 So I just said in my language my name, the spirit name I was given, my English name, I'm from the Sagyan First Nation on the south-eastern shores of Lake Huron. Our ancestor, as we're talking about, I'm a helper. Like some of the assertions that like education is not in the contemporary class settings. It's on the land when we're talking about being indigenous. Like, you know, you can't remove that from language land. Yeah. Kinship. I would even say water, because we are watered as people. We don't quite know that about ourselves anymore. It's an incredible fear with being on the water that we have. And it's like, we were never ever like that. It's incredible that that piece. As well with this part about like, what was it like? Some of like passing along knowledge. For me, I'm not an elder. Whatever. Yeah. And then what does it mean to hold knowledge? A lot of people would like look at those words and it's like a status that you somehow get to this place. And now it's like a social construct, but it's really about the relationship that you have to that piece of knowledge. The way that it's shaped your life, the way that you work with that particular way. So if it's language, understanding the findings of their expression as peoples. For me, one of the big things is canoe, like the canoe. Like paddled across the Great Lakes. There's a relationship there with the water, with the canoe. How do I as a human hold that? It's not easy. Especially being a young person. So I feel like it's about relationship. It's about those seven grandfather teachings that we talk about. One of the things that people don't realize, a lot of us don't realize is that, and I didn't know this starting out, that when they say seven grandfathers, do we assume that they're these old men sitting up in the ether somewhere in a lodge just waiting to hear from the Nishnabe? Who are they really? When we go back to the land, the memory of where we came from, we know that the animals were the ones to first teach us how to live here. We as a people, I would say as a human species, have derived all of our knowledge to date from them. We have the creative ability inside of ourselves to take that knowledge and change it a little bit. Academia seeks to expand and flesh out all of those things to create a discourse, to create a particular area in which somebody is able to articulate that whole space. That all derives back to the animals. The seven grandfather teachings are the seven clans, the seven families of animals. So the ones with hooves, the ones with talons, the ones with sticked feet, the ones who live in the water like the turtle and the fish, the ones who have webbed feet, the ones who have large paws and the ones who have small paws. Those are the seven grandfathers. When we say grandfather, we're not talking about the human grandfather. Those are our ancestors, that's Ozokon. Ozokonok, they're the ones that went ahead of us. We're not told a lot of these things. The grandfathers are the ones who, at various points in our story, how we evolved, how we learned to be who we are and have these complex systems that were land-based but never left the earth. A lot of the spaces that we're now is elevated, disconnected, even when we wear shoes, it's all insulated. We're insulated from that actual connection. Those systems of knowing whether that be language, whether that be navigation, that's particularly where I'm at now is that navigation part, like Anishinaabekin, the land that we're from. Conversely, as Turtle Island, a lot of us don't know why we call it Turtle Island, that when you look at the continent, it's a turtle that's getting ready to dive into the ocean. The places, when we look at, for example, colonization, we know it came from the east and it's spread. As that happened, our people fled. The ones who were responsible to carry a lot of this knowledge and a lot of it went underground. Some of it went so far underground, we don't know if it'll ever reemerge. Some of it was stolen and it's now being held captive in cultural institutions. Navigating this nation of ours, this responsibility that we have, for me is where education is going because we're starting to recognize that we can no longer just articulate and express things that were never meant to be written down on paper anyways. It's a very extractivist and reductionist way of doing things. Why would we just put it outside of ourselves on a piece of paper? At some point, we have to be that, embody it and do it. Navigating physical spaces and the geographies of where we're from, being Anishinaabe of the Great Lakes, that's a whole other piece too. I was told by a friend, this knowledge is common amongst people when you travel around. It's always expressed in a different way, which is again the danger and the challenge of academic Western academic spaces because you always have to cite your source. So that you can have a place marker to actually go back and discover more of what that person had worked on but also to provide credit to where that thought originated. We belong as a species to a collective consciousness as well. We are a we, not just single units. So the knowledge that we can find, it exists in different forms, different ways of expressing it in relation to the land, in relation to our families or how we're all connected. For that time and space, I'll say myself as being a holder of knowledge or someone who's taking care of knowledge. In a lot of respects, when I'm talking about the Great Lakes, I'm saying that in the way that I've heard it expressed was that it doesn't belong to us. We belong to them and they are them, right? They're not an it. They're responsible for our very existence. The Great Lakes at 36 or 37 million direct dependence, human dependence every single day are hosting our variability to have this conversation. And so the notion that to take something outside of ourselves to write it down makes it unalive. Our people had a custom, a practice of putting knowledge down in the form of drawings, right? Because of the story of colonization. That these things, the systems that maintained them, that were in relation to them, that took care of them were under threat. Like our clan system, when I was telling you those, that was one of the first things that wasn't allowed to be anymore. That was one of the first things to go down into the depths, right? And like I said, some of it went so far. We have to be brave to dive deep and to recover that, to understand the ways that our people were. I see Indigenous education as being that investigation, in a way that is inside the body. In a way that if all we're doing this for is for a position paper at the end of the day, how does that serve the people that we started this journey for? We always have to be thinking about the little snotty nose res kids. We were all once those snotty nose res kids, right? And some of the things that we had to experience as those little people, like when we really, we go into academia to understand what happened, why? Why did that happen? That was by design. By very careful design that was perfected over hundreds of years on other parts of this planet, right? And we're challenged to face that at the same time. I feel like the most useful thing that I could pass on, like holding knowledge, that knowledge is also holding me. Just the same way that we belong to the Great Lakes system, doesn't belong to us. The knowledge that can be obtained, right, can be, it's not an ownership of those things. It's not about an ownership, it's about recognizing that they're like, say for example, sacred items. A water drum, a pipe, you know, a sweat lodge. Any of those things that help us to be well, to maintain our spirituality, to maintain who we are, we don't, like when they say pipe carrier, when they say drum keeper. It's actually the other way around. It's the drum that keeps us. It's the pipe that carries us. Some would say like Grandfather William Commander, you know, before he passed, that was something that he shared a lot about. He took care of the belts of our nation, like the Wampum, you know, and he would never say that he was a Wampum belt carrier. He said, no, they carry me and they own me. They have an agency too. They have a dream. Our people never did things, like even the items that they carried had spirit, had life. That's how alive they were, that they could literally imbue life into an otherwise inanimate object. They all have a spirit. They all have even a name. You know, our Jimanak, like the canoes, they're coming back. Every community all over the places, they're all making them. What are they making them for? What are we as a people being prepared for? That's my encouragement to young Indigenous people, you know, is like pay attention to what's happening close to the Earth. Pay attention to what's happening in the water, in the sky. You know, the hierarchies and the systems that we're being petitioned to maintain are dying in a world of abrupt and irreversible climate change. Like this isn't a luxurious or it's a privilege to be educated, right? We had to fight hard for that. A lot of our people had to become assimilated for that, to leave the forests and to go into these spaces, you know, and we're being asked to change them from the inside. Part of the present encouragement is like, you have to have this type of education in order to be successful in order to survive in this world and I would challenge that because that mentality and that message came out of the residential school experience. You know, that's what we're told by our grandparents, that's what we're told by our parents, that this is what we have to do. We can no longer be Indians. As we're being assimilated in these urban settings, we're leaving, we've left the forests, the forests are being plundered. You know, resource extraction is the basis of the economy here, you know? That's a staple way of life. People don't question that. The only ones that are left questioning that are the ones who refuse to leave the forest, you know? And our relations, the ones who make us indigenous, the ones who first educated us about how to be a human being, they're concerned about their lives. Their lives are in jeopardy, like their homes, their way of being, their voice, their rights, like, you know, they're petitioning us to come back and help, you know? They're also worried about their great-grandchildren's futures too, you know? And I feel like that's why we have to do these investigations, why we have to look in and pay attention and start to get our minds around what can we actually do. It's not a luxurious experience. It's a practical urgency, you know, that we have to respond. And the other thing that we share is that, you know, we have an incredible opportunity to make a, to push through a lot of these colonial barriers. We've been kind of pinned up, rounded up and pinned, you know, as a people. And we have, like, there's some of us who have been brave enough to just, like, jump out of the pen and go. I'm particularly encouraged by those people because they're the ones doing the heavy lifting of our nation. Unpaid, unrecognized, you know, it's heavy, it's hard. It's harder than just engaging with it purely as an intellectual experience. It impacts your life, physical well-being, you name it, right? A lot of the spiritual ways that we have can help us to maintain our wellness while we do that. So, like, we're not alone. We were never, like, our ancestors thought far ahead. The things that they first saw happening, they've all happened, you know? They thought of us. We weren't left to just dwindle. Like, it's like a flashing light that slowly goes out. That's where we have been, but that's not our only story now. You know, we are coming back in a big, bold new way, right? We get to define that. The colonial constructs, even within academia, might have the ability to almost prevent us from really seeing that real opportunity. Because whenever we're being educated in the contemporary sense, it's always to go in within the system. But we have our own systems, and they are coming back, and there are people that are dedicated to that. To me, that's where, when I see Indigenous education, I see a time where that is a main-state understanding that we've already, okay, there are these generations that go through that post-secondary system. They have found ways in and out to utilize it for what it's actually for and understand what it's not for. Be able to go home to their communities, drive forward what's needed, what's been in waiting for years, right? Like, this has been a long time coming. You know, and there are people that have been sitting at home, you know, living their lives and waiting for that time. They're waiting and they're like, you know, let's go and meet them. There are relatives that's going to sit with them and hear what they have to say, because they know the land. They know where everything's at. They know where the medicines are. And they've been just waiting for the young people to come home, you know. How do we do that in a safe way? How do we do that in a way that doesn't perpetuate the violence that we've all experienced? I think for me, that's where I'm at. And I hope I get a chance at some point in time when I do get there to share that too. Because I feel like that's another big piece of this, like, in terms of restoring who we are, you know. So I think that's for me right now as much as I can share. Yeah, but I know there's a weight that we all feel, that we all carry. It isn't ours. We're not meant to carry it alone. We aren't alone with that. We have to know what that feels like to feel like the weight of our nation is on our shoulders. And there is a capacity that we can grow in to be able to carry that in a good way. And I think once we start learning about that, we start to realize like there is knowledge in there. There's that memory in there, right? And that's what's going to lead us to that connection, but we're not meant to just carry it. We have to give it back to creation and say, OK, well, what do I do with this? That relation, that relationality, that connection is vital to how we're to bring up the next generation. So that's as much as I've been showing and told me about you. I feel relative to those things. I remember sitting at this, there was a talk in the, there's like a huge rotunda in U of T. And Winona LaDuke, who's like this amazing, you know, she's right now, she's making like hemp. She's going full on hemp and it's incredible to watch them over there in white earth. So she came in and she was doing a panel with Christie Balcourt, Isaac Murdoch, a friend of mine named Karen Rickley, who's a prof at U of T in women's studies. And they were doing a panel, I can't remember exactly, it was on the water, right? And Winona was doing kind of like a, like she was sharing snapshots of Standing Rock and everything they've been going through over there with Enbridge. And she started talking about the Windigo economics and like, like about fracking and how like, you know, all the good stuff that's easily accessible is gone. And now they're just like going right to the, like trying to find whatever they can, humping, you know, hydraulic fracturing to bring up and collect up the last remaining natural gas, you know. So I'm sitting there and it was in September, Josephine Mondamin, who had been on water walks with me, we do a lot of stuff together. There was a great love there and she was at a water walk in downtown Toronto. They did it's like a one day walk and I knew she had been up since sunrise at least, like even maybe before and it was like late. She came into that room and you got to picture this, like when I get there, somebody says, hey, you're Edward. I'm like, yeah. And they're like, okay, there's a special section for water protectors like right at the front. It's like, you know, you have to go and sit over there. I'm just like, I just want to like, you know, be a fly on the water. I don't want to be like recognized as a water protector, you know, like so weird. You get into some of those spaces, you know, like this recognition is unnecessary because I didn't do it for that. I did it because there was an urgency. There was a call like when Josephine walked in, like Christie stood up. Everybody, they stopped what they were doing and people stood up. She just comes walking out there to walk. I did it because there was a call from her and from other women like her older women that had to do something. They picked up that water and they started praying. They inspired an entire generation of us to take meaningful action for the water. You know, that's why I did it. You know, not for the recognition part. And it's funny, you know, it's like real funny because people like idolize that and they lift that up, which isn't always a bad thing. But if you're not careful with your own self, then it can become not so much. So this is a good thing. She comes in and then Isaac sits on the floor, like gives up his seat. He sits on the ground. Like this is totally Isaac. These some of these ones that were there like are like family. There's a there's a relation out like we all have a relation, you know, and those are the things as people that we celebrate, you know, those connections, you know. So I'm sitting there and I'm like, I just started crying because I was like, that was the moment when I realized that this wasn't just something outside of myself that I'm engaging with. You know, this is this is here. It's alive in here now. And there's a responsibility that I have. It was scary, you know, like when that call comes, whatever that call is, get up and go do it, be there, show up, take a stand. And the more that we all do that together, that's how we that's how we turn things around, you know. So that's who I am. That's who I become. That's who I'm becoming, you know, like, so I feel good to be asked like, you know, to share a little bit of the knowledge that's come my way, the way in which I can take care of that knowledge because it's taking care of me. I feel humbled by that. I appreciate the opportunity to talk about myself a little bit.