Strategic partnerships are nowadays one of the tools most willingly applied in foreign policy. The subject of the presented analysis is the institutionalization process of a strategic partnership understood as the functioning of certain norms and rules in a given relationship (expressed in the founding documents of partnerships) and the regularization of joint bodies and meeting formats. The aim of the article is a comparative analysis of institutional solutions applied in the European Union’s strategic partnerships with its established partners: the United States, Japan, and Canada. The results show that it is possible to identify a pattern of institutionalization process used by the European Union in its relations with strategic partners; they also reveal how great importance contemporary players in the international arena attach to institutionalization processes in their mutual relations.

Indigenous Peoples in the Canadian education system – an attempt to reconcile to the past, the current situation and planned activities

This article is devoted to theoretical considerations on the education of Canadian Indigenous Peoples. In the past, this education was provided in state boarding schools by priests and nuns, mainly for First Nations children aged 4– –16, who were sent there forcibly, taken by force from their parents. There were many cases of abuse in schools such as: physical, mental and sexual violence, experienced by approximately 150 000 children. Some of them never returned to family homes. These schools destroyed the psyche of many young people and influenced their later lives. It was not until 2005 that the Canadian government officially apologized to survivors and their families for the harm suffered by several generations of Indigenous Peoples during 120 years of compulsory education, conversion and integration into white colonizing society. Currently, the Canadian government willing to compensate for past harm, is working at federal and provincial levels to improve access of Indigenous people to the education system at all levels.