 Hi, I'm Heather Knoughwood. I'm from Indian Brook First Nation. I'm going to talk about the MHRA, MacBot Heritage Research Restoration Association, and the work that I do personally. I got asked to step in as a teacher for children. Now, I don't have a formal education in MacBot language because it's non-existent. Like, the university has only accepted it this in 2018. So it's not like you can go to school for this. This stuff here is like what you know. But what had happened was I was just asked to step in as a substitute teacher and I was thinking, well, what I like to teach the kids is because I get hired occasionally to work at the daycare. And what I noticed is the children knew more about MacBot than I did. They knew their animals. They knew their numbers. They knew most of their colors. And so I said, well, if I'm to go in there, and I think I had only three hours scheduled before the real teachers came, and they couldn't come in on a Friday night. And what had happened was I said, well, I would like to teach the children conversation. If we can teach them conversation, because you can ask them any question and they knew the answer. But they weren't talking to one another. So that's what I found was lacking in the education. So they said, sure, you can do that. That'd be fine. So I made a skip with them and then I made a puppet. And that was my first introduction to it. Except that the puppet was too heavy, so I further designed it with a couple more puppets to work with the children. And they loved it. They loved me more than the other teacher because they weren't looking for the modern classroom-type environment that they were so used to. If it became too much like school, then what had happened was they were not wanting to go. But if you can make it fun and we took a lot of breaks, and then the learning to me was everything because they were a little on the hyper side. So they knew there was a playground outside. So, okay, well, let's go to the playground. And then I said, well, what color is this? And black is mucked away again. White is Quebec. So we started using nature as the guide to learning. And they seemed to be responding really well on that. And one of the colors was really difficult. And we had a couple of the students who were more advanced than the others. So they taught the ones that weren't so far advanced. And like I said, so I was quite happy to be part of that back in August. And they actually kept me, they kept me on to just fill in if somebody couldn't make it. And so largely I worked with children and I use puppets so that the puppets only speak Mi'kmaq language and I'll speak English to them, but they have to speak Mi'kmaq to the puppet. And I thought it was a kind of a nice way for a child if they're alone and they got dolls to converse with their toys in Mi'kmaq language. The one of the change that I've seen is when I've introduced conversation to them, like to say, hello, Goe. Medellin is, how are you? And Willie said, boo, it's like good morning. They were saying that the parents were coming back and they were thinking me. They were saying, you know what, my daughter learned more in your three hour education than some of the other programs, I think, and wow. And I don't pretend that I'm a school teacher or anything like that. I just go wherever I'm needed. And my mother was fluent in Mi'kmaq language. And I grew up speaking other languages than my own language. And it was purposely kept from us. And I think the reason for that is because the residential school affects. My parents didn't go to residential school, but they believed and they honestly did believe that they were doing the right thing for us. So my speaking is a little bit delayed. And sometimes I have to think more about it. It doesn't come naturally. So when a parent comes up to me and says, they really liked what you were teaching, Heather. And I was like, really? And she says, and they're actually repeating what you're saying. So if you can find an alternative to learning, because I believe First Nation people are visual learners, that the fact that they're repeating me at home, to me, is what I'm seeing. And it just makes my day. Well, when it comes to the Mi'kmaq language, what we have is we have a whole movement from the recommendations from the residential school. And so part of it is to give us back our language. So we see an influx of all these great, wonderful programs. So I'm just happy that for my age that I lived to see this, because I grew up learning how to speak French, learning how to speak Spanish, thinking considering Mandarin Chinese for languages that you travel around the world, because we already know English. So the Mi'kmaq language was something I never thought I would ever live to see the day where the government is putting money into our language and our language is making a comeback, because they're bringing it into the schools. And so what I see is the children who know the colors where I didn't know the colors. I only knew black and white, like I didn't know, I know a lot more colors now. And I use word association with children. So what I'm seeing is the children know and they're pronouncing it properly. And this is when I fill in for, I fill in at the bus monitor and I fill in at the daycare. And when I see a three and a four-year-old having better pronunciation than me, it's just like, wow, I just sit there and I'm in awe and they're singing songs. And it's like I sing out a little bit of songs and I am in a choir. So when I hear them singing songs, the wheels on the bus go round and round. And so it's quite interesting from what I see now from what I had growing up. We've never had the opportunity to learn our language. So that the government has taken this serious and it's working. So I'm saying we will get our language back. And even though I'm not fluent every year, I said, well, maybe this is going to be my year. This is going to be my year. Because I do have me most speaking friends that I plan on practicing more with because it's in there. So if I was raised with it here in an every day in my life, there's a block because we were told not to do it. And so now that we're allowed to speak it, it's just something that just warms your heart and you're happy to see. And I'm really proud that the children seem like they know more than me. Like they're more apt about being quiz about it because with their mind, with the age of reason from what is it from 8 to 12 or is it from 5 to 12? They won't have to think about the translation of the word. And that's how I end with French because I started learning it when I was 12. I can actually think into languages now. So I understand the languages and trying to get it out there. And for me, where I heard it every day, like I'm still trying to sort that out of my brain because it's there. So I'm thinking that with a whole lot more practice that that little delay when you're translating it to one language to another will no longer exist. So but anyway, so I'm just seeing that there's quite the influx of our learning our language, especially for the children. There's a few adult learning courses and I believe they need more. And the bottom line with all of this is commitment. When I first started doing this, even before I was asked to teach, we did a six month course and it was one day a week and it was very extensive. And I told my sister, I said, you know, we grew up with this every single day. We need to go to every class and we need not to miss any classes because we heard it every day and I said, we will be fluent. So and she's a little bit more advanced than me because she had a coworker in the class that was participating with her and their boss was fluent. So they would go to work every day and they would practice. So so she here I am, we're here and now she's like there. So I know that it is possible. So and like I said, it's just practice, practice, practice. And there's a lot more out there than there used to be. There's a lot on YouTube, I find too as well. Indigenous education for me is the art of learning through visual cues or word association because one thing I found out in the year 2000 that I think it's about 80% of First Nation, no 33% of First Nation people are visual learners. So what does that mean? First Nation children learn differently. And I guess I didn't escape the 33% because I struggled in university and I didn't know why. So with an educational assessment done and I had it done in Ontario, University of Western Ontario and I thought I'm just going to give it what I got to see. What is this block that's happening? And they said, well, 33% of First Nation people because of our oral traditions on how we learn, it's just kind of like a residual gene that our learner will become something visual. So that's why for me, when I'm teaching the children, I use puppets and they make it something visual and they make it something fun and they're more apt to retain it. And so like I said, this is how we learn. So for Indigenous education to me, it's from the elders, our grandparents, our parents, our aunt and uncle to come in and teach us. And now that my parents are no longer with us, my grandparents are no longer with us, we're the next generation that has to relay this to our children. So this to me is what Indigenous education is. It's just sharing off our customs, our traditions, our knowledges and our crafts, whatever we want to put it, is we need to pass it on to the children. So because where I came from, my parents and my grandparents made crafts for a living and they sold them door to door. In Halifax, I mean, my father had walked work right now. We're on a centralized community and there's really no easy way out here. So they would have to make extra money over and above what they had to do just to get a car. I mean, my father would have to hitchhike to work and so they made baskets and they sold them door to door. And my mother was so mad because it was Easter time and my father made $200 and he bought a truck. So we didn't have to hitchhike anymore and she want that money for Easter. So but that's how I grew up. You need more money, make more money. You know, do a job, do a not job. And my mother made baskets, she made flowers. I was taught birch bark roses by my aunt and Irani. And so my grandfather would have a multitude of stuff. He would make totem poles and he intrigued my imagination the same as my mother. So I found that if you don't hinder a child's creativity, they're more apt to learn, they're more apt to know what they want and they're more apt to not second-guess themselves. So if you don't take away the creativity from a child, you would do that. So when I think about my life, I was filled with people who were entrepreneurs. My mother made the famous Geno sub. My aunt Genevieve, my grandfather's only sister, she was a famous leatherwork. And I one time bought this little kit, a monkess kit. And my father saw that I love to create as a child and that's why I like making puppets for children because it's just part of my creativity. So when it came to that, my aunt gave me all of her patterns and I actually made crafts and had a business when I was 12 years old. And the crafts, I made moccasins and I only had that one year because it was a lot of hard work for the money I made. We sold them down in Yarmouth and my father was kind of like my agent. I got picked up, I got commissioned for a princess pageant to make the moccasins for that at the age of 12. So right now, I'm not doing a whole lot of creating. I'm not as creative as Roseanne because my hands have worn out and I'm waiting for surgery on my hands. I got some minor repairs to be done. But to me, to be around by everybody being so creative in my life, like my mom's older sister, Aunt Rita Uncle Wade, they make baskets. My mother knew how to make baskets and usually it's a husband and wife team because the woman will weave it and then the husband will do the heavy work around the top and help secure where it's a little bit harder to wrap. So I've had all of these beautiful people show me their creativity and selling this stuff and making a living out of it. And like I said, my grandfather, my father's side, he would always use what you got. He would take those giant mushrooms and hammer that on a board and make like a nativity scene for Christmas. And my only regret is that we didn't press, we didn't make that our most prized possession to save those things and he'd make walk-in sticks. So my father was always coming home with his creativity, the stuff he created and he did have a store too by the way. And so when I think about all the stuff I did, I just took pride in what I created and passed on what I couldn't because really back in the day nobody was listening. But if you had a true love for the creativity and knew that that would feed your family, well then you just go on and do it. But like I said, I had a multitude of role models who would make a living out of that and to me that art of making something and going out and having our native craft and to sell it as long as it's not a sacred item and I don't make any sacred items. But they would make a good living out of selling baskets and flowers and stuff like that and even this case food. The biggest impact is that my mother, she passed away and she was fluent. And when I thought, why didn't I learn when she was alive? That still bewilders me that I choose to speak other languages. So when I signed up for the course, it's more like it was in her honor because I really felt that with the way the education was going and until we had the movement and language that you see today, this was a dying language which I felt and when I started going to these conferences, I said, you know what, we're only a generation away from losing our language. If I can have a fluent mother and speak English and not be fluent in a big amount of language, then we've got a real problem here. And I'm kind of glad that the residential school recommendations came out because then we're starting to see changes and it's in the language with the children and the adults who are saying they're speaking up now to say, hey, I know, I'm fluent too. Like there's more people coming forward that they're fluent. Like my sister, Sean, I had no idea she was fluent because when my mother got sick, she stopped speaking English and for a while she would only respond emigmo. And I'm like, I know you can speak English, but with her mind where she had a congestive heart failure and so it kind of reverted her memory back. And so my sister started speaking to her emigmo and I'm like, wow, because you see, she was around when my grandparents were around. So she got to have that knowledge, but up until that time, which was about five years ago, I didn't even know she was fluent. So when I'm hearing people in our community who are maybe about 10 years older than me, maybe even 15, to know that they speak it. And so there's like this revitalization because they're coming back. And the only thing that I'm seeing that's different from them who speak it because we're seeing a large influx of fluent speakers come into these courses that MHRA is putting on and I'm thinking, wow, there's like out of 50, there was 20 of them that were fluent, maybe even more, like 25. And I'm like, I didn't think I would see this day and I said, why are they coming to the classes? Because they need the components. They're learning with the Smith-Francis orthography so they're learning to read and write in the language. And a lot of people who teach it, it takes them that one step further that they didn't know where they were at because they were teaching it to people, but they were missing that component. So the Nova Scotia chiefs made it a motion that we follow the Smith-Francis. So there are still books that are being sold in the old formats. And I'm telling you one thing about the old formats before Smith-Francis came out, you couldn't catch on to them. And because I tried, where I was singing a choir, somebody had phonetically written it out and to write the Ming Bao language out phonetically, it's really long, right? And you got to teach people. So when I go to these classes, because they started inviting me to other classes, just in case they needed me to step forward in case somebody got sick or whatever, I'm like the back person, right? And so the most important thing you got to do is when you read these languages, you have to kind of forget what you learned up to this point and you got to start recognizing the letters like the K as a G, a T as a D. So I said, you got to start thinking in this way and if you can think this way, you won't have to write it up phonetically. You can start learning to read it. And the biggest thing that I guess that I'm going to advocate on is that I got ball and toe to help out in a video, right? And that's the one I'm going to be sharing. The Ming Bao alphabet is because we went to three levels of children and they weren't singing the Ming Bao alphabet. They were singing the Canadian alphabet. And so they were teaching the alphabet at a higher age. But what I learned back in 2000, I did study to be a linguist at one point, we had that age of reason. So we need to bring that age of reason for the children to get them to know the alphabet at an earlier age, the Ming Bao alphabet. And when I go to these sediments at the daycare and at the school, they have all the posters down for the colors and their clothing. And they're not getting into the part of speech. They're like learning one word at a time. So I'm thinking, we got to make the Ming Bao alphabet a priority because it's not a priority. And the children there, they're like sponges. Like they know all these words in, like I said, for them to get the alphabet at a younger age. Like I know that anybody's entering, you can ask any three-year-old, they know the Canadian alphabet. So we need to go back to that. And that's the same thing as I tell an adult, you need to know the alphabet. You need to know the sounds because once you know the sounds in the alphabet, then you could read it and then you practice on reading that. And if you have to spell out phonetically to start, that's fine. But you have to train yourself to read it for what it is. So that's the biggest thing that I think is missing in this whole component because the children are there. They're doing a fantastic job. I'm thinking, we just need to tweak it more and move it up that one more inch from what I'm seeing because like I said, getting back to it, I never thought I'd be here telling you what I see, what I've seen in my life and I'm liking what I'm seeing. I'm liking that all the changes are made. And I'm thinking, could we be better a little bit because I guess the next thing I would love to see is when I get called into these settings that the children start talking to one another, right? Or that I'm talking with my friends, I'm talking with my family. And we do have some of it, but it's such a broken language with us. Like for instance, when I was 20 years old, I didn't know what was Mi'kmael and what was English. So I had that kind of confusion as an adult and then I thought, and then here we developed our own slang in our own community. And so what we're trying to do now is break the slang so that we have a word. Let's try to train you what the proper word is. Let's get away from the slang. So those things I'm seeing that are being, I guess, rectified. And so anyway, I'm just so happy to be here to see that these things are happening in our community and outside our community. In the next 10 years, we need to continue doing what we're doing. And I believe that Mi'kmael education, Mi'kmael education, they call it, I can't even say the long word, but it's M-K. Mi'kmael, I think I mispronounced the name. They're making the criteria for the language. And I think that's going to be released this year. And maybe someone else can talk more about that. But once this criteria gets released, and so I'm thinking what's going to happen is we're going to create the new standards, not me. I'm not on the committees to create it. But once the standard is complete and it's out there, I think we're going to really see this escalate and change. And so I'm saying in the next 10 years, we need to keep going where we're going. And actually, we need to step it up and not tire them we're doing right now. There still needs to be a continued influx because the children are learning. But in the same time, we also need to learn the adults so that the child has somebody to communicate with. So we need to see more adult learning in towards all of the curriculums because we need somebody to talk to, right? And we need to have more over the next 10 years, the fluent speaking communities. We need to see more of this exchange, I guess, with speaking and non-speaking. Because one thing I did learn about the language, it takes two years of immersion to learn a language. So I like to see some more immersion-type programs or the next best thing. So maybe video conferences, because most of the speakers now are in Unamagi, which is a Cape Breton community. And that's about, what, a five-hour drive away. So I like to see more of this interaction with our MIGMA speaking communities, with the non-speaking communities. Because our community here was the first to lose our language than I see in the next West Milbrook. And then a while back, I started seeing it happening in the MIGMA speaking communities. And I was like, no, no, please don't, you know, please teach your child. So I've been an advocate to people to please teach your child your language, which is our language. But I teach to other people, too, who are not necessarily the MIGMA, saying please let them learn their language. Because a lot of people think it's a disadvantage, and it's not a disadvantage. So, like I said, this is where I want to see it. I still like to see the programs continue to the point that we are speaking it until we do have the language back, so that we are on our own to teach our own children. In this case, it'd be for me, for my grandchildren or my great-grandchildren, that they're going to be speaking our language so that it's not a lost language, which is what I originally thought growing up, that, why should I learn it? I will have nobody speak with it, speak to with it. And in reality, there's a lot of people for me to speak with. And so, it's one of the, to me, the greatest failures that was imposed upon us was to lose our language. Well, here, if you live near our MIGMA community, the programs offer serve our existence. But here, we live in a community where we have our own school. No, because when there's courses offered here, we have people offer serve coming in to our programs. So to me, the issue isn't on an offer serve, the issue is commitment. It takes a commitment to learn a language. You got to show up, you got to want it. Because I see a few people who say they want to learn it, but what are they doing? And they say, oh, I miss that class. I will come next week. And I'm thinking, this is our last class after six months. Like, you can procrastinate it away, which is like, our class was about, like, 10 people. And so, people showed up at different intervals, but they didn't have the commitment to stay there. So six months might be too long. So right now, we might want to have little smaller, more manageable courses to fit people's busy lifestyle. So that's why I'm thinking. The biggest thing in here is not on an offer service commitment, because I got a couple thousand friends on Facebook. So when I try to share anything that's going on out there, and there's a lot of programs here on the community, but they welcome anybody. It doesn't necessarily mean you're on and off. It just really got to get here at your own expense type deal. If you really want to do something, you will travel at your own expense.