 Cési, Chloe Dragonsmith, Soullier, Baie-Wildes-Ché, Stiastie. My name is Chloe Dragonsmith. I'm from Yellowknife, Northwest Territories. My family is from the Fort Smith, South Slave region, and we're Dene Semplinet. So, my program is called Bush Kids. It's an outdoor learning program for...the vision is for all ages. Right now the program we're running is for ages 5 to 12, but we're also working with the public school system throughout all the grades. So, the aim of our program is to explore ethical spaces between Western education practices and Indigenous education practices. We do that through getting kids outdoors regularly and repeatedly. We operate with the philosophy that we are part of the land, we come from the land, and so it weaves into every part of us and every part of education. So, in addition to camp programs and outdoor education programs, we think it's very important to get kids outdoors for holistic education through all subjects. So, we're using a forest and nature school model to bridge these two world views and get learners out on the land. So, what we're trying to do is work ultimately with the public education system and empower teachers in that system to be doing this work on their own. So, right now we're focusing on Yellowknife, but we do hope to expand and empower others to develop their own place-based programs that can be accessible to all learners. So, our program has a large focus on play and inquiry-based learning. So, often our activities are dictated by the children and by the space itself. So, depending, you know, this fall when we first got ice, our days were very focused on ice, learning about ice, learning how to test ice thickness, and we do try regularly to do cultural activities. We focus as much as we can around traditional foods. So, we've had, we've plucked ducks and skinned rabbits, we've had caribou ribs, and so we do try to bring in, and we try to use the resources we have in the community and the knowledge that's in the community. So, if people have certain sets of skills or knowledge, we bring them in to share that as an activity. Right now, we're measuring the success of our program largely relationally, and that comes from an overall focus on relationships through the program with people, with the kids, with the land, with the educators. We do feedback surveys with parents. We talk to our learners every day to get their feedback on what we've been doing, what they enjoyed, what they don't. We've had very, very good feedback from parents about changes in their children in the home, and we are a fairly new program, so this might expand, but for now, that's how we measure our success. We put a large focus in our program on resiliency and self-regulation. So that includes physical self-regulation, like how to stay warm in the winters, outdoors, and emotional regulation, so how to work through their problems, their personal problems, their problems with relationships with each other and us on their own. We notice, we definitely notice an increase in resilience through the program. We've had parents tell us that their children will at the start of the program come home from school and play outdoors for half an hour, and then on a Bush kids' day, they come home and they play outdoors for three additional hours, which is amazing considering they've been outside all day. So their resilience for being outdoors is impacted. We hear very positive feedback about behavioral resilience and learning about relationships. Our challenges, we have a lot of different challenges. I think probably a big one is regulations, so, you know, legal restrictions and rules around relationships with land. For instance, there's just little things like how your fire pit has to be set up, structures you can leave standing, things that dictate our relationships with land and make them restrictive. That has been a big challenge. I wouldn't necessarily maybe call it a challenge, but part of the growing of the program is building relationships with community and knowledge holders, and that takes time and time. You know, I guess with a program that's focused so much on relationship, that's not often worked into, say, a traditional Western work plan and not valued as the time that's actually needed to build those relationships isn't necessarily understood or built in. So there's that. We have definitely challenges around funding, figuring out where our funding can come from and having it consolidated instead of from different, you know, patchwork sources of funding. Certainly a challenge for us is the cold. We're teaching outdoors throughout the winter, so it's a winter program. We've found solutions to that by having wall tents and big fire pits, but again those were challenges that we had to work through. The biggest part of Indigenous education is getting out on the land. Our culture comes from the land, our people come from the land, language, knowledge, everything comes from land, and so I think that simply getting outdoors is a huge giant step for Indigenous education. And so there are, there's lots of other aspects that we continue to think about and envision. However, though it might not be perfect, I think that actually just getting learners out on the land is a really essential first step. Other things that we think about are, for instance, the focus on traditional foods, bringing in different knowledge holders and elders to share their skills, focusing on relationships or our relationships with the land, with each other, placing value on those. I think a lot of our learning as Indigenous peoples comes from our relationships. Another thing that we try to build is the emphasis on family and community, so we try as much as possible to have large age ranges, teenage mentors, we have a baby that comes in and works with us sometimes. We try to emphasize the intergenerational relational learning as much as possible. And another big thing I think for Indigenous education is thinking about time differently, so you could say maybe decolonizing time and agendas and schedules and letting time be more dictated by the place itself, by the land, by our relationships. So those are some of the things that I think about when I'm thinking about Indigenous education. I hope for Indigenous education. I hope to see place-based models expand across the country. I hope to see Indigenous nations empowered to deliver this place-based education and to define, articulate, and assert Indigenous education principles in conjunction with public learning. So I think that there's a role for public education systems in terms of having open minds to a different world view for education as well as funding opportunities for it to occur, so creating the space, I guess. I think there's a big role for Indigenous community and institutions to draw out the knowledge of what it means, what place-based Indigenous education means in different areas across Canada and to bring it to as many people as possible. So I think it's creating the space and it's drawing out the knowledge, and I really believe it's a responsibility to the land, to our peoples, but also to all peoples to do this. So the Forest and Nature School model that we work with is a national movement in Canada. Forest and Nature School is often said to come from Denmark and I look at that and I say that we've been doing it here on the land for millennia and so actually a lot of the principles of Forest and Nature School are similar to what I know of Indigenous education and that's what attracted me to the model. It's a great middle ground for this ethical space between Western education principles and Indigenous education principles. Through Bush Kids, I work with a lady who's trained formally as an educator in the Western system. I am not, but I grew up on the land very connected with my traditional values and spent a lot of school days out on the land. So I have an understanding from that of what Indigenous education means to me and my peoples. And so we're bringing those two worlds together, bridging through the model of Forest and Nature School. And I think there's huge potential for that. It's not the only way to build Indigenous education but it is a model that exists, that's accepted and growing in many places, that encompasses both Western and Indigenous world views already so it's a good foundation. I'm finding it a good foundation to build from. The ultimate aim of Bush Kids is to make outdoor learning and Indigenous education accessible for everyone. The way we're set up right now is we run a registration program where parents register their kids to come every Tuesday. They come from public schools and the parents pay to have them enrolled. They come every Tuesday and all throughout the winter through the school year. That program is set up for our growth and learning as facilitators. We have a secondary branch to the program which is the one we're looking to build and that's the one where we mentor public school teachers. So we have classes come to our site and we work with the teachers to ultimately empower them to be delivering this sort of education through their schools regularly, getting their learners outdoors on a repeated basis and through different subjects. It's really important for us that the learning is regular and repeated and the access to the land is regular and repeated. That helps to build relationship with place, seeing the place change over time and we also operate on the philosophy that we are a part of nature. We're part of the land and so it weaves through every part of us and every part of our education while it's important to get outdoors for special camps and outdoor education programs. We see it as important to learn holistically through the subjects outdoors and understand how the land is part of us in all ways. So the best way that we see right now to do that is to affect the public education system where kids are all learning daily and so that's why we're going that route mentoring teachers and trying to empower them to do it in their own spaces.