 My name is Juliana, but my Drake, and I'm from Con River, Newfoundland, and it's a Miyabugik reserve. I'm a grade 11, I'm 16 years old, and I go to San Andue, or St. Anne's High School. My name is Cassidy Lambert. I'm a grade 11 student here at St. Anne's High School. I am a Jingle Dress dancer, and I recently just got one of my friends to join me, so she was out there today. Other than that, I help out sometimes with our Mi'kmaq language teacher. I help with the little ones when they have questions sometimes. I do perform a lot of our traditional pieces, kind of globally I guess you can say. I've performed multiple pieces at the Kiwanis, different festivals and all those kinds of things. My name is Brayden Kennedy, 13, 14 years old, and I'm in grade 8 at St. Anne's School in Con River. I'm happy to be here. I'm Emily McDonald. I'm a grade 9 student from St. Andue's School in Con River. Alright, and you're? My name is Kara Keepering. I'm also in grade 9. We're both going to St. Andue and Con River. My name is Mark Jodor, and I'm from grade 8, and I go to St. Anne's School in Con River. My name is Katie Delaney, and I'm 12 years old. I'm in grade 7, and I am in Con River. Excellent. I'm 12 years old, I'm in grade 7, and I go to St. Anne's School in Con River. We're from Con River, we're a St. Anne's School in our name. My name is Damien. My name is Chad. My name is... I'm 12, and I'm in grade 7. I'm 12, and I'm in grade 7. Mark J is 12, and I'm in grade 7. From a young age I started here. So as like a young student, you first learn about the big drum, the hand drums, the difference, like the rules about them, because there are like certain things that you can and can't do around drums about the traditional regalias, the pronunciation of different words for the songs. So when you're little, they put you in a McMull language class. You're taught the language as well as through music and just reading and writing and all those different things. And then as I got older, my father had joined the Men's Drum Group. So I would participate with them, I would go to their practices sometimes and kind of just sing along with them, learn different songs, kind of have fun. And my mother is also part of a Women's Drum Group, so I perform with them sometimes, and I've traveled with them a bit, I've practiced with them. We've kind of combined both groups a few times. So I have a wide variety of people that I can learn from. The Women's Drum Group is actually all like sisters and cousins kind of things. So they're all like, my mom has like four, three other sisters. So two of them are in the drum group, and then their cousins and all of them are there. I like the art program really, I really like the art program that's in here. Can you tell me a bit about it? Well, it's like most art programs, and sometimes they do a little bit of indigenous things, and it's really fun. I really do like it. So what kind of indigenous, what do you mean? We do paint medicine wheels, and we do some arts, like some crafts. Like dream catchers and all that. Do you, are you still taking language classes, or have you aged out of the language classes? I like, like, make wall language. Yes, we never aged out yet. In our last year, I think. In grade eight. Yeah, I think so. And what are your thoughts on that course? Very good. We, we know some of our language, like, like, hi, hello, and all that. There's not really many classes with an indigenous focus. We do Newfoundland studies, and we try to base it on how indigenous people grew up in Newfoundland, but those books are not based on that. We're like just five pages of that big book. So it's hard to focus a class on, you know, just indigenous. Just a lot of our music, I think, is based on, you know, indigenous culture and just learning about who we are. But nothing, nothing major. You have a language class, make wall until you get to grade nine, I think, and you stop learning the language, which I don't agree with personally, that's, that's terrible. But other than that, you know, there's, there should totally be more. Like in our classes, we have done like a decent, decent amount of like traditional work, like paint, like painting, traditional imagery, stuff along like that line. And our MegaMod classes, we've learned the MegaMod language, which I feel is important for maintaining the culture. For me, I don't think we should be educated. We should already know that, but for me that we're being educated on it again, and I think it's really good and bring our culture back. When I perform and I put on the jingle dress that I have, I feel more confident in myself. So I, I've traveled to Teranova and we've done small presentations for like National Aboriginal Day. And I've spoken to many more people than I would have if I was out of Riquelia. I tend to be a very shy person, I can't be too vocal. In Riquelia, in the jingle dress especially, where it's very loud, you draw a lot of attention, so it's hard to not have people approach you about it. So I've learned with being in a Riquelia and performing to kind of come out of my shell a bit more and be able to talk a bit more. That confidence comes with being able to talk about my culture, being proud of who I am and being able to show people that we're not just kind of like strict to these things, we're not performers, we're really like, we just want to teach you about it and like we don't want to be like forcing it in your face, but we want to be like, this is us, take it as you want kind of thing. And I tend to be the nicest I can be. I've had people who have asked me some kind of off questions about it and I've answered them the best I could. But I tend to be a lot more confident, I guess. Well, how do we know like where we're from and who we are without learning that from other people, language, the food we ate, all the things that we've done, our entire culture is based around that. But we were actually like a lost for actual language because we have that Nova Scotia Megamoth, but we don't have the actual language spoken by. The Con River Megamoth. Yeah, that's all died out now. And we should be taught to embrace our past and and and grow from it and not hold it as a grudge. We should we should know, especially for like the new generation. I find a lot of the kids, they don't really care about who they are anymore. There was I was just talking to the great knowledge about body image and stuff from one of the young boys. He said, I want to learn McMull said, I want to learn French. And it's just like they're not they're not raised and and grown up enough with with their culture to love it. Nobody talks about culture here. We don't sit up and talk about, you know, smudging or anything like everybody's like, why do you want to do that? Like I smudge every day. And then if like one of my friends and I would do like, that's weird. Why do you do it every day? And it's like, it's my culture and I'll learn to love it. Plus smudging is scientifically proven cleanser body. And it'd be good to have like one specific specific day in a week to have to learn that language. So like a culture, you know, remember in grade three when we had writing Wednesdays, like we can have like maybe one days or something. All day stuff about culture, you know, like a whole day dedicated to culture. I think that a good idea would be like when the weather gets warmer, we should take a day to go out over there to the field and just do like a lot of craft ish to do with our culture and stuff. Making a boat, maybe making a drone. Say if like we had like social studies class, our teacher could take us outside and see if she knows anything or get somebody coming. My grandfather, Damien Bowell, he used to make snowshoes. And now like he's in this museum in St. John's called The Rooms. And when you go up to the fourth floor, you'll see some of his traditional snowshoes. Well, for our cultures, a lot of our traditions are based outside. So I wish we get more traditions outside, like making medicines outside, like getting the medicines from plants, from the plants. Learning more traditional, traditional, make more traditional stuff, like making canoe, sneers and all that, like all kinds of traditional stuff. They used to do a thing where they take them up the river and learn stuff like trapping and building a lean tune stuff. I'd like to do that. I'm not sure if they still do it or not. Today, we only learned a little bit of the language and we don't really do nothing that our people used to do back in the day. So it would be nice to learn some of the things that they did and see if we can like get back into doing our thing. We can keep the language like going up and get more advanced because we do the same things we did as we were like just in pre-K. When we get to grade 10, we just we only have like a little bit of make them up with our homeroom teacher because after grade 10, they just almost dropped make them up all together. Grade nine is our last year for the make my language. In grade 10, there's a make my studies course, but there's no language included with that. Social studies books are often like based around like the Nova Scotia make them up and then there's the Labrador Inuit and the Innu, but there's none like us specifically in any of it. One thing I think we should have in a school, though, with some of like designs or something like little tiny native designs going across the hallways because it's hard to keep any postures in that up because they keep falling down. So it'd be nice to have like paintings or something by each student like on a book or something like some native drawings. Like when you walk in, nothing seems hey, we're a native school. I think it'd be nice to have like a make them up program going here. Like certain days, you'll have like a program where you can just go and like learn because we already said that like the pow wow, you go and learn about stuff. But I think it would be nice to have like a little session thing and have some people who can go there and learn like the make my language and like learn a bit of it and then have some gatherings or something. Learn how to do a sweat lodge and how to do smudging and all that. Like a certain date or you can go and learn some of these things. More indigenous stuff in some of our classes, like we do more indigenous stuff than what we don't. There's nothing specific that I'd like to see. It's kind of just like I'd rather see more. Migma in every other class, besides just that one class that we have. No, that's impossible. Help us learn more about it because like over the years we lost our culture and we're not really getting it back, which it would be cool if every time we went to make a language class, we'd only have to speak make them on. That's it now to make English that because in other schools, they do that with French and make my language could be carried through out high school. It kind of stops at grade nine and a bit of grade 10 almost make a lot of studies, but it's not really we're starting to lose the language after that point. So I used to be very like I was very confident in the way I could teach to speak and read and stuff like that. But I've kind of lost that bit of confidence a bit because we don't carry out the language speaking throughout high school. So I would like for that to carry through up to grade 12, like when you graduate kind of thing. And I would like for the school to be like more inclusive, like for young ones as well, because a lot of little ones are kind of. Put away from performances, like we had some grade six students come out today with for dancing, but I'd like to have like lessons for little ones throughout the week to teach them about the traditional ways of drumming and distritional medicines and in in a fun way. So, you know, they don't get bored, but I would like for that to happen. For my studies, our teacher got us to make birch bark baskets. So we had to collect spruce roots and get large pieces of birch bark or witch hazel and we had to put them together and put the roots together to make the basket and kind of weave it all together, which was really fun. Like I really enjoyed that. And we we got to make a lean to last year, which was really fun. And I'd like to see us do a lot more of that and not just in making my studies through like throughout the year and start little ones with simple projects, like just braiding or just something simple. There's there's so many things that we could do. Like I spent a lot of time in the Friendship Center in St. John's. Oh, yeah. And I love I love that place. I love the Friendship Center so good. Like we don't we don't do a lot of cultural things as a as a community. Like we have a Palo, but that's, you know, I would just personally I would have like culture camps and there's culture camps that was just on the go there, a march that they could have signed people up for, you know, and culture camps were where just outside of St. John's. It was called. Yeah. For like someone outside of St. John's. Yeah. So you can even do like a language camp or like just learning about culture and stuff and all that. But we do have a lack of push on our culture. We do try. I'm not saying we don't try, but there could definitely be more, especially in the school. Yes, OK. The language should be learned all the way through. I mean, if they're going to teach us a second language, at least teach us all the way through. When you do French, you learn how to speak French. I I can't fully speak my language. You know what I mean? I'd like to be able to, but I have no one to teach me out of the way growing up. And there's the class with Miss Angela like in the weekdays. But that's not well known. Like I didn't know that until she told me like a couple of months ago. I think more like just talking about the culture, even just smudging circles or just sitting up, making dreamcatchers, learning how to do like all the old stuff, like having groups and stuff, would just be a good thing to have. Why not have an after school programmer and doing like that to do with the culture? All of us should be able to pick up a stick and start putting sinew through it and making a dreamcatcher and make our own moccasins and stuff. Like, I don't think we should have to look for somebody to make a regalia. I think we should be able to do that. My little sister is about, she's eight. I have like six siblings, a lot of them. She's eight. She's my youngest little sister. She comes home and she gets so excited. Do her migma words and all that. And it's like these kids, they love it. They love watching the dancing and stuff. Why is that not every day? Yes. Why do we only get in regalia for special events like this? You know what I mean? Yeah. Like just for someone to record it. Yes. It makes it easy for a non-indigenous to perceive it as just attention. I don't want to have to go look for someone in cotton to make my regalia. I want to have to sit up and make it by myself. But I can't because I was never taught. I don't know how to make snowshoes and I don't know how to I don't know how to make a dreamcatcher. I don't.