OTTAWA — The Harper government is on the verge of potentially imposing an “assimilationist” education system on aboriginal children that repeats the mistakes of residential schools from past decades, says the head of Canada’s largest aboriginal group.

In an interview with Postmedia News Monday, Assembly of First Nations National Chief Shawn Atleo urged Prime Minister Stephen Harper to turn the page on more than a century of Canada’s mistreatment of its indigenous peoples.

He called on the federal government to take substantive action in critical areas — by recognizing native treaties and land claims, establishing a public inquiry into missing and murdered aboriginal women, and dropping its “unilateral” and “top-down” approach on how to bolster education for aboriginal children.

The calls came as aboriginals marked the 250th anniversary on Monday of the Royal Proclamation, the document which provided the basis for promises made to First Nations peoples by the British Crown.

Harper’s record on aboriginal issues is now under the international microscope, as a United Nations fact-finder began an eight-day trip through Canada to collect information about this country’s treatment of its indigenous peoples.

The government’s education plan will be the centerpiece of its aboriginal affairs agenda — to be featured in next week’s throne speech, and then detailed later this year with the introduction of a First Nation Education Act.

But so far, said Atleo, the Conservative government’s approach to working with First Nations on the forthcoming act has been reflective of how federal governments have always acted — “paternalistic at best and assimilationist at worst.”

He said that although Harper agreed at a mid-January meeting with aboriginal leaders to bring more “political oversight” to aboriginal issues, his government’s consultation on education has “fallen short.”

He said aboriginal leaders all agree on the need to improve education for indigenous children, but they are worried the current plan is being unilaterally designed by Aboriginal Affairs Minister Bernard Valcourt and that the upcoming act will impose standards that don’t reflect indigenous culture, and that funding for aboriginal education won’t be increased.

“That would be an example of paternalistic at best,” Atleo said.

“Anything less than full supports for language and culture would absolutely fit within a continued assimilationist effort that we still have to this very day,” he said.

“I’ve had residential school survivors who are now leaders in education say to me that the approach (now led by Valcourt) feels like the experience of residential schools.

“This is a pattern that the prime minister has to understand. What would give action to his words of apology in 2008 is to not repeat the pattern of the past and just exacerbate a problem for decades into the future.”

In 2008, Harper delivered an apology in the House of Commons to aboriginals for the federal government’s involvement in church-run residential schools.

Over many decades, 150,000 aboriginal children were taken from their families and sent to these schools, where attempts were made to assimilate them into European culture, and where many faced physical and sexual abuse.

Valcourt was unavailable for an interview Monday. In July, his department released a “blueprint” that provided hints of what the education act will contain. It indicated the bill will allow schools to be community-operated through First Nations or an agreement with a province, and there will be standards for qualifications of teaching staff and curriculum and graduation requirements for students. There will be regulations governing discipline (such as codes of conduct and policies on suspension and expulsion), hours of instruction, class size and transportation.

The government will share a draft version of the bill with aboriginal leaders before it is tabled in Parliament, but it wants the new system in place by September 2014.

Aboriginal youths are now the fastest growing demographic in the country, and the federal government says it wants to help them “achieve their full potential.”

But Atleo said that won’t happen without a significant increase in funding.

“I’ve had senior corporate executives travel with me to northern remote reserves and see first hand kids going to school in trailers at 35 degrees below zero that are not even properly insulated. You walk through that front door and you’re walking into the classroom, and the kids are sitting around with their winter boots on and their jackets on.”

mkennedy@postmedia.com

Twitter.com/Mark_Kennedy_