Offering a hand to indigenous youth
Graduating with a degree specializing in Rural health, Anthony Isaac has set his goal of helping indigenous youth to succeed.
Anthony Isaac is a student with one big goal in mind: to make conditions easier for indigenous students. He will do whatever it takes to reach this goal, including starting up his own program.
His project is called the Young Indigenous Professionals. The idea is to offer consultation and advice to indigenous youth after they graduate. Isaac already has a committee in place and has secured funding to develop web resources, discussion forums, and conferences about getting a career.
However, achieving this did not come easily.
As an indigenous student, he has confronted many barriers such as being from a low-income family. His previous schooling made it such that when he enrolled at The University of Western Ontario, he did not have a sense of identity, and felt confused. But Isaac overcame all of that, and graduates next week with an Honours Specialization in Rural Health.
To Isaac, culture and education are important. While attending school, he looked at bio-medical models of health care and encouraged people to think respectfully of holistic health care because of how spiritual it is, while trying not to push his views on others. He hopes to mix Western science with traditional knowledge in the future.
Along the way Isaac has become a role model, sharing his knowledge with indigenous youth about overcoming barriers and moving ahead in life. He has co-ordinated camps and given talks at schools to spread this message. He wants youth to have the chance to make things easier for themselves and have a great opportunity in the future.
Isaac senses a turning point in history with real advances in creating more opportunities for indigenous groups.
Although Isaac has a main goal in mind, he is not sure how he will reach it until taking a vision quest. A vision quest is a ritual to find meaning and purpose in life. Indigenous youth do it to this day by going to a sacred place, with the goal of meeting the Great Spirit. They fast for a long period of time. Without sustenance, the body becomes weak and closer to the spirit world. Isaac does not know when he will do his vision quest, but it may be soon – perhaps this summer with a close friend.
Isaacs’s time at Western has been a learning experience because of the cultural disconnects he felt when he enrolled. The transition from a small town to a large city, along with lacking a real identity was tough for him.
Luckily he met inspirational people who helped along the way. Isaac says he loved his Western experience, but he still has much to do.
“It’s been great, but this was only a small stepping stone, a tool to get to where I want to be. There is still much to be accomplished.”
He believes while he has grown in mind and body, he has not grown spiritually, which he hopes to accomplish soon. Isaac believes “without spiritually, education becomes a stagnant factoid of information.”
The next step is to complete a Master’s degree in Health and Rehabilitation Science – Occupational Science at Western.
For Isaac, the past four years have been about give and take. That is why he is working hard to give something back to Western and the community he is from. He encourages people to live through their spirituality.
He quotes the late French philosopher and Jesuit priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, saying “We’re spiritual beings living a human experience, not human beings living a spiritual experience.”
The writer is a Fanshawe College student studying communications and public relations on an internship at the Department of Communications and Public Affairs at Western.