 My name is Charlie Forche. I come from Simch and I am the language teacher at Neuqua-Kelston School. So we teach Suhuat-Mahjin at Neuqua-Kelston School here, and we do a language block for our children, age, head start, to grade seven, and right now they get a language block three times a week, which is about 20 minutes to a half an hour, but our goal is to have language block every day of the week while they're at school. So head start program is their own group in their own room. They can start at 28 months and then they go up to age four. They also have a parent and toddler drop-in day, but they really have an open-door policy, so any infant or child in our community who wants to participate in the program, they're welcome to come, and then from the primary classroom goes to or from kindergarten to grade two, and then our intermediate classroom has grades four to seven. So the aim of the language program is to provide our children with a strong foundation for Suhuat-Mahjin. The goal of course is to get our children as fluent as possible. The obstacle that comes with that is the gap between the children and their parents or grandparents. So most of the kids here don't have grandparents who are first language speakers. I think there's only one family who has a first language speaker grandparent, and then all of the parents here are not fluent. So it's a huge gap, but our goal is to just provide the students with enough vocabulary base and good grammatical structures so that they can hopefully continue on in their goals to becoming fluent. So in the language classroom we try to focus on hands-on learning and land-based learning. So we do have a classroom that is outside, and we use that when the weather is good in the springtime all the way through the rest of the year as much as we can. So it's up on our, they call it the nature trail, and it was the trail that was still there, or it's been there since I was a student here at Neuquacouston, and so they built some benches and we gather there with the students from Head Start up to Grade 7 every Monday morning to start our week that way. But the goal is to kind of put our kids and our teachers in an environment where language is going to flow a lot easier, so things that are culturally relevant so that the kids can relate to it. So if they are not, if they don't have people in their lives that can teach them things like basketry or making tools or whatever it is about Suquam culture, we do our very best to provide that for our students in the classroom in the short time that we have, but we do as much as we can. And what helps is just putting our kids outside so that they can see these things, they can touch, smell, and kind of activate all their senses. So that's really the goal of our classroom is to do hands-on and land-based learning. So I guess one measure of success would be the enrollment rate in our school. For such a small community and for a small school, we're at capacity right now. We have a waiting list a few years ago, the attendance or not the attendance, the enrollment was low, so we opened it up. So we actually do have non-native families who bring their children to our school, which is incredible. And just the success rate for not only our cultural language program, but for math and reading and all of those things they're testing beyond scale. So they're doing really well. So I think the fact that not only Suquam families and Sim families want to send their children to Nukwaklistan, but our neighbors and our community members and barrier, Clearwater even want to send their children to our school. So that would be one measure of success. Another is to see the pride in them. So we offer, we try to teach as many hand drum songs to our children. And that was only introduced back into Sim maybe six years ago. So when I grew up, you didn't hear the sound of a hand drum. It just wasn't in our families. It went underground for for good reason. But now that our kids have it, they're proud. They don't have that fear. So when we have guests come into Sim, it's our children who pick up their hand drum and they welcome the people to Simkin. They do it quite fearlessly. So to see how much pride they have to be Suquam is a huge measure of success. And probably the third measure of success that I see is that they are using Suquam ch'in outside of the classroom. So when they have the vocabulary and the skills to communicate with each other and Suquam ch'in that's not in a classroom setting, I think that's probably the ultimate measure of success for a teaching language. A few challenges that we have. One of them I mentioned a little bit earlier was about the generation gap with learning language. So none of the parents are fluent speakers. Suquam ch'in skipped a generation for our people. And it's like that all across Indian countries. So for us to instill as much Suquam ch'in and vocabulary base with our students, they just don't have they don't have people to practice with at home. And the ultimate goal of language revitalization is to have the language spoken in the home and out in the community, because languages don't survive just inside the classroom. So that's probably our biggest challenge that we've come to date is that they just don't have enough first language speakers or fluent speakers to practice with. Another challenge here probably would be space as well. We're a very small school, but as we grow in numbers, we just don't have the space to to take in as many students as we would like. For me, it would be providing an education that is relevant, that our children can relate to, and that would build a strong foundation for them to be proud of who they are and strong with who they are, so that when they go out into the world, they have all the tools and all the building blocks that they need to succeed out there. So for me, you know, I just think of when I was a child, our parents started this school. So this started as a parent run school, they decided that whatever was being offered in the public school system, it was failing our kids, it was failing Suquam kids. So they decided to take control themselves. This school started in the corner of the gym and it had three students and they had one teacher, but they just decided no, we're going to do it and it just blossomed from there and it really did for myself personally just gave me such a strong foundation so that you know, I knew who I was. I knew that I was I come from unique people. I come from strong people and it helped me blossom into a very confident adult that I knew I wanted to give that back to my kids and the kids from Suquam. So for me, that's probably the point of Indigenous education is to give them the pride and the know-how to succeed in a world that doesn't look like our own. As the language teacher, my vision in the next five to ten years would be to build a program that is so strong that we would create second language speakers. So even though they were born into an English speaking world, they would have the skills to become fluent in the years that they have here at New Coalstone. And in order to do that, we need to build capacity. We need to target young parents and families that really have a vested interest in Suquam Hachin and language and culture so that we have, you know, not just one teacher for the whole school, but teachers for a targeted age group so that we can build them up. But that would be my goal in this school is to be able to give these kids such a strong foundation that they just need a bit more practice and they'll be fluent. I would like to say that I'm very grateful for the opportunity to work at home and to watch my kids go through this school now and knowing that they're going to have such an incredible experience in school, the same experience that I got to have. And watching more and more of my peers come back as young mothers, young fathers, and really building capacity so that we know this school is really in good hands. And you can tell by the enrollment numbers that this school is such an incredible, incredible, not really changed for our community, but it really is, it really is like the epitome of language revitalization. We don't have any other programs in SIMC, but we do have this school and it is our children who go out into the community and they can say a prayer just like that or they can sing a welcome song and pick up their hand. And they just have that know-how and it's just simple for them. It's just like it's their everyday life. So that would be just my final words to say that I'm very thankful just to be a part of this and to know that there are other communities out there really putting their best effort for to give their children the best chance that they can.