 Nicky Dishnikashan, Nia Mitchif, Loret Dushan, Winnipeg Newikin, so I'm a Métis woman, my name is Nicky Ferland. I was born and raised in a small Métis community called Lorette, Manitoba, and now I live in Winnipeg. I have a Bachelor of Arts degree in Human Rights from the University of Winnipeg and I really focused that education on Indigenous rights and transitional justice. So I, in university, had the opportunity to learn a lot about residential schools and that kind of propelled me into the work that I do now. Yeah, the project has been super involved and it was really collaborative which has been a very interesting process. So IPW brought together a huge team of people, the Treaty Relations Commission of Manitoba, the University of Manitoba who I work with, Manso, a newcomer organization, and Kairos, and other partners who are just slipping my mind at the moment. But so we worked together to come up with some ideas about the kinds of information that newcomers should know about Indigenous people and many discussions, sort of what came out of it was this idea to start talking about land and to start talking about treaties and land. So that's sort of how the idea had come about to do this and then over the course of about a year we really massaged that into what are the most key aspects that folks need to know, how much information can they absorb over the course of the day. And then Connie and I kind of took the group's ideas and ran with it and developed this one day curriculum which we just piloted with a group of facilitators over the course of two days. I've been developing curriculum and delivering workshops, Indigenous awareness and historical awareness type workshops for mainly corporate audiences for a long time now for about I guess eight or nine years. And so to be honest they were like mainly sort of a white audience with maybe you know one or two newcomers here and then sometimes some Indigenous people in the audience. But this is what was really my first time having to develop curriculum that was specifically for a newcomer audience. So it was a little bit unusual but it was nice to be working with some newcomer organizations like Manso. They were really helpful in providing some direction. But our biggest concern was like language. So recognizing that some folks might have some language barriers. So really having to be careful about the kinds of language and expressions we were using. Really taking time to define and unpack key terms that we thought were really important for folks to know but making sure that people would understand exactly what it was that we were saying, what we were talking about. I would say that one of our biggest considerations along the way is the fact that lots of folks would come into this with either high prior knowledge. So like some learning about Indigenous peoples or very low prior knowledge. So folks who literally knew nothing about Indigenous peoples and even just this group of like 30 facilitators who came together in this train the trainer. We definitely saw that. Some people said this is my first opportunity ever hearing about these things. I knew nothing about Indigenous people and then other folks have been doing this kind of work for a long time so they had like a high sort of, you know, knew quite a bit. And so we took that into consideration and developing the facilitator guide is that folks can use it like a menu, right? So we think of our, you know, kind of each activity and there's ten in total as recipes that the facilitator can choose from to develop a particular menu that makes the most sense for their group of diners or their audience for instance. So they can take one of the more complex sections and really drag it out if needed over a really long time because it doesn't actually have to be delivered in one day. It can be delivered over a series of lunch and learns over several weeks. So that's one of the nice things about the guide. That being said, I would actually say that one of the best things that I discovered in developing this toolkit, this first of the series of workshops on treaty and land, is that there is so much to relate between Indigenous peoples and newcomers that actually that was such an opportunity for us to take advantage of, right? Is that folks coming here have their own experiences with, you know, land dispossession, have their own experiences with displacement, have their own experiences with like peace and land treaties, that that could really help them understand what it was that they were going to be learning about Indigenous history. For sure, the facilitators. So if you're a facilitator, can you raise your hand? Like if you're going to be facilitating, pardon? Are you facilitating? Okay, I'm just gonna, I'll make your facilitator, facilitators. So you'll see in this section, like after, I'm just gonna call this like section information when you see these tables. So after the section information, you see a bunch of resources. So we have the treaty relations commission of Manitoba's treaty map of Manitoba here, which is on the wall. So again, you'll all have a copy of this poster. You'll see the pre 1975 treaties. So these are things like the Robinson treaties, the Williams treaty of 1923, and then the numbered treaties, of course, and you'll see there's sort of a small version of that right there. And then you'll see this Venn diagram with some information. Don't look at that yet. We're going to do an activity on that one. But you'll see the Venn diagram is right here. And in hindsight, I wish I'd made this about 20 times bigger, but you can always use flip charts, or you can use a thing like this. We'll try to fit the information in here, and if it doesn't work, then less than learned for us, right? Okay. And again, if like at any time you're like there's a glaring gap here or I don't understand something or like stop and like let's do this again, remember the hand signals, and then also take notes on your post-it cards. And we can add things too to the parking lot if they come up. And it may be that things added to the parking lot will be addressed later on in the day and tomorrow, but and it may be that we've missed it. I mean, again, if we're talking about indigenous history, I think it's something everyone should know, you know, whether you're, you've been sort of born and raised in Canada for several generations, or if you're a newcomer who arrived recently, I think that everybody needs to learn this history and to have some awareness about what really happened here. And I think newcomers especially, they come with a certain idea in mind of what Canada is, right? Canada is this like benevolent state who they hear about in their countries as this like, you know, beautiful, generous, like giving place. And that's certainly been a lot of people's experience. It has not been the experience of indigenous people here, right? With in terms of interacting with the Canadian state. So I mean, I think everyone needs to know this with newcomers. It's especially important because they, you see that they develop community right away when they arrive, right? So they get here, they end up at like the welcome place or some organization that helps them sort of get settled in. And I heard like lots of people would come up to me in the breaks and say, you know, I arrived and within a week of me arriving, I was connected to this organization and people were whispering stereotypes about indigenous people into our ears. Don't go into this neighborhood, oh, you know, cross the street if you see somebody, you'll watch out for these people, you know, for this reason or that reason. And it's super problematic, right? Because they're developing prejudices without understanding what it is that they're actually seeing, right, that they can't understand the role of like trauma and colonization and how that plays out in the present. So I mean, I just think it's so crucial that they're getting this information really early after arriving. So I see indigenous pedagogy combining lots of things like being land based. And that doesn't actually necessarily mean that it happens outdoors. But it really highlights the centrality of land to indigenous culture, history and spirituality. Because like we don't think about those things, right? But right now, you know, in this very urban setting, here we are in the north end, we're on indigenous land. And so we have to interact all the time with the community and with the land in that way. I also see indigenous pedagogy being about like lots of storytelling. And so Connie does that so well, right? Like she paints such this picture that really helps people see what it is that we're trying to teach them about. And I mean, it integrates a lot of different things. But I think indigenous pedagogy, it should be fun. It should be experiential and hands on. And again, we've built the curriculum that way, right? That it's, it's, and people said that in the feedback, they said, we expected it to be more content heavy. We expected it to be more textbook based. You know, we expected to be bombarded with information, but it was activity after activity after activity. But I'm still walking away knowing so much more than I came in with. And I actually think that's an indigenous pedagogy, right? Is that we learn through doing, we learn through these different activities and games and role plays and all these things. So it's also about rights folks. It's also about exercising our inherent rights that were agreed to in this treaty making process, right? And we talked about that yesterday, that this was partly about being able to continue hunting and fishing and exercising our cultural and linguistic rights. And so this is a return to that too. So, so some of the key or some of the essential questions I could say for this session. And so these are things that you could actually discuss with the groups or they'll be on, this is what I meant to say earlier and I forgot. Connie and I are creating a slide deck. So that slide deck will go out to all the facilitator groups too. So the essential questions will be part of the slide deck. So for this session there, what purpose to urban reserve serve is urban land, indigenous land? It is. How can you support indigenous resurgence? And what does it mean to stand in solidarity with indigenous people? And then I can't remember who said it earlier if it was elder Carol. And I think that it might have been who said, stand beside me or stand behind me, right? Don't stand in front of me. And that being said, we talked about some examples where it's actually, it's a safety thing for folks to see. If they're standing in front of you, it's because they're protecting you, not because they're trying to take up your space. So these, this group of facilitators that we sort of trained or modeled the pilot for are actually going to take this now into their own communities. So lots of them are going to take it and deliver it at their workplace to like their, you know, own staff and colleagues. Other people are going to deliver it to like at the youth programs they work with. Others are going to take it to like this, you know, the settlement workers to the newcomer communities that they're working with. And the idea is that they'll deliver these, this, they'll deliver this workshop and whether it's like over the course of the day or spread out over several weeks or, you know, in lunch and learns. And then we'll come back in a couple of months and they'll share some feedback and input because we know, they know better than we do about what's going to work delivering this in their community. So we want to hear what went super well, what didn't work well, what kind of, how did you adapt this content for your particular audience? Because we want to include things like that in the toolkit. So people have options for, you know, what might work better for a youth audience, what might work better for an audience who has, you know, for instance, English as an additional language and maybe doesn't have as high language proficiency, like how they had to adapt it for that and then integrate that into the toolkit. And then we'll essentially not finalize because we see these as working documents that we'll always build on, but maybe, you know, develop a more completed facilitation guide and then, you know, share that out again with the folks who participated here and they can keep doing that good work.