As I see kids everywhere preparing to go back to school, I'm reminded of my own experience as an aboriginal kid attending the local school off-reserve in a small farming town in Saskatchewan.

I remember being in high school and thinking something was fundamentally wrong with me. I know teenagers go through growing pains, but there was more to it than that.

I had gone to school with almost all the other students in my classes since kindergarten and now they barely talked to me.

This happened every day for three years until I graduated. I dreaded the classes with tables instead of desks because then my outsider status became humiliatingly obvious. I would be sitting alone at a long, empty table while other students giggled and talked with one another.

Sometimes a teacher would sit and talk with me after delivering the lesson so that I wasn't so alone. I was rarely invited out to lunch or to parties.

It wasn't always like this. In elementary school and junior high, I had lots of friends and was even popular. There wasn't anything wrong with me then. I remember school being full of fun and learning, rather than full of dread and loneliness.

The difference was that in the earlier grades, the number of aboriginal kids was almost equal to the number of non-aboriginal kids. By high school, only a handful of aboriginal kids remained. Out of a graduating class of 24 students, only three of us were aboriginal.

Like gravitating to like

At school, even though class sizes were small, aboriginal and non-aboriginal kids rarely mixed. Of course, there were exceptions to the rule, but most of us followed the rules. What was worse, though, was the fact that it wasn't simply a matter of natural segregation, where like gravitates to like.

What supported the segregation was the uniform belief instilled in us by society at large that if you were aboriginal, you were somehow inferior to the non-aboriginal kids. They believed it, and, sadly, so did we, although we didn't want to. This inequity was ingrained in us and was perhaps most obvious at school.

As aboriginal kids, we were faced with other students whose parents had more money, better jobs, didn't live on reserves and didn't have a lot of the other socio-economic problems that we did.

At the time, we didn't know about colonization or the impact of residential schools on generations of aboriginal people. We just thought that our families were in this situation because we must be stupid and lazy, just like the non-aboriginal people said. We would argue with and even fight anyone who actually said this to us, but it couldn't stop us from believing it.

A lot of aboriginal kids dropped out of school, in large part because they didn't see a future for themselves there.

At the time, many aboriginal kids were pigeon-holed into remedial classes, with a supposedly easier curriculum, and once put in such a class, you never got out again. You were branded dumb for the rest of your school career. These were the only classes where aboriginal kids formed a majority.

Student migration

To escape the branding, some kids decided to go to the local residential school, which was run by the Star Blanket First Nation and boasted First Nation teachers, including its principal, and an excellent sports program.

I'm probably the only Indian in Canada that longed to attend residential school. (My parents, both former residential school students, flatly refused to send me, no matter who was running it.) There was also a large migration of aboriginal students to the new school that had been built on one of the local reserves.

Today, as has been reported by the media, a lot of schools on reserves are plagued with all kinds of infrastructure and safety concerns.

One young student from a school in Attawapiskat, in northern Ontario, has even been recently nominated for an International Children's Peace Prize for the leadership role she has played in her community's bid to get a new school to replace the portables that house her and her fellow students. Shannen Koostachin, although only 13, has been a vocal lobbyist, even speaking on Parliament Hill.

Despite all their shortcomings and financial woes, why are the populations of these schools continuing to swell?

It seems that when given a choice, many aboriginal students are choosing to attend school on a reserve or to attend an urban school designed for an aboriginal population.

In 2007, Indian and Northern Affairs Canada identified a need for 69 new schools. According to the Assembly of First Nations, the number of on-reserve schools has gone from zero to 500 since 1972.

It's been more than 15 years since I graduated from high school. I would like to think that the school environment I endured no long exists. But I have to wonder how much has really changed if the demand for new and expanded reserve schools and more aboriginal culture-based curriculum in urban schools is on the rise.

Rather than focusing on getting more funding for fully segregated schools, maybe we should take a closer look at the reasons why they seem to be so popular.