 OK, good morning, everyone. Welcome back, once again, to Lauren Hall, to the first session of the Leading Together event, the panel discussion on the topic Indigenous Communities, Shaping the Future of Education and Pedagogy. It gives me immense pleasure to be moderating this very special session. To begin with, I'd just like to introduce our very important and knowledgeable panelists who will be sharing their insights for this morning's discussion. We have with us here Dr. Ketukre, who is working as an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Koima College under Nagila University. She has been working in the field of education for approximately 13 years, and she is a fellow at the Highland Institute, Koima Nagaland. She was awarded the Zuban Sasakawa Peace Foundation grant for young researchers from Northeast India in 2021. Her academic and research interests include borderland and border communities in South Asia, identity politics in Northeast India, peace and conflict resolution, human rights, particularly the marginal groups such as women, Indigenous communities, minorities, and persons with disabilities. She's also undertaking and completed research projects, some of which include a study on the borderland communities along the Indo-Myanmar border, with special reference to the Kiamingyong Nagas, which was funded by the Center for South Asian Studies Boati University. And another very interesting project that she's worked on, from which we would like to hear more from her, is on the mainstreaming the lived experiences of persons with disabilities in Nagaland, a gender perspective. And now she's currently working on an ICS. It's our funded major research project. I'm told, titled, Living at the Periphery Territory, Culture, and Identity of the Tikir Nagas, a scheduled tribe in Nagaland near the Indo-Myanmar border. Thank you for agreeing to be the panelists and coming all the way from Koima to be a part of this discussion. The next we have here, I'll start with the ladies and finish off with the man last. Dr. Dali Kikon. Of course, she needs no introduction. I think she is a well-known personality. But just let me allow me to just mention a few highlights about her. She's a Stanford alumni and an associate professor in the Anthropology and Development Studies program at the University of Melbourne. Her work focuses on political economy of extractive resources, militarization, migration, development initiatives, gender relations, food cultures, and human rights in India. She is a woman of many, many accomplishments and capabilities, very reputed and well-known in the academic circles. And I know with such a strong love for indigenous communities. And of course she's also another very prolific writer whose current writing projects include ongoing book manuscripts on fermenting cultures and a report on the impact of the 2020 Bakjan oil spill in Assam. She has also directed and produced an ethnographic film titled Seasons of Life, foraging and fermenting bamboo shoot during ceasefire. As an engaged anthropologist, Dr. Kikon is one of the lead researchers for the Recover, Restore and Decolonize Initiative. It's a community-led movement to start dialogues on repatriation of indigenous Naga, ancestral human remains from the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford University. We will also be having a panel discussion on this tomorrow. And she has recently, I had the pleasure of recently attending her book launch titled Food Journey Stories from the Heart, published by Subhan Books New Delhi. She's one of the editors of the books. And I just heard that yesterday she also launched another book, Life and Dignity. So really congratulations to all of these accomplishments. Dr. Kikon was honored as a look of our champion in 2022 for her work on indigenous food practices in India. So that's Dr. Dali Kikon. Now I would like to move on to introducing our next panelists, Mr. Kevisato Sanyo, who is the founder of Naga Ed. Naga Ed is a digital education firm where Kevisato and his team they supply digital education services tailored for tribal and indigenous communities. Kevisato's professional trajectory initially led him to conservation where he dedicated his early career to bolstering environmental legislation and policies for endangered species, wilderness expanses and rainforests in his adopted homeland of Australia. So prior to relocating to Naga land, Kevisato was working at RMIT University of Australia at the Center of Academic Quality and Excellence where he fashioned academic quality appraisal mechanisms for the 500 plus programs on offer. Kevisato is also a member of the National Committee on Skill Development and Livelihood at the Confederation of Indian Industry and an advisory board member of UPSOL. Here we have it, the three panelists for this morning who will be sharing with us their perspectives and their knowledge on the future of education and pedagogy. I think we would all agree that indigenous communities around the world really have so much to offer with regard to their history, their culture, their ways of knowing that are sometimes intentionally or unintentionally suppressed or sidelined. And in the recent years, there has been a really strong push in incorporating indigenous perspectives into education and pedagogy all in an effort to create much more inclusive and culturally relevant learning environments. So with this focus on indigenous communities I think in a world where there is always just so much going on and so much noise, so many issues to focus on, what we're all here to do this morning in this panel is to really just offer the respect and the recognition to the way these indigenous communities approach teaching and learning. So I'd like to invite all of the students to open up their minds and to reflect on the insights that the panelists will share this morning. I'd also like to mention at this time that for all of the sessions of the conferences we'll be having students share the reflections to conclude each of the sessions. So for this session we'll be hearing from Arindam Joshi from Savitra Bhai Pulepune University and Ardhamin Zaruvi from Stella Maris College, Chennai after the session. So we look forward to hearing from all of you students too. Okay, so for this panel discussion I just, we'll just have a few discussions or reflect on some questions after which I will be opening the time, giving time to the audience to ask questions. So students you may note down questions in between and I'll give you time to put out your questions to this panelists afterwards. So to start off with I would like to ask Dr. Dalit Kikon. You've been working very closely with indigenous communities on a number of projects from food, sea sovereignty, gender injustice, so much more. Drawing from all of the experiences that you've had amongst the indigenous communities, how do you feel that we can better incorporate all of this experience, the indigenous experience or indigenous perspectives into the education system and our pedagogy? Thank you so much and I apologize. If you thought that I was scrolling my phone and not listening to Hauesa, I was trying to find an email that I received I think two days ago from a student. And I received quite a number of emails from students that I don't know and I think that's something quite distinct that I would like to highlight because I do receive emails for peer reviews as an academic that's what we do to examine thesis, PhD thesis as an external examiner. But I think what is exceptional that I find in my own standing and my own experience as a scholar and we call it a tribal scholar, we call it indigenous scholar here is a lot of students write to me about just their feelings, right? It's not that they want anything from me, they just tell me that, you know, Professor Kikon, we just wanted to, or I just wanted to make sure that you know how they're feeling right now. And so I was trying to very quickly find that email, maybe if I find it, I'll read it out, but it's about students from indigenous communities, from marginalized communities. In India, writing to me, where often there will be a sentence which says, you know, I thought I was going mad or I thought, you know, what I was feeling was insane because there are very few professors out there who even validate what I'm feeling. They think that I'm just stupid, you know, until I came across your work or your lecture online or, you know, an essay that you wrote and now I feel that I'm not mad, right? It's almost, how can I say? It's almost to a level of insanity that students are driven from marginalized communities, from indigenous communities, to feel what we feel, to look at the worldview that we haven't tried to theorize or tried to conceptualize to understand the world around us. A one, it's, I think, then to say something really, really heavy, like educational institutions, higher educational institutions, being an accomplice in this pedagogical violence. Second, in a sense of having student community and especially research communities, often have that nature of intellectual bullying to tell students from marginalized communities to say that your experiences don't matter, right? If you're a Dalit in India, your experiences don't matter. If you are an Adivasi, a tribal, your experiences don't matter. You have to constantly adapt and adopt to the dominant framework. And I feel that that needn't be the case, given the wealth of knowledge, the wealth of, I think, worldviews that we bring. One of the things that I often say very proudly is the ability for us as Indigenous people to inherit and to have that in us about storytelling. And I say that for all children who were brought up, I think, around Indigenous cultures, both Indigenous, non-Indigenous families, to say what kind of storytelling methods we have. Any kind of philosophy, theory that we look at around the world, storytelling and how we listen is so integral and important. So I feel that the kind of, I think projects that you have named for yourself from the seed sovereignty, from my association with food justice, I think it's been to draw deeply from where I come from, this land, and to value that with so much challenges that we have around structural inequality, structural violence, the history of militarization, that is also part of our present and how do we then begin to heal? So my justice work has also been around that. And I feel that I think there need to be a deeper commitment and an honesty to the land that we belong, to values like, I think, compassion. We often don't talk about compassion and education in the same sentence. There's such a heightened way of talking about intellectual and higher education projects that almost disassociates lived realities. You know, I feel that as a Naga scholar, we cannot go to the world and tell them that we have made it until and unless the most vulnerable and the most, I think, marginalized people within our community, Naga's, non-Naga's, who have adopted Naga and his home, begin to walk the journey with us. I think that's been my commitment and we can carry the conversations further. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for sharing your experiences and those reflections. I'll pick up on some of those quick topics that you highlighted later too. The second question I'd just like to direct to Dr. Ketukre, who, as an educationist with 13 years experience in Nangalan, what are your thoughts on integration of indigenous knowledge systems into this mainstream educational curricula? Before I answer the question and share my views, I would like to thank the administration of Tetsuo College for inviting me to be a part of this great event. As I entered the campus, I felt like it's a pre-Christmas celebration and I really wonder how you guys pulled it together because in Kohima, we are so busy with conducting our exams and here you are so coolly doing your own stuff. Very beautifully. I really appreciate the students, the faculty and stuff for doing this amazing work. I'm also very, very happy to be sharing this panel with my model, Madam Dolly. She told me not to call her Madam but she is still a Madam for me because as she was sharing, I often wrote mails to her and she graciously, every time I wrote something, she graciously replied. It was, I think, more than 10 years ago. I made her for the first time in Singapore, National University of Singapore and since then I have been following her word and she has been a source of motivation for me personally as well as professionally. I receive a lot of healing listening to your talks and reading your works so I'm so happy to be here. I'm also very happy to be sharing the same panel with Kevin Sato for the amazing work that he is doing. We really appreciate your work and your team's work. So talking about education, like talking about the integration of indigenous knowledge system and the mainstream educational system, I think most of you would agree with me that for a very long time we have been following this colonized or a western system of education here even in Naglain and for a very long time our indigenous knowledge or indigenous knowledge system has been neglected and for that matter we are at a stage that many of us we are losing our own culture, we are losing our own identity and our language. I have a six year old son today he refuses or he finds difficult to speak in my dialect and even his father's dialect. He calls himself an Englishman and that is a very sad reality. I tried my best to teach him my dialect and insist that he also learns his father's dialect but I think the whole system is in the you know the whole process of modernization and westernization that all of us we are going through and coming to the curricula from the preschool itself we are taught how to speak English and children will get you know sticks or they will get beatings from the teachers for speaking their own mother tongue or Nagamis. So that is the kind of you know and forced educational system that we are forced to follow but I believe that over the last few years or at least the last past decade we have seen that we have realized that it is very, very important for us to go deep into our indigenous practices and there are many people who are also advocating the needs to incorporate the indigenous knowledge system. So we have seen many educational institutions incorporating some part of the cultural or traditional activities or practice in the you know in the academic calendar as well and we have seen that but however we still need a very kind of a very strong educational policy. I would like to bring in the national education policy 2020. This national education policy 2020 encourages the learning of Indian knowledge system. So for that matter in Nagaland I think instead of I'm not saying that we should not go for Indian indigenous knowledge system but I would propose that educational institutions, educators and even parents we should think about how we can incorporate Naga indigenous knowledge system or the indigenous knowledge system of the North is into the mainstream educational curriculum and for that we need people who can work on curriculum development. First of all planning design and development which we found very much missing in our land. So I think there is a great need and it's an urgent call and I think that this is a very good platform for us to think about you know integrating not just the curriculum as well but also the teaching methodologies, the teaching aids and the tools which we can use in our own indigenous way to impart knowledge to our students. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you Dr. Ketukare. I'm really glad that you mentioned about curriculum development because I think that's something at the core of what many of our educators in Nagaland really need to get in better close or touch with and I think that's also what Nagaland is doing. So I'd just like to request Mr. Kevisal to please tell us more about what Nagaland's involvement towards shaping the future of education through indigenous knowledge has been so far. So when we started out, Naga Ed, I was calling my partner Sheroi and we were looking at different areas in which we could contribute to our community. That was kind of our guiding star. The question was what is our contribution to our community? And we found that and I think by way here is education was one of the greatest needs for our community. And as highlighted by our other panelists as well is that the education system that we have right now is unbalanced. So we've been hyper-optimized, inherited bridge system, hyper-optimized under the Indian system for a particular output, which is sitting on board exams because it's directly linked to livelihoods. So the majority of our jobs come from government. We have some of the highest rates of government employment in the country. And so if a young person wants to get educated and have a livelihood, it's directly linked to getting a job in the government, which is directly linked to performance in your board exams. So it's really crowded out the space for our indigenous practices and the way that we practice knowledge in our maroon system. Mainly under the maroon system, it's tied to our village. We had the sovereignty of our village that was the peak of our culture, coming from our family, our clan, our kell, and then to our village. And our knowledge and our indigenous practices is about how do we contribute to that sovereign village? How do we have a community-based system that we live symbiotically with our fellow people in the village and with the natural world? And so that's how I define our indigenous practices or indigenous knowledge. So in understanding that that space is now crowded out, how do we then bring back or how do we maintain balance? And in those areas to align with our indigenous practices, we've identified two additional areas in addition to the ethnic academic areas. So one is essential skills. So under the maroon, under the village lifestyle, your education is what are the essential skills that you need to live and work? And that is what was taught. The other one part we call lessons for living, which is how are you a contributing member to your village community? And we've expanded that to how are you contributing member to your global village community? But essentially it ties back to our relationship with our village and our relationship with people in that village and our relationship to the nature around that village. So how do we bring aspects? So we've looked at it in three different pillars for the company, looking essentially our academics or leading up to our board exams, aligning ourselves with the NEP. But in addition to that, adding those areas of essential skills that might be different now in the world that we live in, but essentially skills to survive and thrive in the world that we find ourselves. And lessons for living, how do we build moral fortitude? How are we contributing members to our community? And I think that ties directly to the values of our indigenous identity and how we identify indigenous peoples. Thank you so much for sharing on that. So with regard to this whole imparting of indigenous knowledge and integrating it into education now, we've talked about compassionate education, looking at how, looking more closely at what students, indigenous students face. I think Dr. Dolly had mentioned that in her opening statement about being given recognition or being acknowledged on the feelings that students need to grapple with, with modernity, with tradition, how, and I asked this question to all of the panelists here, how do we change this narrative? How do we help them decolonize the existing narratives of being told, you know, how would they negotiate with this tradition and with this modern education system? What would be your response to the students to best address this complexity that they are faced with at a time when the push towards technology is so strong, push towards modernity at new age, learning methods are so strong, but at the same time we're being told to focus on indigenous knowledge as your practices, how do they negotiate with this type of engagement as they also try to be modern citizens, globally, global citizens of this world, at the same time being touched with their indigenous identity? I put that question to any of the panelists, all of you, if you could share your response on that, that would be great. Hawissa, thank you so much for the question and I have no answer to that because it's so big and I think it's a thought in progress for all of us, right, it's daunting. I think many Naga students are still first generation in many ways where their parents, both mother and father, hasn't finished high school or at the most college dropouts and all of a sudden the jump that we're having to the global, I would say true technology, true, you know, the net through the digital world, sometimes creates quite an imbalance because the reality is that majority of us, I think in the 21st century, are going to become migrants, are going to really be in the service industry, are really going to be faced with a reality that we have very minimum skills, right? That our shelf life, I know it's quite derogatory, but our shelf life, our professional life, sometimes is going to end the moment our body breaks down. So those are the realities. So what are we looking at? I think these are the realities in front of us, but since you maybe used the word decolonize, right? How do we decolonize our mind? And that's a process that's a topic that I have been talking about as an educator myself. And like my co-pathlete said, not looking at really at Western-centric educations, but how do we place value here, back to where we belong? And sometimes it's tough, sometimes it's very hard because of the past that we all inherit, the past that we have of violence, the past that we have of colonization. So in a sense, I just came back from, I think giving some talks and interacting with college students and with university students in Mokokchon and in Lumami, Nagaland University. And we were talking about decolonization. I know such a weird concept that it doesn't really make sense for a lot of us. We have so much happening here. And what is decolonization? Why should we care about that? So I was at this college called Jubilee College, which is in Mokokchon, and it's part of our Baptist Church initiative. And we saw the statue, a life statue of Reverend Longry at the college, one of our Naga visionaries and leaders. And we started talking about decolonization. And sometimes I think these concepts come to us, the language that I'm speaking, English-Takoya said. And then Nagamis is a market language that came up from the foothills of the Naga Hills and Assam, when our ancestors began to trade and barter with the Brahmaputra Valley. So it's also a language. Then I also speak Lotha, my mother tongue. So in a sense, what I'm trying to say is, I know that when we talk about modernization, when we talk about globalization, it can be very confusing. But I think since the time of the Industrial Revolution, since we have something called electricity, nothing remained the same. So if we are talking about the shock that we are going through by the digital technology media, can you imagine a few hundred years ago when people in Europe discovered electricity, how life changed? Then it was no longer the lamps. After sunset, it was electricity. Then came the photos, then came the videos. And I think we're still going through the process. So as part of the human species, what I want to tell students here is that we are going to see changes only in this lifetime of a magnitude that we can't even imagine. When that happens to you, remember, never forget the ground beneath your feet. Who are you? I always tell my beloved students and my colleagues that the colonizers and those who came to conquer us that knew very well who they were. They knew or they believed that they were superior to us in terms of their race, in terms of their education, in terms of their knowledge. And like our esteemed guest today, Agumeta Tolans, we as Nagas have been studied to bits. We have been written about by all European scholars who have come to study. But what have we done in a sense to understand who we are? So sometimes it just starts by asking very simple questions. If the colonizers knew who they were and if the oppressors who come to exploit us know who they are so well, do we know who we are? I think that in a sense resonates with the questions that my Honorable Co-Panelists have asked about language and also about skills. So maybe I'll stop here. I resonate with a lot of what you said, Dolly. Something that I think we're struggling with is not just that we're entering into a new world, but we're adapting in a very compressed timeline. So we're talking about our people, our communities, adapting to four industrial revolutions, sometimes in one generation. So I think about the way that my father lived. He was an enimist. Our family was not Christian initially in the beginning. And so we would sacrifice chicken sushi-cheo for a good hunting season. We'd have saccharine. We'd have our festivals. And then from then we moved into Christianity. He traversed the globe. We ended up in Australia. When I was growing up, I saw my first computer. I think when I was nine and I peeked through the window of the school and met two computers there. So in our family we're adapting to four industrial revolutions in one generation. And for large parts of community, in fact more than 80% of our community were doing it in this generation. So not only are we adapting to that, we're also waking up to our consciousness of an indigenous people within this generation. So the idea of Nagas being indigenous as a self-identity is relatively new. The Naga identity in itself is also relatively new from 1920s, 30s, you know, we're calling this term from others. So as Dolly was saying, we really have to know ourselves, right? Before we, for us to be able to adapt and to keep true to our cultures, to our values, we really need to know ourselves. And for me, that really again, as I was saying, before ties back to our village state, right? So the core values in our education at a more room level, the core values or our being is actually orientated around our village state. And so for me personally, it's about a practice of continually going back to your village, about experiential learning, for sitting with your elders, learning with them, learning the things that they do and try to see the world from their point of view because it's tremendously different now from the beyond their imagination. And as our core panels would say, the world that we're going to will be beyond our imagination now. Some of the work that I did in Australia was about the future of work and how we adapt to the future of work. Within that realm, we have a few skill sets, right? About the changing landscape, especially as we're going into the cyber physical world. Some of those skill sets that we're talking about where we've adapted to due to our political history and due to our cultural history. So some of those being sense-making, collaboration, adaptive and novel thinking, we've been pressured into forming those skills. So as we're going out into the world, as we're awakening ourselves, my hope for our generation and the generations coming up is that we invest in those skills that we've had since time immemorial because those are the skills and those are the coveted skills that the world is looking for today. So moving forward, that's really where I would say, it'd be great for our young people to look back and able for them to look forward. I'm just gonna move on to a couple of other questions which we can try to get to. Directed to Dr. Ketu Kree, speaking from the perspective of persons with disabilities, how can we shape our education and curricula to be more inclusive of this segment of society? We also have students from Chennai, from Pune and from various indigenous communities over here. So different marginalized sections of society, how would we bring everyone into the discussion? How would we try to be more sensitive to persons with disabilities? How can we really make our education system much more inclusive? Before I answer that question, I would like to put a disclaimer. I'm not an expert on disability studies. I've just started my journey into this sector. I am a lifelong learner of political science and as a student of political science, I always thought about the concepts, normative concepts like justice, rights, equality and all. And my work with disabilities started with the Zuban Fellowship and for that I'm very grateful to Zuban Sasakawa Peace Foundation grant. It's not that I have not known people having disabilities. All my life I have been living with relatives who had disabilities, I had friends who had disabilities, but as a subject matter or as a discipline, I did not put attention, but through this fellowship, I was somehow motivated and also forced into looking into this disability sector. Now talking about disability issue, particularly indigenous communities, we, most indigenous communities, we see disability from religious or spiritual perspective. Some see it as, some see disabilities as punishment from God, some see it as blessings. So even in my work, when I had interaction with families having members with disabilities, they gave their experiences, sharing that some of them, they think that it's a gift from God. And I was also told that there is, in a particular village, a young boy was dressed in traditional attire and every year during the harvest, he would be taken to his field. And they believe that whenever he accompanied his parents, the harvest is bountiful. So that's the kind of attachment that they have attached with being, being a gift or being a blessing from God. But majority of the people, people think that disability is a curse. It's a punishment because of the sins of your parents or the sins of your ancestors. And for a very long time, we have not thought about or talk about this persons with disability in England openly. They have been hiding for a very long time and today I'm glad that there are many special schools, there are many inclusive schools coming up, but at the larger level, these are confined mostly to Kohima and Dimapur. They are yet to make entry into other rural places. So I think the government has to take serious policy decision and also see to it that the policies which are adopted are put into place properly. Now coming back to inclusive education, I think it is very, very important that education has to be inclusive. Education is one of the strongest weapons that we have as people. And I think that this particular group of people, persons with disabilities, they have to be given access to education. And for this, I think it is very, very important that we go back to the indigenous values like solidarity that we share with our own community people. We also need to think about caregiving, how we can care for one another in a community because in olden times, even the persons with disabilities, they were seen to be more integrated into the society comparing to today. Because today in town and in cities, we see that there are also avenues where these persons with disabilities are also helped and they are empowered. But there are also big sections of persons with disabilities who are hidden away from the gaze of the government, who are hidden away from the services which are available for them. So I don't know whether I'm answering the question correctly or not, but this is something that really troubles me because in Nagaland, yes, we have seen schools coming up, but we have seen that there are many persons, children with disabilities in rural areas who are locked inside their houses when their parents, parents who are farmers, they go to their field. And early intervention could have avoid, could have avoid many of these disabilities to a large extent. So early intervention is something that we need. And also for educational institutions, I think it is very, very important that we have inclusive policy. UGC has come up with the inclusive guidelines. I'm not saying that anything that comes from the central is good, but what I'm saying is that it is very, very important that education sector, education department in Nagaland, board school and higher education, we have to come up with our own policies to take care of these indigenous persons with disabilities. And another thing is that at the college level or even at the school level, we have to look at whether they have accessibility to the education that we are providing or not. Not just physical accessibility, but at the regional, our behavior at attitudes toward these persons with disability. And also the social situation, how we treat these persons with disability. Today in Kohima, we have good number of schools coming up with these facilities for children, but most of the schools are from the families who had struggled with these issues themselves. They don't want others to go through the same thing, so they have started preschools, they have started schools for these children with disabilities. So my greatest concern is at the school level, we have students with disabilities. The school education department is also doing somewhere, and we have the data. But what happens to students in higher secondary and in college? Let me also tell you the figure of iShare Report, all India survey on higher education, 2021. The data shows that we have only eight students with disabilities in higher education, eight students. And in higher, in school level, we have more than 2,000 students. So where do these 2,000 students go after they finish their class 10? This is one question that I'm trying to figure out, and this really troubles me as a teacher. So in our college, Kohima College, we have a small committee which was set up to take care of the needs of students with disabilities. Right now we have seven students identified. These students, they also have difficulty coming out and accepting themselves that they are having some certain kind of disabilities. So I think for the students also, they need to accept the fact that they have such disabilities and come forward. And also from the authority, from the college management or authority side also, we should keep things in place for them, like having barrier-free access infrastructure or even study materials. Now what we urgently need is we need manpower. We need teachers who are specially trained in this disability sector. And very unfortunately, I'm not an expert in this. So I just wish that we have some policy intervention in creating some special schools or institutions, especially meant for the students with disabilities so that we can also help them. And by helping them, I think we are helping ourselves because we are all part of this community. Thank you. Thank you so much for sharing about that because I think this is one aspect that's really not talked about enough inclusive education and thinking about the students, persons with disabilities, how do we get them access to education? I'm really happy that Koima College has started a unit focused on these students. Ditto College has also faced similar cases where having students speak out on their own disability and being tagged or being labeled as that becomes very difficult for them to accept. And even for the whole community, I think it's something that we're just not, we need to sensitize our community more on being much more acceptable, inclusive, to speak about it more so that we can help them out. So we've talked about the inclusive policy educations, I think policies that need to be more inclusive towards this marginalized or neglected or non-talked about segments of students and societies and we've, I think the main, another thing about it is all about how do we bring a team of people to work together on addressing all of these issues and bringing all stakeholders, educators, policy makers to come together and frame policies that will benefit and task forces that will actually follow up on the implementation. So I'd like to go back to Dr. Dolly on speaking about indigenous communities. We've talked about some of the challenges. We've talked about compassion, having empathy and more caregiving to indigenous communities and all marginalized sections. What now do you think we should focus on and prioritize at this moment in time to foster faster progress, educational growth within these indigenous communities? What are the key strengths and advantages of the indigenous communities that need to be prioritized? I think at this moment, because we're having this conversation here in Limapur in the state of Nagaland and the northeastern region of India has eight states, northeastern region of India has eight states and I think the focus is really government support. The focus is government support. I appreciate the government of Nagaland giving in a lot of support aid to music. We have the Hornbill Festival starting very soon. All of us will go who can find rooms and bookings around Kohima, but it is time that all of us in this room feel that it is time for education. It is time to devote ourselves to knowledge and knowledge making because the challenges that my two co-panelists have shared are challenges where we need the government to step in. If we have to focus on our ancestral practices of more knowledge, on bringing in our issues of disability within schools, within colleges, the other side of this challenge that is to have government support, education department, women, children, welfare department come on board and say, listen, we are here. How do we make this okay? My fear is that because I worked with Naga migrants for my second book and I went across India looking at the kind of savings they have. And trust me, for a lot of families here, Naga families, we are, I think, just one stop away from being bankrupt, the moment a family member falls ill. So no matter how much skills we have and the money we bring in, we are just one stop short of mortgaging our land, our house, our land documents the moment a family member falls ill. This is the kind of vulnerability. This is a kind of precarity that we have. So for me, Havessa, the focus would be really to call upon the government to look into the educational institutions to make sure that we have the support. And given what my colleague this morning said that investing in education and knowledge is a long-term investment. But we need to have that urgency to say that if we invest in disability care, in educating our indigenous, our students with disability they will be the future leaders writing the policies here for the state government, for the country and be the representatives, be assets, be thinkers, be philosophers for the world as well. And I think this is really key and important. The focus, my final point, should be then how do we together think about being in a position where we focus on education, where we are there as support, even for governments to be able to write reports. I often hear that the government of Nagaland has firms from Delhi, from Kolkata, from other places where they hire to write reports for state governments. And I think that practice needs to be revisited. And this is for the policymakers, for the administrators, for the politicians there. Look at the skills that Naga students can bring in, that higher education can bring in, that amazing scholars sitting here in our land can bring it. And I think this is what the focus on education, what the focus on knowledge can do. So my answer would be that, Hueso, to focus on government support. Along with the Hornville, we also need the Hornville of Knowledge, Wisdom and all to be supported. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Dali. Yes, focus on government support, so necessary in order to help higher education and all of these plans for implementing the national education policy, or whatever new policies that have to be introduced to be made more inclusive. I believe Mr. Kvesato Naga-Ed has also been doing a lot of work at the ground on training educators, creating courses or programs that would be beneficial or that's necessary to upskill our educators and the community members. Can you tell us a bit more of what are the skills? You mentioned about investing in certain skills to empower our community members. What is the work that Naga-Ed is doing and what more do you think we need to focus on? Thanks for the opportunity to plug in your website. So, I recently got back from Kifri, which is on the border of India and Myanmar. So, working with a few schools there, we're working with the district administration. One of the key areas that we're focusing on is really uplifting the teachers' capabilities. So, when we're talking about uplifting education, the delivery mechanism is our teachers, right? Without the learning that occurs is the relationship between the teacher and the student. So, how do we maximize that opportunity? How do we maximize that time? And one of the ways that we see that possible is by leveraging technology. So, in going in these areas, actually, when we went there, you know, we were looking at the connectivity in the area. There's amazing 5G, you won't believe it. We went to Sittimi, we went to Salomi, Pugyo, we went to all these places and GEO has built towers everywhere. I think our government has an agenda about connectivity in that area. And so, we were getting speeds of about 350 megabits per second. It was amazing. So, one of the long barriers about getting digital education into these areas has been connectivity. And for these villages dotted on the border, some of those issues have been resolved, right? The second one was about getting the physical technology there. One of the amazing things that we found was that during this period, the government had deployed almost a tablet to almost every student. And I think almost every government school got two smart TVs. And some of these classes, we're talking about 20, 30 students, some of the schools, we're talking about 50 or 100 students at the most. So, but despite all of this, the technology wasn't being utilized, right? And so, one of the key things is our community and our people's relationship with technology, the accountability we have when we're given these resources, how do we address that? So, we went there on a listening mission. We surveyed about 800 students. We spoke to dozens of student teachers and administrators. And for us to bridge that gap and bring quality education by levering technology is really about how do we overcome these behavioral barriers and this, I don't even know how to describe it, like a resentment or, not even a resentment, just a barrier with technology. So, that's something that we're looking into. Because there's a great opportunity here. One of the great opportunities that we've had is that we can bypass the third industrial revolution. So, we don't have to go through that whole mechanization process. We don't have to go through the extraction of the resources. I think we mentioned that moving forward, we're gonna be in a very service-based industry, a knowledge-based industry. We're looking for knowledge workers. And so, our indigenous value of preserving nature, we can continue and meet the world in the fourth industrial revolution without having to go through those same processes that other communities have gone through around the world but extracting their resources. The second thing is that as we're moving forward into the fourth industrial revolution, the world is looking for certain skills that cannot be replaced by AI. These skills are human skills. And these are the skills that we have because we've built them through generations, because of the structure of our villages, because we have some of the most linguistic, leadiverse communities for a single geographic region, because we've been through tremendous political turmoil. So, for these reasons of our cultural history, our political history, we can double down on some of these skills. So, for us to be able to, education institutes for government, to be able to promote these skills, sense-making, adoptive and novel thinking, collaboration, these are the highly coveted skills. So, not only can we meet the world, and progress ourselves without extracting our natural resources, but we can also meet the world and fulfill these gaps. And then, one great opportunity, last one is that the value systems that we hold in our villages, about respect for one another, about having a symbiotic relationship, about a communitarian ethos and about protecting nature. These are the values that the world needs today. So, for our institution, for our government to be able to focus in on these areas, is an opportunity to give a tremendous gift to our global village. Thank you so much for sharing that. I'm now just gonna open the floor up to the audience in a minute. So, students or staff, anyone who'd have questions, you can pose your questions to the panelists. Before we get into that, I just wanna ask the same question to Dr. Kintukriya on what are the key strengths and advantages you think that indigenous communities, right now, what should we prioritize to foster faster educational growth and progress? Right now, we are going through revolution even in the educational system. A lot has been emphasized on the use of ICT and also artificial intelligence is something that we are all happy about it, but something that we should all be scared of also because if we are not careful, we will be replaced very soon. But something that cannot be replaced is what I agree with Kevisato is that the values that we have, the moral values that each one of us as a part of this larger community pauses. Like for example, many people in the world they are having problem with depression. And in this fast competitive life, depression is something that is also affecting many students and even teachers, educators as well. But when we try to look at the indigenous system, we see that in a community, we take care of one another. We do compete, it's not that we don't compete, but our competition is not unhealthy. But in a capitalist society or in a consumerist society, which is filled with competition, which is filled with toxic competition, I think from indigenous values such as caring for one another, sharing with one another and looking at holistic approach of education because as we have learned, the western education is mostly for survival. But I think indigenous education, it gives meaning to our life, not just survival, not just concern about what we get to eat, but I think it also gives meaning and purpose to our life. So I think we have to go back to that, that we need to care for one another as members of the indigenous community, irrespective of the differences that we have. Now I'm just going to open up the floor to the audience in case you would like to pose any questions. I'd like to request if some volunteers can pass around the mic and you can just raise your hands and they'll bring the microphone to you. Please introduce yourself. Good afternoon. This was a very interesting discussion. I've really enjoyed myself and learned a lot. My name is Lika Chopi and I'm from the psychology department here in Tetsuo College. I actually have quite a few questions. So to start with, I'd like to infer from my own personal experiences and say that I'm unable to properly or fluently speak in my own dialect, which is sumi, due to the fact that I was sent to hostels and birding schools from a very young age. So English is a language that I use to think, to dream and to talk. And most, I feel like this is not a very sustainable way of acknowledging my own heritage. So my question for this is as most schools will not have the resources to teach every single dialect that exists here in Naglin, what are some realistic measures to sustain our mother tongues? One of you, I'll just leave it to any one of you who would like to answer this question. Yes, it is true that schools are not in a position to hire teachers for all the tribal communities because we are diverse tribal community. So there are many students belonging to different tribal communities. I think what we can do is we can have a certain kind of cluster system where instead of going for a very formal kind of education, I think we can have a group of institutions working together to provide specific language or a specific dialect. For example, here, we have Tetsuo College here, we have CH, we have Padkai Christian College, San Marys or whatever. Then I think all these colleges can come together and they can form a cluster and they can teach a particular or a number of languages and they can also help, they can also use teachers. For example, a language teacher in Tetsuo College can also, I think, it's quite possible to allow the teacher to work in another institution as well. It's not that a particular teacher appointed for a particular school not, you know, should be only working in that school or college. So I think we can go for that. Another thing is that at the family level, as I say personally, and people call me a failure as a mother because I'm not able to teach my dialect to my child, but I think this is something that, this struggle is something very real and we have to keep on going. We need to, we cannot expect the schools to teach our dialect to our children if we don't do at home. So I think it comes back to our families as well. And yeah, I think some of the, some of the things you can add on that. Thank you so much for your question. It's really an important one. And I wanted to connect it back to the conversation that we're having about values, right? About Naga or values, about indigenous values across the world. And in my own work, I am making a connection that the loss of our resources, including our forests, which is so important for who we are, what we eat, and how we connect to nature, the loss of our resources is in many, many aspects directly related to the increasing loss of maybe our languages and our cultural practices. Okay, one example, if you're wondering what is Dolly talking about it here, when you lose forests, when you lose all the resources around, what happens? You lose plants, right? When an animal goes extinct, what happens? People stop talking about that. So everything that we are losing, we stop using those terms in our own mother tongue, in our indigenous languages. So that is also loss of language right there. And including all Naga languages and many other indigenous languages here from the Eastern Himalayas, we are categorized as communities who speak endangered languages. So it's not that any of the languages that we speak is actually in the safe category. So we are really looking at a very fast paced culture of loss at the same time as we are talking about values. Language is really important and one of the aspects that I want to focus is that how do we focus on one calling out this culture of shaming. In my own family, some of my relatives' cousins cannot speak Lothar and they come from very special houses sometimes, maybe parents died, they were raised in hostels, went far away to live in different relatives' houses. There's so many reasons why children grow up not being able to speak mother tongue. And I think in our own society, one thing that you and I have to do and promise is that we will not shame people, our classmates, our colleagues, adults who cannot speak mother tongue. And the shaming comes from elders, from the churches, from the tribal associations. And that needs to stop because there is such a desire, a shame and also a longing and sorrow for those who are not able to speak language. So how do we make that space? One, I would say that culture associations are so important. Hornbill, that's happening. We have clubs going to dance. We have clubs going to sing. How about we have clubs, indigenous clubs to learn how to speak one another's language? We had a Naga delegation at the University of Melbourne and all of us, we sang a 10-day song and it is so beautiful to sing that song together. Culture associations, second, we have the Naga Students' Federation, both for the Eastern Nagas and here for Naga Land Nagas and other Naga homeless as well. Why don't we give as student bodies and appeal to NSF that we need to learn to speak our languages? So why can't we have those NSF, ENSF small units where we can meet once a fortnight and learn that? Third, the churches. The churches are really important in Naga society because the first translation of the Bible in our mother tongue, where actually initiatives of the American missionaries. So today, if there is language that exists, including Lothar, Sumi, Au, it is in our mother churches. And the mother churches sometimes are absolutely detached from children and from the reality and from the broader issues of the loss of language. So we need to go back to our mother churches and say, listen, can we have initiatives where we are able to speak languages? Because even among Naga cultures, you know that. If a Sumi and Au get married, can you imagine where the children will go to church? The challenges that are there. And we need to accept that with really great compassion and answer churches to come on board as well. The fourth point is student-led clubs. So very good question that you raise. Why can't we have the model here at Texas College today? Today and tomorrow, have a Texas club where different students are able to come where Lothar students, Angami students, Chakasang students, two, three of you. If you know the language, say, listen, I'll teach you a song, come. Songs are such good ways of learning a language. And the final one, the final point is so important for Naga society, it is to say that it's okay, it's acceptable for an adult, right? Who is 30 years old and cannot speak mother tongue to say, listen, there is a center, come. Let us go and speak that language together. Many times I've realized that the reason people don't speak or don't even try to speak is because of the shaming. I speak Lothar, but when I speak Lothar, there's also a tendency, right, to be constantly corrected. Languages are evolving and it is okay to have many terms, it is okay to have many ways of speaking. And I think these are kind of the very quick five suggestions and I call upon really huge, amazing student associations that we have like another student's federation to make sure that this is taken as a priority. We need to work at that scale. I really agree with what Dali has mentioned. Working, I think as students here, we all have an important role to play in just mobilizing our groups, our peers within our circles and just keep on speaking that language as much as possible in all circles and all wherever you can get the opportunity to call your friends and speak more about of your language. Any more questions from the audience? Okay, there's one here. Pass the mic at the second row. I actually have another question. I thank you so much for answering my question with such heartfelt answers. So my other question pertains to disabilities, especially mental disabilities. Mental disabilities, whether it be depression, anxiety disorders, or intellectual disabilities and learning disabilities aren't even acknowledged sometimes as disabilities. As a Naga society, we tend to blame bad spirits or human possession to explain these mental illnesses. Since mental illnesses and disabilities aren't always visible, what are some steps to make these issues more visible socially? Intellectual disability is something that it is very not so easy to notice unless you spend a good amount of time with somebody. And in Naga society, I think those people who have mental illness or mental disabilities, in Nagamis we call them Pakala Pakali, we use a lot of negative terms to address this kind of people. And I think in all our tribal languages, we have this negative connotations for this. So I think one thing, one first thing that we need to do is we need to reconstruct those terms that we use to call somebody Pakala, somebody Pakali, and see what kind of disability they have. Because even under intellectual disability or even under developmental disability, there are different spectrums, there are different types. So it is very, very important that we need to know. Talking about the negative stereotyping that we have, if somebody is not in a very correct form or state of mind, we call them 75, 75. And I think all of us as a people, we are 75 or 50 in one area or other. We need to acknowledge that. All of us, we have our own disabilities. So all the disabilities may not be visible, but we have as people, we are not perfect. So I think acknowledging the fact that we are also imperfect in our own way is very, very important. Another thing is if there are people struggling with depression or mental illness, I think it is very, very important that they also seek trend professionals. In my interaction with many families, we have seen how they have taken their children to prayer centers. They have taken their children to those, copyrights. They have taken their children to those local healers. So I think instead of, I'm not saying that I don't believe in prayer, I do believe in prayer, but I think there are scientific way of testing. There are scientific way of helping those people who have mental illness and mental difficulties. So we also have people who are very distinguished and they are very good in their work, particularly those psychiatrists and psychologists. I think we should take professional help from there. But I think at the community level, we have to go beyond that stereotyping one another and accepting the fact that all of us, we are 50 or 75 in one way or other. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. We will move on to the next question. I think the gentleman here in the second row. Sure, since we are running out of time. As I'm a PhD scholar from the Geneva Graduate Institute, I apologize if you could be here listening to the panel. My question actually comes around, and first of all, thank you, Dhoni, for bringing up this idea of nature, forest, and loss of indigeneity. And I think this is something that a conservator had actually brought it up, that we might be losing our culture by virtue of losing out on a lot of our conservation. I think we touched that point. So my question basically is around the solution of decolonize, right? I mean, it's been passed around so much. There's movement for decolonization, moving away from the global north to the theory of building the global south. So what will it be for educational institutes? For example, who are talking about decolonization? Right, I mean, where do we draw the line when we're talking about decolonization? Is it an idea? Are we talking about practices? Are we talking about, for example, Christianity itself comes in debt? So is there a risk in actually kind of touching upon that because we cannot separate another society from the Christian culture? The second thing is, I'm glad that you touched upon the story of storytelling, and that's one thing I've been struggling to find out, a way to actually engage with indigenous knowledge. And could you elaborate more on that to go into theory of building? The second question is for KV, and I think I really enjoyed the way of kind of thinking about education and how we're using the idea of indigenous knowledge. The use of village that you have put sounds very interesting. And to go into the future, we need to go back into the past. But in the process of actually going into the future by looking at the past, is there a tendency that we might be over essentializing this idea of village? And how do we draw the line? Because, for example, a village and a community, there is something called values, and values are political, it's shared. How do we draw the line, kind of, and how is your organization sort of engaged with the fact that you have so many tribes and you're using the word language? Sorry, about village. And the last one is for Ketu, and I think thanks for the talk on disability, and I think, what is the research? I think, for me, I think it's more about research. How is the research on disability been by NACA scholars, based on initial first-hand experience, yeah, thanks. Okay, so we have a minute to go before it's lunchtime, and I'll give you a very short, thanks, John. His dad was the chaplain of Bhatkai Christian College when I was a student, and you and I still remember Sir Paul Raj and all the wonderful conversations that I had with him, and I see that he raised his children well, so you are now a PhD scholar at the Jereva School of Graduate Studies, and your questions, I think, are very genuine, and it comes from a deep place of thinking and introspection, and I will, once again, fail like I often do in, I think, giving you an answer, because this is really a part of a process that I'm living through right now in this life and in this period of my life. So first, very quickly, I think you asked about decolonization. Decolonization has become part of, really, an integral part of the curriculum, at the University of Melbourne where I'm a professor with all my colleagues, it is so important for us, I think, to consider what's happening with global universities overseas, definitely most of them situated in the West, but with the surge, right, like Kate said, of indigenous staff, students, professors, this need to know that we need to break away from a really Eurocentric pedagogy and understanding. That's within the university structure, but for me, when I say I'm an indigenous scholar, what does it mean? It means that it's a living practice where I'm situating values of where we are, and I go back to the example that I gave of, maybe, Reverend Longry. This is a time, globally, where everywhere we read, we are reading about ceasefire in Gaza, the demand for it, the demand for peace, for justice. Reverend Longry was one of, I think, the leading Naga thinkers who talked about ceasefire during a time when Nagas were really going through a very heightened sense of militarization and conflict. He, along with many other Naga thinkers, talked about peace. I often say that, as a scholar from South Asia, the Naga world has so much to give in the realm of peace, of justice, of human rights, and this is what it means, actually, to decolonize, then to bring in the thinkers and to center it, not only in the context of India, as Naga scholars or as scholars working on Naga issues to see what we have to offer, but how do we center it? I say that because often when scholars, students read my book, it is really the indigenous scholars who are sometimes not able to grapple with how is it that Dolly can theorize from Dimapur? I wrote a book on Dimapur, by the way, and it was published by Oxford University Press, and I wrote that book because I was tired of people all over the world asking me, where the hell is Dimapur? And I promised myself that one day I'm gonna write a book about it, and I wrote about it, right? So I think it's that kind of challenge that we need to have. So decolonization as practice. When it comes to, I think, Naga culture and the equation with Naga people and Christianity, I think we just had a co-panelist who spoke about the animist culture that Uncle this year had, and what did it mean? I met an elder, a Naga elder in Dimapur who went to severe pressure from the churches to convert just before she died. We have Nagas outside the state of Nagaland. Hello, do you know that? Yeah, you do, right? We have Nagas outside the state of Nagaland who are practicing Buddhists, and we will have Nagas who will claim themselves to be ethers. So perhaps for us, thank you for throwing the question. The process of decolonization maybe is also to make who we are in our past, our present and the future a little bit more complex and to understand how is it that we see the future? And definitely it'll be challenging, but I think that's the way to go. So maybe I'll stop here, but we can have more conversations later. I'm just gonna jump in here as you answer the questions, both by the gentleman. Let's request, oh, into lack of time, if everyone can also just make their closing statements, if any additional statements you'd like to add, and then we try to wrap up the session in the interest of time. And Dr. Dahlikidn close with her opening statement as well. Thank you for the question. I'll keep it short and brief, but happy to continue the conversation after. So I think the question was about why do you put so much prominence on the village or the village state? The reason I put it that way, I framed it that way is because that is a formation of our identity. So when we're saying that we are Naga, that is a fiction. So as you rightfully said, it's a political construct. So what ties us together? One is the struggle for self-determination, the particular struggle that we've had. And secondly, it's the values that we derived from the village state. So that what's common between our different tribes is that the peak of our society or the sovereignness of a society came down to the village and therefore the values and the education that was imparted to the community stems from propagating or keeping alive that organism. So that's where I say we lean back into the village. And very quickly, how do we rationalize that? Well, we look at the world that we are in today and some of those value systems no longer are compatible with the world that we live in. So we come from a patriarchal society. It's no longer compatible with the world that we live in and needs to be eradicated. So in that sense, we need to look at our value sets, our value systems. How is it compatible with the world that we live in? We need to go through a process of rationalization, a process of discernment. And in addition to looking inwards, what are we adopting from the world around us? We have uncontrolled capitalism. We have uncontrolled individualism. How do we discern when we're taking in other worlds, other thoughts, other practices? How do we discern what is good for our community? And I think that's only left for us to decide. So we need to develop the skills to be able to discern and rationalize those. So I think it's a process and it'll be an ongoing process. Thank you, John. Regarding research on disabilities, I think among the Nagas, this is a very under-researched topic. I may be wrong, but I have not come across any research on this. There was a BDTCs done by a Sumi pastor, I forgot his name, on the role of family in giving care to persons with disability. But apart from that, I think there is no study on persons with disabilities in Nagaland. We have a children's book by Madam Estheran Kirei, Different Strokes, it's a children book. And apart from that, we don't have much literature on that as well. But I think this will be my closing statement. I think this is one very important area of research scholars can think about. Another important thing that we need to connect disability with the Naga society is that we have had a long history of conflict. And this Indonaga conflict also had a huge impact, particularly on mental disability, intellectual disability, and physical disability of the Nagas. Particularly those people who were involved in the freedom fighter. So I think this would be also one interesting area that any interested scholar can look up to. Yeah, thank you. Thank you so much to all the panelists this morning. I think I've learned so much and I hope all the students and everyone here has also had a great learning session. The conversation can go on for hours. I know there's just so much, I think that we can talk about, please feel free to carry the conversation over lunch. We are yet to hear from the two student respondents too. So I'll just close the session for now and hand over the rest of the time to our host, Dr. Nozanina. Thank you so much to Dr. Dali Kavisato and Dr. Ketokre. Let's give them a round of applause for this.