Three students from Quebec hitting the road to Oxford as Rhodes Scholars

The wildest dreams of not one, not two, but three students from Quebec came true recently when they found out they had been awarded one of the most prestigious scholarships in the world.

After completing undergraduate studies in Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal respectively, Iakoiehwahtha Patton, Rayene Bouzitoun and Clovis Lachance will head to the University of Oxford — as Rhodes Scholars.

“That moment is pretty vivid in my memory still,” Bouzitoun said of when she got the call.

The selection committee told her it had one last question before moving forward with the process, Bouzitoun said: If they were to offer her the scholarship, would she accept?

“And I lost my mind,” Bouzitoun said. “I couldn’t believe it.”

The Rhodes Scholarship is a fully funded opportunity for postgraduate students to study at Oxford, in England. Eleven were handed out in Canada this year, including two in Quebec, to Bouzitoun and Lachance, and two in Ontario, one of which was awarded to Patton. (Students can apply in their province of residence or the one in which they are studying.)

“The scholarships call for and recognize a set of timeless virtues — intellectual excellence, strength of character, energy to strive, commitment to serve and instinct to lead,” Richard Pan, the Canadian secretary of the Rhodes Trust and the chair for the Rhodes Scholarships in Canada, said in a statement. “The scholarship winners directly reflect the diversity of our communities and the best of Canada.”

Patton is completing a degree in art history, anthropology and Renaissance studies at the University of Toronto, where she is the president of the History of Art Students’ Association and participates in various Indigenous advisory committees, among other activities. A member of the Kanien’kehá:ka First Nation from Kahnawake, Patton is among the first Indigenous women to win the Rhodes Scholarship.

“I feel a profound responsibility in everything that I do,” said Patton. “Part of that responsibility is because I hold the title of ‘first’ in a lot of the things I do. It’s unintentional. But, coupled with the actual content of my work, I know how important it is that I occupy these spaces. I didn’t have Indigenous scholars as role models until I entered university, and even then, I didn’t know of any in my field until the last year. So I am acutely aware of the weight of my titles, like being a Rhodes Scholar and everything I will do after this. I don’t take it lightly.”

Patton plans to continue pursuing art history at Oxford — an easy choice, given her love of the subject.

“My Renaissance minor gave me a time frame and movement to focus on: the early modern, from roughly the 15th century to the 17th,” she said. “My anthropology degree gave me a framework to approach my studies. I’ve taken many religion, gender, post-colonial, global capitalism and theory classes that have given me the tools to analyze art and its cultural and historical contexts.”

She plans to focus on Netherlandish art — the Northern Renaissance — which she said she fell in love with during a university class. Some of her favourite artists are Jan van Eyck, Hieronymus Bosch and Rembrandt.

“I’m interested in the colonialism, trade and material exchange of this period; the way that these events have profoundly impacted Netherlandish artists and subsequently the art that they produced,” Patton said. “As much as I love Netherlandish art, I grapple with the fact that it has enacted such violence.”

Bouzitoun, for her part, studied law and international development and globalization at the University of Ottawa. She’s kept herself busy over the years, working to improve women and children’s health in northern Ethiopia and to advance the advocacy capacity of North African youth, among other things. She traces her accomplishments back to her community of St-Michel, where she works with the Forum Jeunesse de St-Michel and the Clinique juridique de St-Michel.

“It’s a community that was really helpful in my journey and I want to take every opportunity to thank and remind them,” Bouzitoun said.

At Oxford, Bouzitoun plans to continue pursuing law. Though she’s unsure where her studies will take her, she has a particular interest in transitional justice — the processes at the end of a conflict when a country must address past human rights violations — in part because she witnessed the after-effects of the civil war in her former home country of Algeria, which she left as a child.

“I was born at the end of it, so I didn’t experience it per se myself, but the civil war in Algeria has had repercussions and a lot of the people who are established in Canada today from the Algerian diaspora are refugees from that civil war,” she said. “Our parents lived it; the culture and the mentality in the country have been drastically transformed after this period of time.

“It puts a lot of perspective in terms of what transitional justice stands for. If you don’t address issues that led to civil war and if you don’t make sure that the transition is appropriate … then you create a very fragile and vulnerable state.”

Lachance is also interested in law. He’s studying international relations and international law at the Université du Québec à Montréal, and has been active in his student association, in political science games and the university’s human rights clinic, and has educated voters about Canadian politics. At Oxford, he plans to continue studying international relations.

“I’ve always been fascinated by politics,” Lachance said. “International relations is politics, but … it touches all the world’s regions, it touches on how these regions are interconnected, and I find it fascinating to see how certain politics in certain countries influence how we operate here, and how we can be inspired by politics in other countries to change ours for the better.”

Lachance is also unsure where his studies will take him, but he knows he’d like to do more than one thing.

“Maybe teaching, maybe advocating; I would like to study law after my master’s degree, so working as a lawyer could be pretty interesting,” he said. “But working in the field of politics would also be something that I would really want to do.”

Though he said it did require hard work, Lachance wanted to emphasize the luck behind his win, since not everyone has access to the same opportunities.

Bouzitoun, who always saw Oxford as a distant dream, agreed.

“When we look at people getting scholarships or getting opportunities, I feel like as humans we have tendencies to say the person is doing something great and that person is different,” she said. “What I would really want to emphasize is that I’m actually absolutely no different than anyone else, and I could list 10 people at the top of my head that would deserve the scholarship just as much but that were maybe not given the privilege or the access to know about it or to apply for it. … I’m pretty sure if we sit and have coffee and we talk about your story, you’ll come to realize you maybe accomplished just as much or more.”

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