 We've been an innovation collective based out of Yellowknife Northwest Territories. We've been around for about four years and we focus on fostering Indigenous leadership values and skills through cultural resurgent type initiatives. What age group or target audience is Dene Newell for? The target audience and age range would depend on the project, but it's pretty broad generally, so with the urban high tanning camp it's a bit more geared towards adults who are interested in traditional high tanning. However, this year because we held it in September instead of July, there was a significant amount of interest from the elementary schools, so we actually ended up hosting over 500 elementary school kids over the two weeks. We did tours twice a day and had about 60 kids a day come as a part of their class, so that one ended up being having much more of a youth focus than we had anticipated. And then for one of our other programs is the Women's Rights of Passage Gathering and we tried to get a broad range of ages, so we had just under 30 participants, women and girls, and the age range was from 11 to over 70, so it varies. If we could concentrate on the women's gathering, what was the aim of that program? We called it the Recognition of Being Rights of Passage Women's Gathering and the intention for that was to create a space for indigenous women to learn traditional teachings and protocols around rights of passage, not just from sort of girlhood to womanhood, but rights of passage around having children, around aging, becoming an elder, responsibilities to family and community, leadership values and ceremony. So it was a four-day gathering and women had to register and it was held here in Yellenife in August in 2017. It was an opportunity for Aboriginal women to learn about themselves and their culture? Yeah, definitely self-reflection was a big part of it, of the gathering. Women were really encouraged to draw from their experiences. It was really discussion-based and sort of trying to really encourage the group to kind of see the leadership potential within themselves, in a way, through using rights of passage sort of as a cultural lens for looking at oneself and one's family. What in your opinion makes Dene Nawa an example of excellence in indigenous education? Well I think Dene Nawa was a good example of indigenous education because it is the goals of the programs are indigenous led and indigenous decided. The organization is indigenous led. We have a network of a lot of indigenous people across the NWT. For example, our first women's gathering was actually the indigenous women's circumpolar gathering. It was more of a conference and we had almost 200 participants from Alaska, NWT in Nunavut and the Yukon come to Yellenife for the gathering and that was to make space for indigenous women to teach and learn what they wanted to and felt. Another reason why I think Dene Nawa was a good example of indigenous education is that we really try to infuse spirituality into our programming when we have the capacity to do that and the knowledge, especially with the rights of passage gathering that was actually led by two elders, two very knowledgeable women elders. Another reason why I think we're a good example is that we really try to incorporate land-based experiences in all of our programming even though we have been operating mostly in an urban context. How do you measure the success of your program? We tend to measure success of our programs by the number of participants and the participant feedback which sometimes we get through debriefing circles at the end of the project. Sometimes people send us their feedback after the fact and usually we'll do an online survey asking participants for feedback and if the feedback was positive and we were able to include as many people as we'd hoped then I would consider the project a success. From your perspective what is indigenous education? Well from my perspective indigenous education is indigenous led or at least the goals of the programming is decided by indigenous people. It supports indigenous people to reach the goals that they decide for themselves, whatever those are, is very relational or relationship focused with community, family, the land and animals I'd say that would be a component but also I feel like indigenous education can also be really different from community to community. I would say that indigenous education would be created and delivered by indigenous people. You tend to hear of a lot of programs that were not created by indigenous people but have been around for decades and then people think that if you tweak the program a little bit it can be relevant for indigenous people but whether that's a case or not I won't say but I feel like indigenous education has the goal of it will be to support indigenous people to reach their potential and their own goals for their community or family or whatever. How would you define the word indigenous? I don't know indigenous is such a weird word now because I think indigenous is a useful category for describing a shared lived experience of certain people. So I tend to use the word indigenous up here because programming tends to be for a really sort of multicultural indigenous community. You have Métis people and Inuit people and Dene people mostly and then there's Crete community and a whole bunch of other First Nations people here so that's why I tend to use indigenous in this work but I do find the term useful when talking about our kind of shared histories. What is your vision for indigenous education over the next 10 years in your community and in Canada? I would just like to see a lot more financial support for indigenous led educational program whether they're oriented around hunting or gatherings like rites of passage or language learning or things like that. I would like to see more support equal to or more than the support that other public education programs and services receive. Particularly in the north I would love to see a lot more resources being committed to language revitalization equal to more than the funding that French programming gets for example. What information materials or resources do need to achieve that vision aside from funding? Sometimes I feel like it's not really a matter of things that we need right now but we really need time and space to build support systems for our community and just so people have time to access opportunities that are available to us now that weren't even two years ago or five years ago or ten years ago because I think that if we're talking about post-secondary education there's a lot more indigenous people going through post-secondary education than there was five or ten years ago. There's just more indigenous people just in terms of population. I think we just need time to, we need a bit more time to organize then maybe we'll be able to say exactly what it is we need. But I think all the capacity and strength to do all the things that we want to do is within our communities already and we just need to create spaces where those strengths can be supported and our collective potential can be reached.