 My name is Randy Herman. I'm the Director of the Engineering Access Program at the University of Manitoba in the Faculty of Engineering. It's the Engineering Access Program and we call it NGAP for short. NGAP is a support program for Indigenous students who want to get an engineering degree and oftentimes when I tell people it's like a four-legged stool of supports. We offer academic supports, financial support, social supports as well as personal supports to Indigenous students. Our target audience obviously is Indigenous people, primarily Indigenous people in Manitoba, although we accept Indigenous people from across Canada. And the target audience, the age is can be anywhere from 16 or 17 year old, someone right out of high school, sequential, just finished high school, all the way up to we've had students who have been older than me, who have started engineering, which would be we've had students in the mid 50s who have started engineering. So we have this huge range of students. So it's very, very typical for us to have in any classroom, again a 17 or 18 year old sitting next to a 30, 35, 40 year old. The aim of the program is to assist Indigenous students who want to get an engineering degree. And the understanding is that many Indigenous students have been failed by the Western education system. So they left high school without getting a diploma. And those students, we believe, should have an opportunity for higher education. So because of that, we offer upgrading courses in physics, math, and chemistry as well as computer programming to the Engap students so that they can successfully integrate and successfully challenge the university level courses they will need for an engineering degree. The program, again, is intended to increase the amount of Indigenous people with engineering degrees in Manitoba. So right now, across Canada in general, the number of Indigenous people with engineering degrees is sadly underrepresented if you compare it to the amount of the population in Canada. So even in Manitoba here, we're looking at a population of between 17 and 20% Indigenous people compared to the total population. And yet probably only about 6% in engineering. We probably have 6% of our graduates in engineering who are Indigenous. So you see that we still have to triple that number. And only by having Indigenous people represented as per their population in engineering can we actually affect real change in engineering culture. We typically end up looking, in terms of metrics, again, we look at the western eye system and we look at how many graduates we have. And in that we're doing very well. We have 117 Indigenous people with engineering degrees, which puts us at the top of any school doing this in Canada. We have the most amount of graduates, the largest amount of graduates, Indigenous students. So that's good. But if you look strictly at how many we should have, then it's not so good because really we need to have triple that number. But I don't like to measure success in that way. I think the successes of our program is it should be measured differently. And by that I'll just say that we have many of students who don't end up graduating with a credential from NGAF, from engineering, will end up getting a different credential. So they'll end up transferring to arts or to business or to science or even to Red River College and they'll get a technology diploma or they'll do something else. But they won't necessarily be successful in engineering. But to me, that indicates success because we've taken a student who maybe, who likely didn't even have a high school diploma, they've gotten the information they needed to be competitive at a high school level. They've left here and they've gone on to do something else. And I'll give you a story because I like to tell stories is that a number of years ago we had a student who came into NGAF and he was, he hadn't finished high school and he had been a truck driver for many years. He was the father of two young children. And due to a tragic accident in the truck, he wasn't able to go back to trucking. So he came here to be reeducated. He did a number of years of engineering, but eventually didn't complete his degree. He left here. He went to a placement that we had set up for him in a corporation, an engineering type corporation. And he decided to start working full-time because it was just too much with the two young girls and being a single father. It was very hard on him to continue. So then a couple years had gone by, he came back to my office and he said, you know what, Randy, you might never be able to count me as a graduate. You might never be able to count me as a success in your program. But he says to me, what I want you to know is that what you did for me changed my life, that I am a different person now than I was when I started at NGAF. And I just want to thank you for that. So to me, that's a success. But even more successful a couple years ago, his daughter, who had been about 12 or 13 when he started in engineering, his daughter graduated from our program with an engineering degree. That is a success to me because right away we've changed the trajectory not only of his life, but the trajectory of his children. And I really think that doing that really is assisting the Indigenous community. There's a high demand in two ways. First of all, there's a high demand for our graduates. Our graduates, we're well known across Canada in the engineering community, and we have corporations from across Canada coming here solely to speak to our students, to try to get them our students to work for their companies during the summer, but also to work for their companies when they graduate. But there's also another demand, there's a demand to get into the program. The last, when I first started here, we had about 40 or 45 students in the program over the four or five years of engineering. But now last year we started out with 81 students. So we've actually almost doubled the size of the program in the last number of years. We often get feedback, our graduates are very invested in NGAP, and they will often come to me and ask me how things are going, ask me what's going on, what's happening in the program, how many students we have, how many graduates we have. They're all very, like I said, invested. They want to know what's happening with the program. So we have that. We're well received in the engineering community in Manitoba. Most of the corporations, engineering corporations know about NGAP and want to have NGAP students and graduates working for them. And we're also well received in the indigenous community. Many communities now know about NGAP. And if they know a student wants to get an engineering degree, they'll say, in order to be funded, you'll have to go through the NGAP program. I believe it to be, yes. And again, obviously I'm the director of the program and I can't say anything else about that. So it sounds sort of self-serving in a way. But in the larger aspect of things, in the last number of years, I sit on a number of national committees because of this program, because I'm director of this program. I have worked with about half a dozen different universities across Canada who are looking to start a program similar to NGAP or at least are at least starting to think about engaging indigenous learners in the engineering fields, in the engineering education areas. So that sort of shows me that if people are coming asking me my opinion about things, that there's an understanding that this is a high quality program, doing something that many other places, many other institutions aren't doing. You know, when I first started in NGAP 18 years ago, I think I had a very narrow definition of indigenous education. And that was encouraging indigenous people to get a Western education. Very, very bluntly saying, going out to indigenous communities and saying to them, you need to get an engineering degree, you need to go through the Western system, and you'll graduate with an engineering degree, and then your life will be peaches and roses. You'll do very well. People will hire you, you'll get a job, etc. But as I've matured and as I've worked with many community members, many indigenous elders, I've come to realize that what I'm doing is sort of only half of what needs to be done. Certainly it's appropriate and it's helpful for indigenous people to get a Western education because that's the system we use. But there is also a huge opportunity for us to educate non-indigenous people about indigenous culture. And that's one thing that I'm starting to work on now here in the Faculty of Engineering is getting people to think about getting engineering professors and other non-indigenous engineering students to think about indigenous culture and to incorporate it into their classrooms. Tomorrow, actually, tomorrow, I'm working in an engineering professor's room. I'm taking our Carl Stone, one of the indigenous leaders here on campus, we're going into a classroom of non-indigenous students, and we're going to talk to them about indigeneity. We're going to talk to them about indigenous learning. We're going to let them know what's happening. And one of the reasons we're doing this is that I know when I graduated from university, after I graduated, I went and worked as an engineer. And in my first couple years on the job, I was in no fewer than six First Nation communities. And if I had not had an indigenous upbringing, I would have been very ill-prepared to be in those communities. And so I'm thinking that many non-indigenous engineering students here do not have that type of background, and they will be unprepared to work in indigenous communities. So as an education institution, it is our role to make sure that these students, non-indigenous engineering students, are prepared to work in indigenous communities and prepared to work with indigenous people. Yeah, I definitely see it as a hybridization. And I would say that when I first came to the job, my idea of helping and assisting indigenous people getting engineering degrees was very much looking at it from a Western point of view, right? And that very Westernized point of view. But then as I've grown and started thinking about, well, that's we need to, it's all the changes don't need to be by indigenous people. Non-indigenous people have to change as well. And I think that's looking at it from a more indigenous way or a hybridized way. I think right now, we, right now we may be a little bit ahead of the game, the fact the University of Manitoba, the fact of engineering, we may be a little bit ahead of the game in the sense of bringing indigenous knowledge into the classroom and making sure that non-indigenous people who are graduating from the University of Manitoba understand something about indigenous culture, understand something about the indigenous world of view. But I think other institutions are quickly coming on board. And my, what I think will happen in the future is that there will be a closer integration of indigenous knowledge and Western education in any degree areas at almost all institutions across Canada. I think that's the way it's going. Some of the resources we need is we need more accurate textbooks, history textbooks, not just history textbooks, even engineering textbooks and medical textbooks that pay more attention to some of the innovations of indigenous people that have played a role in our current day civilization. Things like the Berksbark canoe or the Three Sisters and how they, how we're still relying on this technology and not paying homage to the fact that it came from indigenous people of North America. South America.