 What is your name? My name is Steve Wood. I'm Cree. I'm from a community called Sad Lake, which is out by St. Paul, Alberta. I teach at Irmanskin Junior Senior High School. I've been in education for about 24 years. Please describe your program. Oh, okay. Well, I teach basically, it focuses basically on language, an understanding of language and some communication skills with the language, as well as Cree culture. Things like legends, learning some of the cultural teachings that we have, such as what we call Mataiga, cleaning of hides, preparing hides, making drums, rattles, etc. Just those types of cultural teaching, some survival skills as well. Can you tell me about your drum group? Well, here we decided to start a traditional singing group. We usually have practices at lunchtime. It's one of the extracurricular activities where we don't announce. We just pull out the drum and people come to the classroom and they'll come and sing. Other students will come around and just sit around and listen, things like that. And then as a spring off to the singing group, we started a dance troupe. The goal of that was just to go out to other schools, other organizations, and sort of educate them about song and dance and through song and dance to educate them a little bit about First Nations people. Do you have an age group? No, we're open to, as long as you're registered here in the school, the schools from grade 7 to grade 12, anyone's eligible to come out. And meeting your requirements in terms of education here at the school, then you're able to accompany the troupe to various destinations. Last week we went to a school in the city, a junior high school with 500 students to put on a performance. I choreographer the presentation so it not only entertains the audience, but also educates them. The viewer actually understands what they're seeing. In your opinion, what makes it an example of excellence in Indigenous education? Well, I believe that is Indigenous education. You know how you have like music in mainstream schools and perhaps even some dance classes, etc.? Well, it's not unlike that. This is our music that originates with us. And these dances also originate with us. So I believe that it is a form of educating our young people about some of our own history. Do you have any measures of success in your program? Oh no, I don't say like you're the best or you're really good at... Within our dances and our singing, we do have like competitiveness. We have like in our polo circle competitions. And the singing has been elevated to the point where you can reach out now to actually be a recognized individual in the music industry. I mean, there is a place to get to with this type of singing that is like the Grammy Award. So there is recognition to singing. The dances are also competitive in the polo circle. The dancers have to be in extremely good shape. It's not unlike any other sporting event or activity. You can't just throw on an outfit and think that you're going to get out there and be able to move to that music. If you're not in a fairly good condition, you're probably going to struggle a lot. From your perspective, what is Indigenous education? Indigenous education is education that is derived from Indigenous knowledge that is taught by Indigenous people and that has a firm understanding and is rooted in the deep history of First Nations people on this land. That's what it is. I think learning about those things are important such as taking the kids out into the wilderness and teaching them about the different plants because we have plants that can actually heal you. For instance, let's take an antihistamine that you buy in the store. It's in a pill form. You can actually find an antihistamine that's a root that you don't have to ingest and it will actually clean out your sinuses and give you a very good night's sleep and probably not have the same side effects as ingesting a pill. Those things are important, I think, to teach the people and also teaching the kids about finding sweet grass, sage. You can actually live off the land. There may come a time that you might have to live off the land and I think those skills are important. And again, teaching the kids about our history which is not taught in mainstream education I'm not talking about the history from 1867 on or even from 1492 on. It's actually a much more rooted history than that. Those dates are significant. If you don't know what 1867 is, that would be Confederation. 1492 is when that fellow lost his way and ended up over here. And telling the truths about those would be very important and I know the settlers at such a great history on this land building, as they call it, this nation but I think the First Nations people had a big hand in it but those things aren't really told. I think if people were educated about those factors and say mainstream education in North American history, if you will, or Canadian history, I think there would be a much more better understanding between First Nations people and all other Canadians or North American people right now because those things have not been taught. There's this understanding that there's a dependency from one group to the other which is not true because if the treaties were taught in a school and people had a firm understanding they begin to wonder about who was actually on welfare from who. So what is your vision for Indigenous education over the next 10 years? Well, I hope within our education we'll be able to teach our young people about being competitive in the mainstream environment, of course. So you want to be giving them mathematics, sciences, also a little bit of English because of the worldly language, I guess. Aside from those, you want to be able to teach the children about their own history, about their own culture and very important their language. Without the language, we probably cease to exist as First Nations people. It's the root of everything that we are. The language is part of the very fabric of our culture and I often wonder if no one can speak our language, how do we perform our ceremonies? Will somebody be up there talking in English? An example of that is lifting the pipe. Will it be like, I'm going to point the pipe to the south over here? That just doesn't have the same impact as saying it in the Cree. Our language is very descriptive. It's tied right into the environment and I think it's really, really imperative that we instill our language in our young people and it's not really the parents or the grandparents fault that the young people can't speak the language. We've had historical trauma. People that have had historical trauma, you can't expect them to recover from it over a short period of time. Heck, the last residential school was closed in the 1990s. That wasn't now that long ago and if people think they'll just get over it, I would ask them, what about the Jewish people? Are people telling them to get over it? And that was an understanding of what happened to them. It happened to them like 40 years ago. You look at the time frame, it's unreal to ask them to get over it. And that's the same thing with the First Nations people. I think with indigenous education, when we start understanding, when people start understanding about who they are and they have a rich and diverse culture, they start to embrace it. And with that, that will make our community stronger and probably more viable within the nation, the Canadian nation, if you will. I don't know if it's really a nation, a Canadian state. I'm sorry about that. I think it would probably help. Because when I look at it, I look at what kind of culture does Canada have? It doesn't have any. Actually, when you put forward, they're taking bits and pieces of First Nations culture to represent that. And when I ask people, what's the national language of Canada? Most people are going to say English, but I thought that came from England and that was England, England's national language. French. Didn't that come from France? Is that not France's national language, too? So I think like, for us, it's imperative that we teach those teachings and our language, our culture, to our young people. Unlike anybody else in Canada, we don't have a place to go back and get it. I believe that every other person who is non-native to this land, they may be born here, but their ancestry are German, or they could be Russian, or they could be Chinese, or they could be like my friend here, he's from Zimbabwe. He understands that he has a place that he can go pick up his culture and his language. We don't. This is it. And we have to make sure that we instill those things. That's a very important component of Indigenous education. I also think that some of the things that, in terms of Indigenous education, that we have, I think we have some good things that we can share with the rest of Canadian society. What information materials resources do you need to achieve that vision aside from funding? I think we need a lot more interaction with our elders, because we don't have bucks to go back on. I mean, our strongest resources are elders that are still alive and that still have a grasp of language and culture and our history. Those people are really important. I don't think you can go find a lot of this in a textbook. And I think that's really important. That's our strongest resource. I'm a little eerie about sharing information as some of our people are, because people tend to take the information and then write it down as their own. And then what they do is they sell it back to the public and they don't only sell it back to the public, they sell it back to us, which doesn't make sense to me. So I'm always a little bit neary and other people are as well, sharing too much. They say, don't tell them too much. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. There's a catch-22 there, because if you don't tell other people then there's no knowledge of it. But another thing is if you tell too much to other people and they start to and then it's happening in education right now, because right now, most education systems are trying to indigenize their curriculum. So they're asking people to come in and what happens is somebody with a paper from the post-second and their institution. And they're not even First Nations, but they'll come in and they'll say, I have an hold to this and I can prove it because it's on paper right here. But they really don't have an understanding, because I have a knowledge of, again, like Germany, but I couldn't go into their country and say, hey, I can teach you about all that. How could you teach people about who they are when you didn't grow up in that kind of environment? We have to be careful of that because that may not be the right way to go. If you want to really indigenize a curriculum, then you probably need an indigenous person that has not just an understanding, but is deeply rooted in that culture and in that identity to help you haunted to probably put it, not to make mistakes, is what I'm going to say.