 My name is Don McCaskill, and I teach in the Indigenous Studies Department at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario. The Department of Indigenous Studies at Trent is the oldest and I think still the largest department of its kind in Canada. We started in 1969, and it was called the Indian Eskimo Studies Program. In 1972, which is when I came on, we changed the name to Department of Native Studies, and then in the 1990s we changed it to the Department of Indigenous Studies. So I've been teaching in Indigenous Studies now for 46 years, so I've seen a lot of changes that have happened in Indigenous education, both here and across the country. So in terms of the Indigenous Studies Department, right from the very beginning in the early 1970s, we had three pillars that started that were fundamental to the department. One was we wanted to have a strong academic program, which was challenging to students like any other academic discipline. And then the second two pillars were different for other academic programs. One was that we wanted to be applied, that is we wanted to reflect the Indigenous community. That meant that we wanted to get our students involved with the Indigenous community and we wanted to get the Indigenous community involved with us. So that got manifested by a number of different courses. So we had practicum field placement courses where students were accredited going into Indigenous organizations or Indigenous communities and working and getting course credit. We also had a lot of guest speakers that came here. We were involved in almost every major Indigenous political and social movement in Canada. So we, for example, were involved in the Mercury Pollution issue in the Wabagoon English River system, affecting the communities in Northwestern Ontario. We had speakers from Japan come in that talked about minimada disease, which is the result of ingesting food that has too much mercury on it. We were involved in the Mackenzie Valley pipeline debate. We had Peter Berger here from the Berger Inquiry and a number of people from the Northwest Territories talking about that. During the James Bay Hydroelectric Development Project, we had the guest speakers down here like Billy Diamond and the lawyers and talking about that project. We were involved with the Canora sit-in on the park that was claimed as Indigenous land. We were involved in Moonded Knee back in the 1970s, the original Moonded Knee. We were involved in a lot of things that strengthened the applied side of the program. The applied side also, we were the first group, I think, in Canada that had a council made up of people from outside the community, outside the university. Elders, traditional people, chiefs and councillors, people from the PTOs, were all involved in what we call the Council of Directors. They were involved in all the decision-making in the department, including curriculum, what curriculum and courses we established, even hiring of all of the different faculty members so that we slowly grew as a department. That was the applied side of the department. We wanted to reflect the Indigenous reality and get our students involved in different projects. The third pillar was the cultural side, which we're calling now Indigenous knowledge. We wanted to ground our program in the traditional Indigenous culture. Right from the very beginning, we had something that no other university had, and even hasn't until this day, that is, elders that were appointed as tenure track faculty with the understanding that their traditional knowledge that they had in terms of the language, in terms of the relationship to the land, the ceremonies, was the equivalent to the PhD in the Western Knowledge Point of View. They were appointed as tenure track faculty. We had an Isnaabe elder, Fred Wheatley, back in the 70s, and we had a Kayuga elder, who was chief in the Lawn House, Confederacy, Jake Thomas. And then later, we had two other elders, Shirley Williams and Edna Menotwabi, who were also appointed as tenure track faculty. And so that was the, and the cultural side, we also had elders come here for sometimes as many as a week or so, and we performed ceremonies, such as sweat lodge ceremonies, pipe ceremonies. And then we also, the biggest thing of all in terms of the cultural pillar was the elders' gathering that we had at Trent. We started the elders' gathering back in the mid-1970s, and we were able to bring maybe 20 or 30 elders down for the conference. And we had about maybe 12 different drums. We had 75 people selling arts and crafts here, and it just became so big during, all the way from the 70s to the 80s, that we had 5,000 people attending the conference. They were coming from all over Canada. It was very famous, and we had to use the biggest venue in all of Peterborough, the Memorial Centre, to hold the conference. And it got to the point where it was so big, it was taking up so much of our time right from September on, that we actually had to stop it and make it smaller in the preceding years. But so we taught the languages, we taught the traditional culture, and we developed all sorts of cultural courses and again got the students involved in the community in terms of ceremonies. And most important of all, we had elders involved in the program right from the beginning. So those were the three pillars, the academic, the applied, and the cultural. And we've continued that right through today. Coming into the program, their objectives in the old days, back in the 70s and 80s, I think were to learn about being indigenous. Because of the exposure that they had to the elders, to the getting involved with the communities and the organizations, they really reinforced their identity as indigenous people. So we felt that throughout our entire history, we really feel that one of the contributions that we've made is to strengthen the indigenous identity in terms of the individual student, but also in terms of the culture as well. We felt that in some ways we've made some contributions to the communities through our research, through being involved in sitting on boards, involved in various issues. So we like to think that there's a reciprocal relationship between the department and the community. So that when the students leave and they take positions outside the university, we hope that they have a solid grounding in all three of those aspects of the program. A solid academic program so that they can think critically, synthesize material, analyze material. We hope that they have an understanding of the processes that happen within the indigenous community, what makes an organization function, an indigenous organization, and also a grounding in the traditional culture. So that a lot of our graduates have gone on to work in government, work in the band councils. We've had a number of graduates go on to be chiefs of their bands, their First Nations communities. We've had a lot of teachers. We produce lawyers. We produced a lot of generations all across Canada when I travel doing research or whatever. I run into a Trent Indigenous Studies graduates. And so a lot of the leaders that took their place in the indigenous communities, some of them were really proud to say are graduates of Indigenous Studies at Trent. Success for the student in the graduating from the PhD program at Trent is a little different from that. There's an undergraduate going on. I should mention that one of the things that we developed was the first PhD program in Indigenous Studies in Canada. So for a PhD graduate, we feel that because the program is grounded in indigenous knowledge, they should come out of the program with a real solid understanding of traditional culture, particularly Elis-Nabe and Haudenosaunee cultures because those are the territories that we're the most closely related to. Also, of course, having a solid academic understanding of particular issues that they do their dissertations on so that the core course of the PhD program is a culture course that exposes students to the traditional teachings and elders and some processes in that course are on the land where we take students out on to say, for example, sugar bushing, maple syrup making, and those kinds of things. So we hope that the students graduating from that program have a solid grounding both in traditional culture and understanding of that. Plus, in addition to the mazu and option that we have that the students can take, which is required, is they have to be involved with an elder or traditional people. They also have to take a practicum field placement. So that's the practical side, the applied side, and hopefully they have an understanding of their traditional, traditional Indigenous organizations or Indigenous cultures or Indigenous communities depending on where they do their work. So they have to do not only an oral written comprehensive exam, but they also have to do an oral comprehensive exam too, based on traditional culture. So those are the skills that we hope to have for graduates of the PhD program. And we've been quite successful in having students become tenure track faculty within Indigenous studies departments all across the country so that we've had, I think, a pretty good record because there's been a real need for Indigenous and Indigenous studies graduates from PhD programs to become professors within universities across Canada. For undergraduates, it's somewhat similar. There are different streams and we developed, for example, an Indigenous environmental studies stream that is now becoming recognized throughout Canada as one of the premier programs of its kind. We also have an Indigenous performance program as well. And that, again, is graduating students that have gone into various kinds of performances, whether it's dance or whether it's music or different careers within the performing arts. So for an undergraduate, again, it's important that they have some understanding of being able to read and write critically and also have some understanding of the issues that have faced Indigenous people, including a reinterpretation of Indigenous history in Canada so that they understand the true nature of the treaties, the residential school experiences and those things. And they also have some grounding in the traditional understanding of the culture and also some of the key contemporary issues that are facing Indigenous people now. Well, as I mentioned, the Indigenous Environmental Studies program has been recognized now as an excellent program. The faculty involved there are being asked to go to other universities to set up programs similar. And it's also having an important contribution, I think, for helping non-Indigenous people understand the environment from the Indigenous point of view based on the Indigenous worldview. And so we've had a number of key Indigenous environmental individuals involved in setting the program up and continuing their involvement with it. And we also, it's cross-listed with the Environmental Studies program at Trent generally, and that program is a very strong program as well. So in terms of water, our students, for example, participate a lot in the waterwalk and have an understanding of the blending of Western traditional scientific knowledge and Indigenous environmental knowledge. And it's had a major impact on even policy with regard to, let's say, the Ministry of Natural Resources. There's a whole series of partnerships now that are happening with Indigenous people, working with the environmental scientists in, for example, water quality, or forestry, or a number of different things like that. So that has been certainly a source of excellence. I think we've also been very lucky in having Marie Mumford, who was well renowned as an individual in the Indigenous performance. She worked in BAM, for example, with the BAM Center there. She worked at the University of Toronto. And now she's been here a number of years and she's established an Indigenous performance program. And that's had a huge impact as well in terms of the quality program. And again, we've had students graduate from that program that have gone on to do things. She's also brought schools in here, young people to learn about Indigenous performance. We have an Indigenous theatre here, the Nosium Theatre, which is one of the few Indigenous theatres in Canada. So she's been able to use that to kind of spread the understanding of Indigenous performance all across the Southern Ontario region and beyond. So that's another area of excellence. And then just generally the Indigenous studies department, graduating a lot of individuals over the years. We've had a Master's program as well. We've had a lot of graduates there. And the PhD program, as I mentioned, is I think a source of real pride for us. It's one of the few PhD programs that is grounded in Indigenous knowledge and the traditional worldview. So those are some of the things that I think we're quite proud of in the department. Well, I think the vision for the next 10 years, obviously more and more Indigenous students coming to pro-secondary education and graduating and making a contribution to their communities, establishing Indigenous organizations of all kinds, political organizations, arts organizations, law and justice, producing more and more Indigenous lawyers, more academics, more teachers in every field. And that's been happening for about the past 20 years or more here. And more and more now Indigenous people are taking over roles. And it's becoming much more normalized to involve Indigenous people as partners in any kind of initiative. You see that in the environmental area. You see that in developing curriculum in the schools. I think one of the major stimulus for that has been the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. I think that the non-Indigenous society has finally come to recognize that Indigenous people need to be involved in anything that relates to them. And so that the PTOs, the Provincial Territorial Organizations, such as the Union of Ontario Indians, have been around for literally close to 50 years now. And they're now making huge inroads in terms of nation-to-nation status. For example, provincial government has made a commitment to recognize that honoring the treaties in a more substantial way than has been the case in the past. I think that's going to happen more and more. The partnerships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, the fact that any development on Indigenous land has to have major input from Indigenous communities. And some of our graduates have made contributions in terms of being lawyers, for example, to negotiate some of those land claim deals, some of the resource development deals that have been made in terms of mining or whatever. So the old days of being able to develop projects, for example, resource extraction without involving Indigenous people, are gone now and there's more. And that's going to happen more and more, I think, in the future. The other thing that's happening now just at the beginning, and I think is going to continue to happen, is the fact that Indigenous people are going to profit from developments they can place on their land. So, for example, Hydro One in Ontario has negotiated a deal where the Indigenous communities will control the hydro line that goes through their land, and they will get the profits from that electricity that's being produced by that land, that electricity that is sold. And so, therefore, there's a huge economic advancement for Indigenous people. So, economically, I think there's going to be a substantial increase in the next 10 years of Indigenous people benefiting from the economy. I think that there's going to be a lot more Indigenous graduates that are going to get better jobs so that the economically successful, if you want to call it the middle class, of Indigenous people is going to grow and grow and become much more successful.