Blue Quills University
Canada · Americas
About
University nuhelot’įne thaiyots’į nistameyimâkanak Blue Quills (University nn Blue Quills, formerly Blue Quills Education Centre and Blue Quills First Nations College (BQFNC)) is a First Nations owned and operated university in Canada, the first of its kind in the country. The university is jointly owned by seven First Nation band governments: Beaver Lake, Cold Lake, Frog Lake, Whitefish Lake, Heart Lake, Kehewin, and Saddle Lake. The university is not provincially chartered, unlike all other universities in Alberta but instead incorporated by federal statute. The institution was founded as an Indian residential school in the 1930s before being occupied by a protest movement in 1970 and then transferred to Indigenous control in 1971. It was declared a university on September 1, 2015. Blue Quills is a member of the National Association of Indigenous Institutes of Higher Learning and the First Nation Adult and Higher Education Consortium, a non-profit organization in Western Canada, which coordinates the efforts of its members to provide quality adult and higher education, controlled entirely by people of the First Nations. The university hosts an annual cultural camp in May.
Adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA). Photography via Wikimedia Commons.