Earning success

The only way to succeed in life is by learning that no one will give you anything for free, the former Assembly of First Nations chief Phil Fontaine said to a roomful of high school students.

"You have to go out and work very, very hard to achieve the kind of success you wish to have," he said Thursday morning at St. Patrick High School to students from St. Pats, St. Ignatius High School and Pope John Paul II Senior Elementary School.

Fontaine, a special advisor for the Royal Bank of Canada, spoke to the students about the educational opportunities available for Aboriginal youth to kick off RBC and Lakehead University’s joint Aboriginal outreach program.

The program is a one-year, four-stage pilot project that will offer events and activities to Aboriginal youth living in and around Thunder Bay to show them the possible paths they can take to a successful career.

Fontaine said the message he delivered to the students was that despite the demands, expectations and pressures youth face, the most effective way of securing a good future is to be successful in school.

"We live in a very rapidly changing world and the expectations and needs in fact are different – pretty complex – and we need educated people, well-trained people," he said. "It’s very important that every student that was present in this room makes a real effort to achieve success in high school."

That success will offer them choices and enable them to make decisions regarding the kind of future they want for themselves.

Having attended two residential schools growing up, Fontaine acknowledged that today’s world is much different than the one he grew up in and there are higher standards placed on today’s Aboriginal youth.

His community regained control over their education in 1973 and maintaining that control is important to Fontaine.

"The kind of success I know we need to achieve is very much dependent on the kind of control we are able to exercise over education in our communities and in urban centres like (Thunder Bay)," he said.