 This is Lucy Laafke, she is a community services agency here at L'Alhota, in Shokunate. Can you describe your program and what it's called? I work with TCSA education. I'm a teacher and I work at the board as a language and culture coordinator. Our job is to provide support for the language teachers that are in the school, by helping them with their training also, making materials that they may need in their schools. And we also do community visits. The main program that we deal with in the junior kindergarten to grade 12 is Kinchon Yati, the language. And Donawu, which is the culture. And Konawuke, which is our way of life. What are the age groups in your or your target audience? Well, we do have a teacher in Bruno's school that have day care. So for the students who are in school or for people who are working for TCSA. And we have day care to preschool, which is probably about ages 6 months to 4 year olds. And then we have kindergarten all the way to grade 12, which could be between ages 5 to 17. But in our region, even people that drop out get an opportunity to go back to school. So there are times when you go to a grad and you'll see a mother and a son or a mother and daughter, or son and father, son, daughter graduating together, which is really good. So I can't really say that age is only up to 17, which normal school systems are. Because in the north, people that drop out don't really have any other places to go. So I'm glad that our board is able to bring in the older students back. What is the aim of your program? The aim of our program is like our mission statements, strong like two people. And I think the history of our leaders bringing the school system into our region is really important. Because before, a lot of us were being sent to residential schools. But when our leaders, when us children came back into the community and a lot of us were losing our language in our way of life, the elders were very concerned. So they lobbied to get a school built here. And so the Chief Jimmy Bruno School is the school that the elders like Chief Jimmy Bruno and his counselors worked really hard in getting the school in our region. And at the beginning of the school, the leaders were very strong and sane, that are the way of life and two cultures have to be taught. And the one thing that they did to make sure that what they're talking about was being done, we had elders, when the Chief Jimmy Bruno School first opened up, we had elders that were in a school doing the activities that they were gifted with. And then you go in there and you see a lady working on hide, doing hide preparation from the beginning to the end. In another place you'll see an elder working on making snowshoes. And in another place you'll see an elder telling stories to students. And then you go out in the tent and you'll see elders cooking food. So the elders were very important part at the beginning. Like many systems, if you don't have funding, then they didn't have funding to have the elders in school so they sort of died and went away. How do you measure the success of your program? Well, to get back to the aim, strongly to people is really important. And it's so important for our students to be coming into the school where they're also being taught their language. We want them to be able to speak so they can be part of the elder circle. But the other thing about learning the language is that when you learn the language, you learn your history, you learn your customs, you learn what your heritage is. And spirituality is number one. Our elders are always talking about why spirituality is really important. And of course the land environment are so important. And also to make sure that we're indigenizing the schools that will happen in our region because they're right in the central land. So it's very important because in the past language, especially the language program was down the hall. You go there to learn your language and it wasn't really part of the whole school or sometimes when they don't even have a classroom for a language teacher, the language teachers would be carting their materials from class to class because they didn't really have a place for their language. So that's also another reason. But I think Deneke de Curriculum is also what really, really supports the program that we're doing because it's a foundation of everything that we do. It was this Deneke de Curriculum was created with the help of the elders from the Northwest Territories, all the elders. And the elders were brought together and went from place to place to place. And we went through, they selected the themes. The themes that they selected had to do with animals from our region. It had to do with the land. It had to do with the people. And it had to do with the land and sky. These things are what our children are living in and with and that they really needed to know these things. So that's the reason why we have the Deneke de Curriculum, which is really, really important. We'll have one for kindergarten to grade six. We'll also have one for grade seven, the junior high. In the junior high, a lot of it has to do with rights of passage, the things that they're going through. They also are getting old enough to really understand their role in society. So they learn about self-government and they learn about developing their talents. They also learn about winter camp and passage to manhood, womanhood. So that they really understand what their roles and responsibilities are. How do you measure the success of your program? Right now we have at EMS, we have an immersion program. So we have a kindergarten class, a grade one class, a grade two class that are in an immersion world. It's controlled language all day. And yesterday the immersion teachers brought their students to the senior home and they sang in Canada and they also showed the elders some of the things that they're learning in Tintron, which was really great because the elders were really happy to see the young ones, especially to hear the Tintron words coming out of a four-year-old or five-year-old or six-year-old, so that I think that they're happy that the language, though it's not as strong as we're passing it on to our youth, we also have locally developed courses. These are the locally developed courses that are being taught to high school because we do have a language program that goes from kindergarten all the way to grade nine, which is only about 45, 40 to 45 minutes a day, which even though they're not going to be able to be fluent speakers at the end, but that's how it is. And then when they get to high school, they have courses that they can take. They have Tintron, yeah, T-15, 25, and 35. We'll also have other courses that were had, like the Tintron history. We'll also have Konauke, where the children are being taught trapping and hunting and the skills that they need if they're going to be living in the north, especially in our region. So we do have that. And we'll also have, for the teachers, we developed this last year in partnership with the Tintron government. There's a Tintron history. So it goes from grade one to grade eight. So in the teachers' book, it gives them information on all the communities. Every community, it has that background history because a lot of our, even our parents don't really know the history of the community that they're in. And then a lot of religions that have been identified by the parents themselves. So we developed this after parents had taken a couple of courses, locally developed courses through the Tintron government. And a lot of them didn't really know their religion. A lot of them didn't know who Mufi was. They didn't know who Edso was. So a lot of them, because when they had gone through the school system, none of that was being taught to them. So they didn't want the same thing to happen to their children. So they tasked us to create a Tintron history curriculum, which will be taught in the school, whether it's taught in a regular program. So the teachers that are even non-Tintron teachers are teaching this. Because in the curriculums that, in the grade five curriculum, we have all the teaching notes for them. So we'll have the floating time. This is the cosmology that goes with this. We're teaching the Tintron history through our cosmology. So if we're teaching in school, we teach them this is the history of the Tintron people. Down there is the history of Canada. It's linear, where if you look at our Tintron cosmology, things happen. This is when the world was new, the animals were first people here. And they were just developing. And then as things started to develop, and then there's a lot of stories about Yamosa and all the things that he had done. So the Yamosa was a very important person, and there were a lot of conflicts, things that were happening that he helped resolve. And then as things resolved, he moved into the next generation. There are a lot of things that have happened. And then here when we had contact and dealing with the contact, a lot of conflict, a lot of things that happened, we call it the dark time. So when we're talking to students, we tell them this one here is a little bit gray because a lot of negative things that happen with clashes between the two cultures. And then we'll talk about how self-government in 2018 said, you're going forward and there's young Tintron people. These are a lot of things that you need to be dealing with, but you also need a lot of skills to be able to go forward. And we'll also use this to help them understand that language changes. Because during this time, the word Yamosa at the beginning of when the world was new was here. And to this day, we still have the word Yamosa, but computer and Skidoo didn't come into our language until here. So there are some languages that carry on. There are some languages that died because our culture changes all the time. Like with the bold and arrow, we're not using bold and arrow anymore, and all the things that the bold and arrow maker used to do and all the language I went with making bold and arrow, we don't have it in our vocabulary anymore today. This is the cosmology that we're using with the development of the curriculum, the cultural history curriculum. So this is being taught to the students from grade one to grade nine. We also have what we call CBIP. It's called Curriculum Based Planning. The teachers from grade three to grade six, they collaborate with each other. And then even though you have a grade three teacher in Iwatee, Gametee, and Vukwetee, and here at EMS in Enzo at CJBS, they collaborate together and then they talk about the legends they want to do and then all how science and social studies are all integrated and so they're integrating the subjects and teaching it to the students that they have. Because in our region, we have a lot of multigrades. In the smaller community, you have a grade three teacher that's teaching grade three, four, five, and six, so she has four grades in her class. And so that becomes also a challenge in itself. And we do a lot of language development. We have teams that the students have. And clinical songs because a lot of our strong clinical elder singers, a lot of them have passed on. So I'm really glad that the Chief General Bruno was able to do a recording of the songs. Also, the local artist David Gahn, who we hired him one time, he went from school to school to school and did music with the students and a lot of his songs are in clinical. Right now he has a CD that's all Christmas songs and will also develop materials. This is the legend. My vision or my dream would be to have it only in the language and not in English because the kids know how to read in English. So they'll go to that instead of staying in the language. We want them to stay in the language. And so this is another one that was done in partnership with other groups. But all of this is all in clinical, which I like. It's all in clinical. And I do have one that's in English. We also have one that's written in clinical, which is really important. But the quality of materials are some of the challenges and issues that we have because Rosa and I are working at the language center. The teachers are asking, they need this, they need that. And I'm not a trained curriculum developer. I'm not gifted in any way with music or anything, but we try the best that we can to develop materials that they will need to be able to do a good job in teaching the students that are in their class. We'll also have on the land culture programs. So all the schools do get funding and they take a lot of them do the fall camp. A lot of them also do winter camp and spring camp where the kids get to go out in the land. Years ago, we developed a summer to be part of the community trails of our ancestors. So every year, central government, they go to different communities to hold their meeting. And the other communities would canoe over there because that's what our people always used to do. And every year, they all gather at a place in the summertime. And so we do have the trails of our ancestors that we had done in the past. How do you measure the success of your programs? When I hear children speak the language, one year I went to Walmart. I was just walking and I can hear this little clenching voice singing away. Follow it, follow it, follow it. It was a little girl singing a clenching song. I was so happy. I didn't talk to her anything, but I talked to her, the teacher. And she said, we've been singing that song for almost a week now and now just teaching them how, especially trying to teach them the syllables because English language and clenching language are so different. At 41, we don't call it alphabet, we call it A-A-E-O because our language is syllable-based. We're English, we only have 26 alphabet. So if you're teaching them, if you want to teach the children the syllables then my friend was working at the school, she called and said, I need something, I'm trying to teach the children the letters of our language. So I thought, I try to find a really catchy tune. So I came up with O-La-La, O-La-La, O-La-Le-Le-Lo because it has the syllables in there. So the children are learning that. A couple of weeks later, my friend phoned again at the school and she said, the kids are just giggling and laughing when I'm singing O-La-La, O-La-La, it's O-La-La, it's O-La-La. They're just laughing. So she said, I asked them, why are you laughing? And they said, when we say that, it tickles because some of the sounds that are in clenching are not in English and if they speak only English, then their muscles that they need to develop the sounds in their mouth are not there yet. So they're just discovering where the sound is coming from and where is this other sound coming from. So we do develop a lot of materials. Sometimes just, no, Christmas concert is coming up. Can you do something for me? Sometimes it gets to that. But just hearing young voices in the community and then having the community people themselves tell us certain things like when they started an immersion program, a mother was saying, my child is learning, teaching me in colors. My child taught me how to say the Lord's Prayer. They're actually learning from their own children that are going to the school. And then a young lady was telling us that every morning on the intercom at EMS, I would say the single Canada in Chinchong, they do the prayers in Chinchong. And she said, I learned my prayers by standing outside my house and listening to it over the intercom even though she's about like from here to maybe past the church her house is that far away, but she can hear it. So it's really good when I hear people telling us things like that and I'm really glad. We've been doing literacy in the evenings for parents and people that are working. So we have many people that can read. Maybe the writing scale is not there yet, but they can read. So that's really good, I think. From your perspective, what is Indigenous education? I think when I think of myself because I've been in residential school for 13 years of my life and I nearly did lose my language and I know I'm not as skillful in my traditional activities as my other sisters in my family. There's about 13 of us in the family. So for me, language really identifies you. So when in a community, when I see family members that are speaking the language and I see them laughing together and I see the joy in their face and the happiness then it really makes me happy that the language is still alive within the family and within that group of people that are together. And I feel that that is so important, but for me, when I think about... as soon as they go into school because a lot of us who have gone through residential school still have a lot of barriers or we don't like going into that building because it reminds us of our residential school days and some people have bad experience in the school itself but one of the things that the elder had told us was you go through one door then you have to get through another door to get into the school then you go through another door to get to the principal or also the classroom like there's so many doors that are blocking your way and so if we can have a school that's really warm and accepting of any people that come in but then I would like to see a school where the students and the staff are really, really welcoming and embracing people that are coming to the school making sure that the students know how to treat elders as soon as you see an elder coming in or into any of your homes you always tell them do you want coffee, you want tea, you want something to drink, you want something to eat because these are just a part of sharing that is so important, part of our dindala and I would like to see a lot of our people in our region that have certain gifts that we're getting to them like musicians and artists and people that are really good in craft to promote more of what it means to be proud and be kinshaw like I'd like to see more I remember one year wearing my straw jacket and yell knife it was a red straw jacket with white and a lot of really nice beaded flowers on it I would just stand in the corner waiting for the light to change and then my nephew from Wikipedia and he says, where are you wearing an old jacket? So I'd like to really help the younger generation think about our art, our clothing as something that's beautiful and not as something that's outdated but being spiritually strong having a purpose and enjoying life is something that our elders have always said this is more important than material wealth and those are the kind of things that I think is so important for our people to know What is your perspective on the importance of languages and language revitalization in indigenous education or for indigenous peoples? For me it's really important that everybody knows who they are they know their history, their heritage and the dedicated curriculum when it was developed one of the things that the elders told us that's so important I think is whatever your teaching has to be authentic whatever your teaching to the students you should also see it in the home or in the community For me, when we're talking about revitalizing the language I'm glad that people are I've taken courses through the University of Victoria I've also done a couple of courses through the University of Alberta I went through the TIP program in Saskatchewan because I'm really strong in being told stories through my grandparents and having been born and living out in the land I was about six years old before residential school I had a really strong foundation so the love for who I am as a teaching person, for the language and for my culture and for my people is really really strong because I've lived that life but when we're talking about revitalizing the language I find I have to struggle with it because everything is academic based everything is written in English and when people that have dropped out of school are trying to get into the program they may not have the writing to be able to really think about the things that they want to write and struggle and I don't want them to struggle and fail and then already say I can't do it and just and a lot of reading that you're doing is languages that you have been using a lot so you're going to be struggling trying to figure out what are they saying so in a way I find that revitalization is something that we need to do but I would like to now think about it having gone through it it needs to be done in our language it needs to be done everything needs to be done in our language because a lot of the younger generation some of the younger generation I shouldn't say oh don't realize that they've been colonized they don't realize that their life they're modeling for their kids a life that they're living a lot of them don't even consider themselves or promote the cultural language and culture they're just sort of doing other things in their life that they want to do but if they really wanted to revitalize the language I want to make sure that they understand why they're doing it if you're just pushing people just to get the number then I don't know what the criteria they have at the universities that are offering these courses and I don't know how they're making people accountable for their learning do you want me to pass on to the next generation? yeah just be true to who you are like Osborn Kinchel or Die Kinchel and that's what Deneke Day is all about being authentic, being who you are being true to yourself and when you're teaching something you're doing it here but you also need to see it there so it has to be a connection you can't just teach things in isolation they won't be embedded as part of who you are if you do things like that what is your vision for Indigenous education over the next ten years? more Kinchel teachers I'd like to see more Kinchel teachers who can speak the language because we do have quite a few Kinchel teachers and some of them are young Kinchel teachers that have been really colonized they think they're more white than white people and you do see that in their attitude I don't think they know it and when you say I'm Kinchel do you really mean it? it's what sometimes I think and of course the materials that we have I'd like to see really high quality materials that we're going to not photocopy stuff to language teachers I hate that but we don't have a lot of authors that can write a story for kindergarten where they're doing a lot of language repetition where they're teaching the kids to listen to language and patterns and then we don't have a lot of really good stories to challenge the students that are in a junior high give them a story where they'll be able to think creatively and then to be able to comprehend what they're reading and be able to argue and say this character was this and then this story ended this way I didn't like it I want to see more of that and we'll also need a lot of stories written for adults if you want to continue to grow with your language once you get out of school then there should be I'd like to see a whole library just full of kitchen books every kind of book that you can find of course a lot of movies and dramas and everything from our culture in our language is something that I think would be really great to have