 My name is Emily. I'm from the Chalais Nation. My quaggling name is Gwixi Slas, and my other name is Emily. That's what I go by at the school. None of the kids call me Mrs. or Miss. I teach an Aboriginal education for the school district. That's my main job right now. I teach from grade four through grade twelve. Well, they're in between. Middle school, I don't do middle school. Well, first, in elementary school, I think we really want kids to become aware of another language group that belongs to this community. I teach both First Nations and non-First Nations kids. They always are excited. They learn the sounds because their sounds are really important. The sounds of quaggling are really important. High school kids, my goal is there, is to get them to be speaking more and be able to write full sentences using the language more fluently. Each one of my classes are different because in one of my classes, the kids are learning how to put the vowels and consonants together. It seems like it might be boring, but they seem to really like it. In another class, we made cardboard bentwood boxes so they could learn about how we started our stuff. The other class, I work with the teachers to make sure that what follows their program that they're doing. We're going to do stuff like a little play on the quaggling, maybe a little quaggling story, and the kids are going to play act it out. So there's different ones. And the high school kids, well, everything I can do to get them interested. I get first block and they're pretty tired in the morning. Well, I really observe a lot because I'm like a, I say I'm a vagabond teacher. I go from one class to the other, but I do observe the kids, watch them to see what they're learning, if they're interested, if they're losing interest, I really do a lot of observing. In the high school kids, they do quizzes. But again, I observe them, I get them to practice sentences, putting in, you know, putting in nouns and verbs into the right places. Quaggling is a really, well, it's like any other language, it's complicated, it has lots, lots to learn. But mostly it's observation. And then the little kids I've taught, before I used to teach the kindergarten kids to, and they come up to me and tell me all the things that they remember when they're in grade three or grade four. They usually, there's like a little bit more of a, they sit up a little taller, they stand a little taller, they're a little bit prouder. I had one of the kids I remember, I did middle school once, he was like, when he first started coming into class, he had his head down, he would not take off his coat, he would not even make any eye contact. By the end of my term with him, he had taken off his jacket and he was participating. And this child had what he called a, he had a really good memory. Like he could see pictures and he'd remember all the words, but no one had ever noticed that in him because they didn't find him, they didn't get him to, they didn't reach him. And he really enjoyed hanging out in Quaggling class. So he's like one of the, one of the kids I remember because he was so, it was a really big change from the beginning to the end. I don't know what happened to him later on, but he was, it was really amazing to see the change in that boy. And some of my other kids are like that too, and they go, hmm, there's more to Quaggling than I just, yeah. Guess what I'm hoping is that some of the kids are going to follow along with, and keep going with Quaggling and then go to school and become teachers and come back home and teach it. Because, you know, eventually I'll have to stop working. Maybe, I don't know. The biggest challenge has been curriculum. We've, people have been doing this for 20 years, but no one has really like saved stuff or, you know, or shared stuff. Some people didn't want to share stuff. But, you know, we've, I belong to the Buckman-Geller group when I first started, and we created alphabets and everything that we think of. And I use that now in my teaching at the school district. A lot of the stuff that created in the Buckman-Geller language group. So, yeah, the biggest challenge is creating curriculum so that it, you know, when you start a kindergarten, you're working and you're built all the way to grade 12. My, my own thought is by grade 12 they should be able to write a decent paragraph or two in the language if they have been going all the way. So, that's, that's still my goal. I still think that they can do it. I guess like the kindergarten, the one that's going to be starting has had a, there's been a lot of people wanting to put their kids in it. And they, they were going to limit it to 18, I think. So, there is more than 18 people that have put their name in. That might be a big, that might be a big challenge. I don't know about the high school because it's my first year at the high school. And in the elementary schools, I was going from classroom to classroom. So, they're always going to be there. The children are always going to be there. But what I find about the children, doesn't matter where the First Nations or Non-First Nations, they just enjoy learning. And if you make it fun, it's, it doesn't have to be anything fancy. They just, they, they want to learn. And I guess if I'm doing it correctly, I guess because they want to learn. So, yeah, there's lots of stories that they, that we, that I tell. And I tell them differently to different groups. We do have some stories about our, you know, the culture and how things began. Yeah, it just, I teach differently than a lot of people. One of my friends called me, I was organic. She says I'm an organic kind of teacher. It depends on how the children are behaving. But I like telling them some of our legends. But I tell them, you know, depending on how old they are, how deep I go into, you know, because some of them kind of spooky or scary. But I think some of the stories will, they get some, gets their minds working. Or even I tell them stories about how I grew up. And that gives them a different perspective on how their lives could be or why their lives are the way they are. Maybe, you know, I, I incorporate a lot of other things. Anything I can think of that will help them to be the best it can be. And just, you know, it's okay. You don't have to be a dancer to be quack with chalk. You can be, you can be anything you want to be, right? So, just about a year ago, just about one year ago, this amazing lady named Dee Cullen phones me up and says, do you want to go to Korea? And I went, huh? Not really. She convinced me that I should go to Korea and we went to Korea and we started this little project. It is an app, you know. It's an app for to teach kids. Basically a kindergarten, an elderly people can do it too if they don't have any bases. So the beginning part of it is doing the alphabet. This is a little program that kids can play. And then you choose which one is and it shows the kids that they picked the right one. So again, you choose, the kids can choose the right one. So I'm just going to press the wrong one just to show what happens. So this kind of lately tells you you picked the wrong one. Pick the right one and there you go. But the Koreans were learning English. So this is, they did it into an English from Korean to English and they had to change Korean English to Kwakwa. It was pretty interesting. I'm just going to show the part of the review. And so when you're learning our language there's lots of different parts in your mouth that you have to say it properly and that's why this is the cool part. It actually talks about... Ah, Ah-ya-su. Ah, Ah-ya-su. So that's our first part. So then you would say Ah-ya-su. So that is our little program. So right now it has just the alphabet and we're waiting for the story to get downloaded which is coming very soon. That's awesome. So we're really proud of this little program. All of our little children in our preschools have one of these to learn with. I mean we know technology isn't a good thing for children but I think when you use it to teach I think it's a little different. But yeah, so we're really happy. And then the story is done by a young lady that she just graduated high school last year and she did the voice for... and she had been in Quarqvilla program. She did the voice for Sally and then we had another young fellow that we worked with that's one Dana's relatives. Brody did the dragon's voice and then Dana did some voices. I did a few voices. We had quite a few people that participated in it. So I think it will be helpful because if we don't have anybody to teach it will be useful for the kids. It's not going to just be a toy, you know, that they play. It's going to be something they'll actually learn from. So that's one of our projects. Many. Well, you know, I never really thought about it. I think it's a whole thing. It's everything. When I teach, I don't just teach Quarqvilla. I teach about history. And if there's non-First Nations kids in my class I also teach them about their own indigenous history because a lot of people that came from Europe had their own indigenous places. Just because a lot of times kids start to feel what about me are not important, right? So everybody gets to think about where they originated from. I think that's part of indigenous. It's inclusive. It's not, you just don't focus on the one group. You've got to bring everybody. Non-First Nations and First Nations kids working together. Everyone's got to have... Everybody's got to feel good about themselves. So I think that's what First Nations education is about me or Aboriginal education is. It's inclusive. It doesn't leave anyone behind. Language is really... Every language is important. Language... It's a picture. You know, like every word is a picture. At least that's what I try to teach the kids. Is that every word that we speak there's a picture that goes with it. And when you start losing that picture the world gets smaller and it's not as brilliant as it could be. And when I quack all others some amazing words and I went the more I study it I went why would we ever give up such an amazing language because it has brilliance to it. Other languages from around the world have the same problem is that that brilliance for their language is being lost because it's being overcome by English. But English also has some brilliance to it. If we could be more multilingual people we would be just so much more amazing I think. But that's just how I feel about language. Well I certainly hope we have an immersion completely immersion school like at least a grade five. I think we can do it. You know, just, yeah I can survive that long. Yeah, both Dana and I both we've thought about it for a long time and this immersion kindergarten is just the beginning. So I think that it's possible I think it's possible to become at least a grade five just like French.