Vancouver’s Native Education College (NEC) is scheduled to close its doors forever on July 31 2007. The NEC is unable to offer its teachers wage parity with instructors in other colleges thanks to inadequate funding from the Provincial Government and changes to income assistance that are preventing the college’s impoverished student body from paying competitive tuition fees.

Since it was opened in 1967, the NEC has been a cornerstone of Vancouver’s Urban Aboriginal community. The NEC has helped regenerate mutilated First Nations cultural traditions, and it’s allowed hundreds of Aboriginal people to escape the streets and acquire the skills and confidence they need to succeed in the white man’s marketplace. Since wage parity between First Nations and non-Aboriginal college instructors is ethically non-negotiable, since the NEC’s Board of Directors doesn’t want to operate on a deficit, and since the Provincial Government is thus far unwilling to pay the $1.5 million necessary to keep the NEC in business, the school will soon vanish.

To comprehend this loss, we have to understand just what it means to First Nations people to have a college that’s run by Aboriginal people in accordance with First Nations cultural traditions. Professor Thomas Kusalis’ Intimacy or Integrity: Philosophy and Cultural Difference (University of Hawai’i Press, 2002) goes a long way towards supplying that understanding. Kusalis argues that there are two discernible perspectives underlying human cultures, perspectives he calls integrity and intimacy. For any given culture, one of these perspectives will be dominant, shaping the way people in that culture think, learn, and behave. While the integrity perspective dominates Europe and its colonies, I believe that the intimacy perspective shapes Canada’s First Nations cultures. The differences between these perspectives have profound implications for Aboriginal education. Kusalis writes that “integrity means being able to stand alone, having a self-contained identity without dependence on, or infringement by, the outside.” Integrity cultures associate objectivity with publicly verifiable empirical observation and logical reasoning. These cultures value intellectual and conceptual knowledge over intuition and embodied knowledge—that is, knowledge that comes from body-awareness. For integrity cultures, knowledge is separable from both the knower and the known, and therefore the process of learning doesn’t change either in any significant way. The integrity perspective values knowledge whose ground, or underlying justification, can be clearly articulated. This is the kind of knowledge that can be found in textbooks and be taught by instructors who barely know their students.

The integrity perspective also governs how members of these cultures view relationships. In integrity cultures, relationships are believed to exist solely in the spaces between people and things. Thus, from this perspective, relationships don’t penetrate their members in a way that would compromise their individual identities. Because relationships are seen as being external to the members of the relationships, the whole can never be greater than the contribution of its various parts.

Ethical thought within integrity cultures is shaped by impartial rules about rights, responsibilities, and social contracts. Metaphysically, the integrity perspective is expressed through atomism and a dualism that sees opposites as irreconcilable.

Intimacy cultures, on the other hand, operate on very different principles. Whereas integrity cultures focus on individual autonomy, Kusalis writes that “intimacy is most essentially a sharing of innermost qualities.”

Like their integrity counterparts, intimacy cultures value objectivity, but they view objectivity as being personal rather than public. Kusalis illustrates this point with the example of sporting events like gymnastics and diving. These events can only be judged by experts who have an intimate knowledge of their aesthetic and stylistic dimensions. Because the experts’ judgments in these events tend to deviate by no more than five percent they can be considered objective, but this objectivity isn’t accessible to non-experts. Such personal, objective knowledge is at the core of intimacy cultures, and experts, masters, and elders are its revered repositories. Intimacy cultures also value intuitive and embodied knowledge far more highly than conceptual and intellectual knowledge. Knowledge, in this perspective, changes the knower and the known by bringing them together. This is the kind of knowledge that can only be imparted through empathic relationships between teachers and students, and whose ground can never be easily described.

Intimacy cultures view relationships as existing in overlapping spaces shared by their members rather than in the spaces between them. For this reason, relationships modify the identities of their members. Rather than being simply the sum of its discrete parts, the whole from an intimacy perspective exists within each of its parts, just like a hologram.

In contrast to integrity cultures, ethical thought in intimacy cultures is guided by situational responsiveness informed by discourses of love and compassion. Society, in this reading, isn’t the sum total of individual social contracts, but instead an organic unity. The metaphysics of intimacy cultures are expressed in holographic paradigms that view reality as a web of interdependent processes, and by theories of the interpenetration of opposites such as in the yin-yang model.

Both perspectives have their virtues and vices. When taken to its extreme, the integrity perspective generates alienated and anarchic egoism, while unrestrained intimacy can produce totalitarian groupthink. Of course, no culture is purely one or the other. An undercurrent of intimacy flows beneath integrity cultures, just as an integrity undercurrent runs beneath intimacy cultures. Normally, these undercurrents help contain the dominant perspective and prevent its excesses.

Despite these undercurrents, Kusalis believes that intimacy and integrity are essentially irreconcilable in the same way that the grammars of different languages are irreconcilable. To successfully resolve conflicts between integrity and intimacy cultures, people have to become culturally bilingual: we have to be able to speak the languages of both intimacy and integrity. This is difficult, because these perspectives differ so radically on so many levels. For someone entrenched in one perspective, the other can seem utterly nonsensical and perhaps perverse.

And this brings me back to the NEC. For a person raised in one perspective, the challenges of adapting to an educational setting grounded in the other can be overwhelming, and Canada has a long history of forcing First Nations people into integrity-based educational institutions run by non-Aboriginal Canadians. The most horrific historical example of this practice was Canada’s genocidal residential school system. Though these murderous schools are closed, ethnocidal education continues for First Nations people throughout Canada. By forcing people from a colonized intimacy culture into an integrity-based colonial education system, Canada is attacking First Nations cultures and placing nearly insurmountable obstacles in the path of First Nations people seeking personal and collective empowerment through their education.

To survive within a hostile colonial environment, First Nations people are forced to become culturally bilingual in the sense Kusalis describes. Because colonial Canadians can easily avoid this task they rarely grasp just how hard it really is. Having swum within an integrity culture for their whole lives, Canadians of European descent can’t imagine how people from an intimacy culture could drown within integrity-based schools. This is why the NEC is so important. Through an intimacy-based educational program, the NEC has successfully given its students the means to be culturally bilingual, allowing many to become leaders in their communities.

There are other colleges that are trying to incorporate some aspects of First Nations cultures into their programs, but only in a very superficial way. These institutions remain integrity-based, as reflected by the fact that their boards and instructors are overwhelmingly non-Aboriginal. For First Nations people seeking a genuine intimacy-based education in the Lower Mainland, the NEC is the only game in town, and, unless our Provincial government takes action, it will soon be taken from them.