‘I just want to go back into the school and teach’

A Nunavut Arctic College student has received a $10,000 scholarship from RBC.

Saalia Pijamini, 27, a second-year student in the teacher education program, is one of 20 recipients of the 2023 RBC Future Launch Indigenous Youth Scholarship.

The award recognizes Indigenous students who aim to give back to their communities and create more opportunities for other Indigenous people.

Pijamini will complete the next two years of her degree through Memorial University in St. John’s, N.L. She hopes to one day return to her home community of Grise Fiord and teach at her former school.

“I’ve always wanted to be a teacher. I always liked learning and helping classmates with schoolwork when I was in high school,” Pijamini said. “It helped me realize it’s what I want to do, teach.”

Grise Fiord’s school is small, with just around 30 students, but Pijamini said it’s a “nice, small community to start off with.” With a teacher shortage in the territory, she wants to see more teachers in smaller communities.

“The students from my hometown and in that school, they’re all special to me and I just want to go back into the school and teach,” she said.

Her favourite subject to teach is math because she loves problem-solving, she said. She’s actually teaching it now to her five-year-old daughter, who just graduated from kindergarten.

As part of her degree, Pijamini is also learning to incorporate Inuit traditional knowledge into her teaching.

“I’d love to be able to do that with my students in the classroom, like in science to learn about animals or the land and the plants, and for health class like we’d be able to learn about traditional foods, how they’re prepared,” she said.

As the mother of two young daughters, Pijamini said the scholarship will help relieve some of the financial stresses of being both a full-time parent and a full-time student.

“It will help me focus better on my studies,” she said.