studies program could look like.

First, there must be collaboration between the university and local Indigenous communities and organizations. The university must exercise humility and base its curriculum on the ideas and needs of local communities. An academic program is just an empty shell without true, meaningful relationships with the people it claims to serve. These connections will serve to pressure the university to continue evolving its program as well as keeping the curriculum relevant.

“I will tell you that I think in both my experience in Oregon and my experience at UBC, what was critical to the success of both of those initiatives was engagement with the Indigenous community in Oregon,” Kesler said.

Second, Indigenous faculty must be involved in the process of building the program. In an interview with The Tribune, Professor Vernon Coburn, an Anishinaabe associate professor and Faculty Chair of McGill’s Indigenous Relations Initiative, emphasized the need for caution in such circumstances. He explained that the University of Ottawa’s Institute of Indigenous Research and Studies crashed before being able to truly take off because it was not created ethically or relationally.

“It’s been almost a dismal failure,” Coburn said in an interview with The Tribune. “I think it was because it was led very narrowly, without engagement from the community and input from Indigenous faculty and staff and the larger university community.”

Third, the program must be more than a vanity project. McGill has encouraged faculty to begin events with land acknowledgments, only to turn around and engage in a legal battle against the Kanien’kehá:ka Kahnistensera (Mohawk Mothers) over possible unmarked graves at the site of McGill’s New Vic Project at the former Royal Victoria Hospital (RVH). The Indigenous Studies program must be designed as more than a flashy banner on McGill’s website that claims a journey toward reconciliation.

“A lot of that reconciliation and Indigenization stuff is show—it’s a spectacle, just like reconciliation in general is a spectacle for good conscience of the settler society,” Renaud said. “Real change is very different.”

Finally, the program must be set up to succeed. Once established, the university cannot treat the program like a “diversity experiment” where if it fails, the Indigenous faculty would be at fault. This highlights discrepancies between Indigenous and non-Indigenous disciplines, which are given more institutional support. McGill has an obligation not just to establish the program but to truly ensure its success and longevity.

“It’s like offering one person a Cadillac and then offering the other person a little Ford or some other rinky-dink vehicle,” Coburn said. “We can see the differential treatment. And then you blame us for it failing? [They] say, well, look, every time we give the Indigenous people something, it doesn’t work, they break it [....] And look, it’s their own fault that it failed. It’s like, if you helped department X so much, why don’t you give us the same amount of help to succeed?”

“It’s just going to be an embarrassment if you do it off the back of a cocktail napkin. No, this needs to be comprehensive,” said Coburn about the future of McGill’s Indigenous Studies department.

But why do Indigenous Studies programs matter? Kesler said it plainly in an interview: “As to why to do it, it’s pretty simple. Because it’s the 21st century, you’re in Canada, [and] Canada has a long and terribly troubled relationship with Indigenous people. [...] If we continue to graduate the leaders of British Columbia and Canada from this university ignorant of this history, what are we doing? We’re failing in our responsibility to provide people with the necessary information to lead this country and this province.”

Ignorance is a weapon utilized by the settler-colonial state to further its objectives of the elimination, dispossession, and displacement of Indigenous peoples. Settler-colonialism is not a thing of the past, and neither are we as Indigenous peoples. For too long, Indigenous peoples have been ignored, especially by colonial institutions such as McGill. Universities, as self-proclaimed beacons of knowledge and research, cannot afford to enable ignorance. As academics and humans, we must ensure that we orient ourselves onto the right path for the right reasons. McGill has this responsibility not only to Indigenous folks across the country but also to settlers. Only by learning from the past and the present can we guide ourselves and all our relations into the future.