 program. Good morning. My name is Erica Bowden. I'm the Executive Director of the Regina Treaty Status Indian Services. I have been the Executive Director here since 2007. So we're going on 11 years now. So I've been part of this organization and we're actually moving into our third strategic plan. Now backing up a little bit, our organization is owned by the Tetrid Agency Tribal Council, as well as the File Hills Quapel Tribal Council. We are the only Indigenous-owned human service delivery agency in the city of Regina that provides services for urban as well as on reserve who come into the city as well as those transitioning back and forth. We do on our board have, even though we're owned by the two Tribal Councils, we have representation from all of the Southern Tribal Councils, with the exception of Fishing Lake First Nation and Kausus First Nation, due to them leaving their Tribal Councils after our board was put together. So they became non-aligned after the existence of our board. Now we still provide services to them and we have staff members from both Fishing Lake as well as Kausus as part of our staff. So we definitely represent all of the Tribes in the Treaty 4 area. Our organization is based on the premise that we exist due to the portability of treaty rights, that because we're in the city of Regina does not mean that the people, the Indigenous people who come to the city or in the city are not eligible or have the right to all of the treaty promises that were made through through Treaty 4. Within the Treaty 4 treaty rights we also are very committed to our inherent rights and responsibilities which are the right to the land, the languages, the culture, those types of creators laws. So our entire foundation is based on treaty and inherent rights and the treaty inherent rights and responsibilities of living in the city of Regina or coming forth. So I'm giving that foundation so that it's understood exactly what guides us in in all that we do. We also have seniors as well as knowledge keepers who guide our organization in terms of culture and language as well as the services that that we provide. The reason why I am not only for foundation but to talk about when I when I looked at these four research questions and I'm very excited about about the National Center for Collaboration in Indigenous Education because I believe that it has an opportunity for us to start to have true Indigenous knowledge base into our education systems especially for those who live in an urban setting because most often times people who live in the urban setting for whatever reason don't have access to those traditional concepts and those traditional principles. So I think that it's very very timely. This organization is now in its 22nd year of operations and it being a service delivery agency basically what had happened before is there was looking for funding to put on certain programming in human services. Now what our board of directors have done is they've turned that around a little bit and have put together concepts of land based knowledge language based knowledge and how could we incorporate that into the modern setting in terms of human service delivery. Now in our programs we say that we have womb to tomb services meaning we provide access to prenatal care or counseling with prenatal or in utero time periods for women and families right up until grieving that we provide grief counseling and grieving opportunities for for those beyond that are experiencing death. So I guess we've asked ourselves well what provides success for individuals and families and therefore how will communities be impacted in a positive way in concentrating on individuals and families and what we have found as a barrier to that success has been for a lot of our indigenous people is the inability to fit in with education systems or any kind of mainstream systems that education system the health system the the legal systems and there's been a lot of difficulty within that whether it's inherent racism within those institutions or whatever the case may be. So our challenge was how do we provide opportunity for people to make change and within that education is a huge stepping stone and the continuation of education and success in education is very vital to that healthy concept of who a person is as an indigenous person and how they can contribute to not only the society here in the city but also to have that connection back to their land their homes a reconnection or a connection because many of our urban people especially the younger people don't have that connection back to the land and who we are as indigenous people this is what our elders our knowledge keepers tell us our lands our languages as well as our spirituality our key to who we are as indigenous people so how do we get to that point and how do we provide learning opportunities for individuals and families to become successful in that measure there is no one answer there is not one simple answer which brought us to the point of thinking that if there's not a simple answer well then there has to be a wraparound or an integrated approach where you're dealing with different aspects of an individual and their learning concepts so we have at this agency we consider ourselves a learning agency so as you step through the door everything that we are providing as opportunity for learning are all stepping stones to get to the success of either what's keeping a person from being successful in achieving a job or else what's preventing a person from being successful in the classroom whether they're youth or adult learners now I'm bringing it around to the actual question here that we're that's in front of me we have formally an adult 12 program that is very successful treaty for Ed Center that's part of our organization as well as we have three programs within our program partnerships with the with south poly and one of them is called partners for success the partners for success are for low literacy and those people with low literacy have probably been on the classroom anywhere from 20 to sometimes 40 to 50 years and so whether they have cognitive disabilities meaning we assist them to achieve some sort of literacy level where they can have some sort of a job or else this is a stepping stone to getting to the other classrooms the next is called jump start which is also for adult learners and those adult learners have also been out of the classroom they have not achieved very much success a lot of them are new out of the correctional facilities they just have been marginalized for basically all of their lives so what we do is we take this opportunity to spend some time with them and this is a Monday to Friday program and they receive provincial training allowance but which helps them because now they're not on social assistance they're actually on a training allowance which is one step towards employment and being sustaining self-sustaining which is really exciting for a lot of our clients anyway that is meant to get them either to the pre GED where they're GED prepping or else to the adult 12 or adult 10 after they're successful in that classroom they go into the adult 10 the adult 12 or the GED program now these are all stepping stones like I said to success in order for the self-reliance and being able to provide for themselves and their families so those are our formal education programs however every program that we have has teaching components to it to either self-identity as Indigenous people what tribe they're from because that's the other aspect that we find that a lot of especially in urban areas we have schools who believe that teaching Indigenous education means that in a grade 8 classroom all the kids go to a sweat and what we know from our knowledge keepers especially around the city of Regina here we actually have five tribal groups that's the Cree the Soto, Nakota, Dakota, Lakota and we do have some Dene but not a whole not highly represented here but for example in if a classroom a teacher decides to bring all of the kids to the classroom or pardon me to a sweat lodge well there may be a Soto girl in that and the Soto and Soto women traditionally do not sweat except in very special circumstances or whatever the case may be so it's a pan-Aboriginalism or a pan-indigenization of who we are and while I I appreciate that there's effort there with our agency when someone comes in through our doors and even if we and especially when we do cultural types of responses to the person we do a family genogram so where what nation is that from what family are they from how can we connect them back to the reserve the their family their kinship system if for example they want to learn more about the traditional spirituality well we hook them up or we connect them with a knowledge keeper from that area so I just gave the example of a Soto girl well if a Soto youth came into the door what we would do is we would do that family genogram and we would try to hook or connect that person up with a Soto woman elder knowledge keeper so that they could gain the what their tribe would have and so we're starting to build identity not only as a human being not only as an indigenous person not only as a Soto person but a Soto man or woman or whoever they identify with so we're really trying to always learn and get to the core of who an individual is and then once that becomes strong how we build families and community within that you had mentioned when we did our our talk prior to this about our language program well we do have language opportunities which is very much part of our integrated services here it's not only open to our clients the city of Regina but we also do our city the people in Regina but we also do live streaming and we have the five languages and we rotate them in introductory classes so that we can give a smidgen of what a person would like and hopefully gather their interest enough that they move on whether it's university classes or the wherever they live that there's there's more advanced classes with those with those language classes we also provide for the youth of Regina both our summer students as well as the ones around the city a language camp every year and we hold that with land-based knowledge out at one of our first nations so a lot of times the youth that we take out there for the three days they're sleeping that's the first time that some of them have been out of the city that's the first time sometimes they've been out on a reserve and that's the first time that they've connected with knowledge keepers because we bring in university teachers who have the credentials western credentials to teach language during that language camp but they are in a partnership or a secondary position to all the knowledge keepers the older people that we bring out to that camp and those people the the knowledge keepers guide the curriculum they guide the activities and they are there for those young people to get used to being around older people because a lot of our young people are either shy or they don't know how to approach an elder they don't know how to approach someone especially if they think that they hold special knowledge and so what we're trying to do is demystify as well as well as give some sort of a generational connection intergenerational connection because the other thing is is that sometimes yes our youth have been raised by grandparents but then sometimes they haven't and so or their grandparents have been absent from their lives so this is the first time that a lot of our youth or I should say some of our youth have connected with those knowledge keepers so it's it's it's really interesting the transformation and it's only three days you know the transformation between the youth when they start out when they leave in the vans on that first day and when they come back and we provide opportunity even after that for those youth who go to that camp to still do activities throughout the year with those knowledge keepers that assisted them and we're not just talking like sitting around a boardroom table we're talking about bowling you know those types of social activities that that demonstrate good fun so I guess that's another another another program that that we would have how do you measure the success of your program we measure the success of all of our programs with both markers western markers as well as our agency markers I guess is I don't know if that's the correct terminology that I would use but you know for example if somebody's in our treaty four at program the greatest success would be that they finish their their grade 12 program so that's an easy one so completion of programming is is a measure of success however a lot of the people who come in and utilize all of our programs have several barriers so we measure success of individuals as opposed to programming and when we concentrate on assisting individuals get over their barriers or obstacles oftentimes they move towards the westernized concept of success now that's not always the case and that's when it's kind of my job to step in and especially with funding agencies or funding partners to say okay we had in this program 20 people start out and 10 completed however for the funding partner 15 or 18 completing would have been their success so when I go and I have a meeting with them I say at the beginning of this this person was homeless this person's literacy level was at a grade two this person was using heroin but we're at the end of this program and we're we are recommending him or her to continue on with either another program here or the same program because this person now has a home this person moved from a two to a grade six literacy level they have stopped using IV drugs and they have been successful in all of their corrections meetings so to us those are huge individual indicators of success that we have to support so that they eventually get to that westernized concept of what that marker is for for success for them it's a it's a challenge it very much is a challenge to go and have people understand the different concepts of of success but for us it's about individual and family success first and foremost what is indigenous education okay well I kind of talked a little bit about that in my introductory but for us indigenous is a better term than indian it's the whole definition of indigenous are the first peoples of the land and like I talked about earlier in the interview for us it's not enough at this agency for us to say for anybody coming in okay you're indigenous that's why we do the family genograms that's why we we connect and we talk about who a person is like for myself I am a korean matey woman I'm not only indigenous that's kind of like when you think of a circle all of the circles outside of it and for some systems and organizations it's good enough for them to stop at indigenous and that's not a criticism on my part what I'm saying is for us with our whole concept of integration and where we're going in learning and self-sufficiency and pride and knowledge and foundation and who we are as a kree matey woman or or kree matey man that we have to get down to that bottom of it because oftentimes whether it's that community trauma that individual trauma whatever the case is we have to work past that so that's why we go beyond that so I support the term indigenous but we go much beyond that how would you define education I would say that from our perspective here education is a subset of learning and learning is as indigenous people comes from first and foremost who we are and we have to in order to be successful find out who we are and that's through our inherent and treaty rights and those creator's laws that are given to us are natural laws our values our tp teachings our medicine teachings so all of those things have to be in balance or we're working towards the balance of those in order for us to be successful in those westernized settings and to get the most from that western knowledge there's that balance of our traditional indigenous ways of being so education what I think creates success is building all of that so that a child or an adult if they go into a classroom or or they're learning anything new it's not just about learning that new but understanding how it's all interconnected it's interconnected with other aspects of learning it's interconnected with success of an individual it's connected to the the learning of who we are as people so that's how I would define the education from an indigenous perspective what is your vision for the future of indigenous education in your community I guess that in community in Canada the answer would be the same those who are on reserve are a little bit more fortunate in the sense that they have more opportunity because they're smaller and they're more isolated so if you look at that concept of isolation or being together not really having a whole lot of that outside type of influence that we get in the cities or small towns there's plenty of opportunity yes there's barriers there's obstacles but there's plenty of opportunity for true concepts of indigenous education those of us who are in these systems in the cities and in small towns it's much more challenging but what is my vision for the future of education for indigenous people is how I would phrase that for those of us who live in the city and in towns because it's very very difficult to be an indigenous person in these mainstream learning systems when we don't have the support other than maybe a couple of other especially as we get to the higher levels of learning and I should say education to not have other indigenous people with us to not have those indigenous teachers those indigenous principles to not have the curriculum based on indigenous knowledge and concepts so what is my vision is that a person a kindergarten somebody who's five years old can go there my son he's migma and kree and matey that he's able to go there and find out exactly what that is that he's given tools to be feel empowered by who he is that he doesn't have to hide that that by the time he hits grade 12 that not only does he have the qualifications to enter into post-secondary university and be successful at that but also that they've worked on those other aspects of education and knowledge and learning whereas he is not a broken person or a person who doesn't know who he is but still can go into post-secondary but that it's all there and he's able to go into society and become successful as a indigenous person can you think of any types of information that if you had now it would help to achieve your vision such as the assumption here is it is assumed that most is right programs in the survey will require additional funding to help achieve their vision so this question these questions are designed to probe informational needs such as curriculum text or other educational resources to support the continued development of indigenous educational initiatives I think that the the biggest one other than the obvious for myself would be the acknowledgement by western systems as well as our own systems that when we bring in knowledge keepers that they are there as guiders and teachers of curriculum or lessons or whatever the case may be as opposed to somebody to bring in for a prayer or only as needed that they are integral right from the beginning of guiding learning and education programs I think that access to the lands to the languages to our traditional spirituality if that's what a person chooses those are all key to the success of any education system and for lifelong learning for us as indigenous people