Cultural Competency Won’t Cut It
You’ve probably clicked through a cultural competency training module. Maybe you left with a checklist of “dos and don’ts” and a certificate. At the end of the day, you wondered whether any of it would actually change anything in your workplace, in your decisions, or in the systems you work inside every day.
What’s Missing From Most Diversity Training
Cultural competency training has become a staple of professional development across health, social services, education, and government. So has cultural humility. Both approaches have their value. But they share a common limitation: they locate the problem inside the individual. They ask people to become more aware, more sensitive, more skilled in cross-cultural communication without asking how those cultures came to be positioned so unequally in the first place.
These trainings teach professionals how to interact with Indigenous peoples without ever reckoning with why those interactions are so often shaped by harm, distrust, and power imbalance. As we approach June, recognized across Canada as National Indigenous Peoples Month, let’s to ask ourselves whether that’s enough.
Historic Systems Continue to Disproportionately Mistreat Indigenous Peoples
The disparities that professionals encounter in their work, such as Indigenous children overrepresented in child welfare, Indigenous people overrepresented in the justice system, chronic underfunding of Indigenous health and housing, are often observed as cultural differences. But these are not who we are as Indigenous peoples. They are products of generations of intentionally racist policies.
The Indian Act dissolved and replaced Indigenous governance systems. Residential schools severed children from language, family, and community for over 150 years. The Sixties Scoop removed Indigenous children from their families and placed them into settler homes. These were not accidents or misunderstandings. They were coordinated, legislated, and federally funded.
This living history works alongside and against the resilience and strength of Indigenous Peoples. The systems are still operating. The workers, administrators, and professionals that engage with Indigenous communities today are operating inside institutions that were built on these foundations. Cultural competency training rarely names this systematic oppression directly. In a world of truth and reconciliation, it should.
What Cultural Perspectives Training Does Differently
IPS’s Cultural Perspectives Training is a full-day immersive course built around a different premise: that understanding Indigenous peoples requires understanding colonization, its history, its mechanics, and its ongoing presence in contemporary policy and practice.
That means participants learn far more than terminology. They are invited to examine the history and legacy of residential schools and their continued impacts. Through informed and caring facilitation, participants engage with what colonization looks like today. They identify their own social location and how privilege and institutional bias shape professional decision-making in ways that often go unexamined.
The course also addresses Métis identity and inclusion specifically, a recognition that pan-Indigenous framing can erase the distinct histories and rights of Métis peoples.
The learning model combines in-class sessions, virtual or in-person, with self-guided online modules and action-based assignments. This structure supports diverse adult learning styles without jeopardizing complex, culturally and politically grounded content.
Indigenous Sovereignty
Indigenous peoples have always governed, known, and protected their inherent rights to their lands and waters, knowledge systems, and self-governance. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, enacted in BC through DRIPA, provide specific, binding commitments that organizations are now legally and ethically accountable to. Cultural Perspectives Training equips professionals to understand what those commitments mean in practice, gives actionable steps forward, and strengthens participants’ commitment to allyship.
If You’re Considering Professional Development This June
Organizations often recognize June, National Indigenous Peoples Month, with events, land acknowledgements, and optional learning sessions. Those gestures can be meaningful. They can also become a substitute for the harder work of institutional accountability.
IPS’s Cultural Perspectives Training offers the structural analysis, the historical grounding, and the practical frameworks that professional development warrants.
Our next session is Wednesday, June 17. Registration is open now at ipsociety.ca.
“The Cultural Perspectives Training by the Indigenous Perspectives Society is a powerful and practical learning experience. It helped me move from awareness into action and deepen my understanding of how to show up as a respectful and responsible ally, both in my work and in my everyday life as a parent and community member.
The course challenged me to reflect, ask better questions, and take responsibility for how I move forward. I would highly recommend it to anyone committed to meaningful reconciliation work.” – Testimonial from Kathryn P. 2026