 What is it called? The program is called the Native Law Center Summer Program, formerly known as the PLSNP. And what are the age groups or the target audience? It is for students who have an undergraduate degree, so usually it would be in the 22 kind of age range and higher. It is a graduate program, so it's not a direct entry. And what is the aim of the program? The summer program was created to increase the number of indigenous people studying and practicing law in Canada, and it is an eight-week summer course that occurs prior to the student entering law school in the fall. And what is the program intended to do, like the learning objectives? The program teaches students first-year property law, and as well it teaches the skills that they need to be successful in law school. So legal writing, legal analysis, and how to brief cases, write legal memos. So how do you measure the success of your program? Well we measure the success of the program in a couple of different ways. One thing is by the enrollment. We see that the enrollment has gone up over the years. In 2011 we had 28 students in the program. Last year we had 47, so there is a growing demand. We also, most of the law schools in Canada accept our program for credit, so that, and they will, almost all the law schools in Canada do send students to our program, sometimes as a prerequisite for them to attend law school. So that's an important piece. But also, I think one of the, what we would say across Canada, we estimate that about 75% of the Aboriginal lawyers or Indigenous lawyers started their educational career at the summer program, and program alumni have gone on to become lawyers, judges, government officials, professors, and also pursue further academic studies in law. And for example, the current president of First Nations University of Canada, Dr. Mark Dockstader, attended the summer program prior to going to law school at Osgoode. One thing though, in regards to the success of our program alumni, it's important to note that our ability to monitor how many students have advanced onwards in legal education and beyond, it's difficult for us to really track that because of privacy legislation, and so we right now are just monitoring it, monitoring the development of our alumni as best we can through actual personal contact with alumni, such as the interviewer's cousin, like we seek out people who have gone through the program and then connect with them and ask them to then connect with us. But we do know that a lot of our alumni are very successful, which is really gratifying for us. What is Indigenous education? It's a broad question, and there's a number of ways you could approach it. I think Indigenous education is any form of communicating knowledge that involves Indigenous students or Indigenous knowledge keepers or faculty, or involves the transmission of Indigenous knowledge itself, traditional knowledge. It can kind of approach it in terms of the participants in the endeavor or the actual kind of knowledge. And so I see Indigenous education kind of in those two, kind of potentially being aspects of those two dimensions, but a form of decolonized education I would say will be one where the institution respects Indigenous traditional knowledge, includes it within the curriculum, and whether the students or the teachers are Indigenous or not. So it's paying respect to that source of knowledge in terms of education. How would you define the word Indigenous, Tom? I would define Indigenous as people who existed prior to the assertion of authority by a colonizer. So Indigenous peoples in North America would be First Nations, Métis, and any Indigenous group that existed prior to Canadian authority exerting and forcefully assuming authority over that territory. Is this a term Indigenous, one that you would normally use? Increasingly so, in my situation, being in the lawyer while aware of the other legal terms that the Canadian government has applied to Indigenous people without their consent in most cases. So I use Indigenous because it's consistent with the international language, in particular referencing the United Nations Declaration. And so I want to identify with that more positive standard of Indigenous rights rather than aboriginal, which is based on the Constitution, which has identified rights that are less than those of the Declaration, for example. I prefer Indigenous for those reasons, although I think we need to be increasingly more specific as to what people we are, like if rather than using these catch-all and Indigenous phrases or kind of aboriginal phrases, we should refer to our nations themselves, the Kree, the Naiti, you know, the Dakota. What is your vision for the future of Indigenous education? I would like to see Indigenous education be inclusive of Indigenous knowledge. I'd like to see Indigenous peoples in places of authority, in positions of authority, and in educational institutions. I'd like to see the treaties and their treaty right to education be manifest more significantly in terms of governance authority of educational institutions. So that would mean, for example, in the university here, you would have an Indigenous component to the governance authority, not just the Senate or the Board of Governors, but you'd also have, say, an elders council or something, but with real authority, not just in an advisory role. So to me, that's decolonizing, and anything short of that is just kind of indigenizing in the kind of just getting Indigenous peoples in the system isn't enough. So what, can you think of any types of information that if you had now, it would help to achieve your vision? In terms of the program, I think it would be useful for us, right, Kathleen, to have more data from law schools about graduates, aboriginal graduates, and more data from the law societies about aboriginal graduates, and their success rate in article, and data on their career path. I think it would be very useful for us administering the summer program to have that kind of data, and for law schools to be more open to sharing that data with us right now. They're not very open to doing that, and so we struggle with trying to understand the statistics of how many aboriginal graduates are in the country, for example. We don't really know. Very good. We have a good idea, but we don't know the exact numbers. So aside from the programs in which you are personally involved, what information do you have on other Indigenous education programs in Canada? Well I know at the University of Victoria, they've just started a joint JID program, so it'll be a, maybe you can speak to it a bit more, but it's very exciting. Yeah, it's a pretty important initiative in the sense that the program will teach Indigenous peoples' laws as well as Canadian common law, so it'll have components with respect to Coast Salish law, probably mostly sent British Columbia kind of oriented Indigenous peoples' laws, Coast Salish, and other peoples from that area. And the students who go through that four-year program will not only have a degree in common law, but also a degree in Indigenous peoples' law, so that's pretty significant. Here at the College of Law, we'll be introducing a new course next year called Quist-Castasson, which means kind of setting things right, the reconciliation course really, that the TRC said in a call to action that all law schools should include in their curriculum, so the College of Law is introducing that course next year here. And other law schools are too as well to some degree, but there still is a fair bit of work in terms of recognizing Indigenous peoples' laws as a valid source of law in Canada, but the Native Law Center is working on promoting Indigenous law, both in terms of research and then encouraging the law schools to be more inclusive of Indigenous law traditions. So that's pretty much all the questions that I have, but is there anything else you guys would like to add? One of the, I meant to bring this up as the idea of talking about programs of excellence in education or Indigenous education, the program, the summer program that we have, when it began in 1973, there were only four Indigenous lawyers and five Indigenous law students in Canada, and within the first 20 years, we had 373 alumni come through the program and go on to law school, and by 2011, a total of 832 alumni had gone through our program and graduated from law school. Now we have a bit of a gap in our information from 2011 to today, but we do know to date, like as of 2017, 1,635 Indigenous students have attended the Native Law Center summer program. We just don't know how many of those have went on to successfully complete law school. One thing is sometimes people realize by doing the summer program that they don't want to go to law school, like they just realize it's not for them. That's important because law school is a three-year commitment, and it's good to know right off the hop if it's not for you and it isn't for everyone. So we don't consider that to be a failure or anything, but so when we say we've had to date 1,635 alumni to go through the program, we estimate probably 85% of them would have gone on to law school, but that's where we need more information so we could actually say for sure how many went on to go to law school, graduate, how many went on and got their articles, how many are practicing lawyers, how many went on maybe to post-graduate studies. That's one thing that we are working towards. Yeah, and the program has been quite successful in that respect, and even other disciplines like nursing and medical schools have approached us to see how they can model a program similar to ours to increase the number of students attending those disciplines in education. So it's been around a while and people know that it's actually accomplished a significant impact in the number of lawyers who are Indigenous in Canada, so it acts as a model. And I think one thing too, which I didn't kind of highlight is one of the really important pieces of the summer program is that it does serve to create a really strong bond, kind of a professional bond within the people who go through the program. So we have, say, last year, 47 students attending the program. They would have come from all across Canada, and once they were done here at the U of S, the native law center, they would go to their respective law schools across Canada. But we know that these friendships that are formed in the summer actually are maintained throughout the career of the law student and then the professional, which is pretty exciting because it creates a very strong kinship group. Which you see in the Indigenous Bar Association, which they will join usually. So the alumni are also very much connected, usually, to the Indigenous Bar Association, which is a national association of Indigenous lawyers, judges, and law students, and so they meet annually. In fact, their annual assembly will be here in Saskatoon in the fall. And we hope to have an alumni reunion event as well in conjunction with the conference.