 So the first people's principles of learning, I've, gosh, I've been digesting this over the past year. And I guess I want to sort of start by saying that I view it. I view these principles as a way of looking at the world, right? We all have a lens that we look through. We have a world view with these principles. And when I play with them, I'm looking at the world through an indigenous lens. And that's what I want you to do for the next 10 to 12 minutes. 8 to 10, if I can go quickly. Andy Averson's Yoda. I love that. Many of the truths that we cling to depend on our point of view. So an Aboriginal worldview communicates that the values and beliefs that we're taught are taught within the framework of how we relate to Earth. It's not a blanket, but I want you to sort of think about this lens that we're looking through and how important Earth is to indigenous cultures. So the principles of learning are going to be available if they're not already on the website. They were created out of the brains of some marvelous educators. Finesque and the Ministry of Education brought together indigenous peoples that had embedded experiences in their cultures, knowledge of education, and together as a group created these set of principles. And I guess what resonated, one of the many things that resonated with me when Paige spoke, is this idea that I want you to take risks and I want you not to be afraid to make mistakes, that that's how we learn. And as I proceed over the next eight minutes, there's a lot of principles. Some of them are, in my opinion, are kind of wordy and kind of dense. So I'm taking a little while to get through. But I want you just to think about maybe connecting with one principle, maybe connecting with one small phrase in a principle, maybe think about how that might affect your work over the next year or so. So learning ultimately supports the well-being of the self, the family, the community, the land, the spirits, and our ancestors. The self, when I think about today with reading about choice and about personalization and about that sense of belonging that we can support kids with, that's about the kids. That's their self. That's their sense of belonging, that's their self-esteem. But we know, and I love the way that this statement is worded, we know that just as a self, we can't exist that way. That we exist with our families, we exist in our school communities, in our larger communities, and that reaches along land, ancestors, et cetera. That that's all a full circle, it's holistic, and that it's not just about the self. We need to be a healthy self, good well-being, of course, to be a part of our community, but it's not just about the self. Learning is holistic, reflexive, reflective, experiential, and relational, and I love this photo. You'll see my daughter and her little buddies, Liam and Brennan, and that's Maddie, crouched down, and they've got those big jellyfish on the beach in Quadra, and they are engaged, and they're talking about the red jellies, and they're screeching, and they're wondering if it's gonna hurt them when they move closer, and they touch those jellies, right? And to me that really embodies that connectedness that they have with Earth, with one another, and together they're working together to try to figure out what's going on with these red jellies, or man-of-wars, as we were calling them, and a sense of place. A sense of place in indigenous cultures is extremely important. That's why we acknowledge territory. That's one of the protocols that speaks to this connection to place, place names, places themselves very, very important, very sacred. Learning involves recognizing the consequences of one's actions, and anything that we do, positive and negative, for me this connects directly to what Deb was talking about today around self-regulation, that we act, and there are consequences to our actions. Project of Heart, I think I've mentioned this project before, it's a project across Canada to help kids learn about residential schools, where schools learn about residential schools, they study it, they are sent from this Project of Heart, they're sent tiles, little wooden tiles, so if your school has 500 students in it, you'd be sent 250 tiles, so 50% of your school population to represent the percentage of kids who did not make it home for residential schools. And as they're learning, as a culminating activity, these kids paint a tile, or several tiles, to acknowledge or to communicate to those kids, the survivors and the non-survivors. And these are some kids in high school, grade 10, who had a large unit, had elders in, et cetera, and these are some of their tiles, commemorating these kids. And Dana, Vancouver Island, Dana Platton, is very popular today. And her grade one class did the same. She read her class, Shishietco, beautiful, Shishietco, right, should be familiar by now, beautiful pictures, beautiful words, doesn't get into that heavy duty stuff. It's a perfect book. It talks about a connection with nature, a connection to your family. And what Dana, I think, emphasized in her class was that connection to family, and then what that might feel like, or what that has felt like, if you've ever been away from your family. Whether you've been with your grandma for a weekend and how you felt, or you've had to sleep over somewhere with your cousins. And her focus was on that connection to family and what that feels like when maybe when you're away from family. She had an elder in who spoke about how she felt being away from her family and some of the good memories, maybe some of the memories about chores that she had to do. Okay, but she kept it at this level with grade ones and those grade ones came away from that experience, knowing about the existence of residential schools. Do they know all of the horrors? No, of course they don't. They're six years old, but certainly they've set the foundation for really aware and conscious Canadians, I think already in grade one. Thank you, Dana. Learning involves generational roles and responsibilities. That's my mom bringing the whole family out today. And it's her job. She's been on the planet for quite a while. She's a survivor of residential school. One of her roles and responsibilities is to help educate our children. She parents my children when my husband and I are at work. That's how it used to be, right? And that was their role. They have this role which is why in indigenous cultures they deserve and they get so much respect because we rely on them so much for their knowledge and their experiences. Learning recognizes the role of indigenous knowledge. And again, this is about the acknowledgement that for thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of years, indigenous peoples had explanations for things that were going on in their world. And as was mentioned earlier by Trish in her story about the quilting, was this idea of devaluing others' truths. That for a long time our people were told that the way that we were and the things that we believed were no good. And so now, part of my mission here on planet Earth is to help us to look through this lens, this indigenous lens with value and with respect and to look at the world from a little bit of a different angle and then to invite others to look at the world through a little bit of a different angle to acknowledge that there's more than one way to look at the world. Learning involves patience and time. I don't think I need to say very much about this except that I want you to think about how this pertains to you and I want you to give you to allow yourself to learn with patience and time. And on that, if you're looking for a good read, I'm always wanting to recommend some good reads and I recommend a couple of these usually when I come to see you that in our district, we'll be doing a district-wide book club and we'll be starting with the absolutely true diary of a part-time Indian. It's a wonderful read and I'm meaning it as a professional read for you. Yes, it can be read by grade nine students as well but it's a wonderful, wonderful, hilarious read. It'll give you a ton of insight into that walking in two worlds that many Aboriginal people must do. I've talked about Indian Horse before, excellent book about hockey, very good fiction and then the inconvenient Indian, nonfiction and hilarious. So I recommend these books. Learning requires the expiration of one's identity. And I've said this before that what I want for her is I want her to be able to navigate the world, her indigenous world, I want her to know who she is as a Tsimsham person, have that strength and that confidence, but I also want her to navigate Canadian systems. I want her to be able to navigate the education system, the post-secondary education system, the healthcare system. I want her to do both of those things successfully. I was creating a little small video clip earlier this year and I was trying to get a snapshot of Aboriginal kids' voices about kind of what they thought of their teachers, what they thought of themselves as learners, what they thought of themselves as Aboriginal people. So I was trying to come up with the questions I was going to ask these kids, right, K to 12. And so, you know, I listed the help of my daughter, my nine-year-old daughter, tried out some questions on her. So I said, you know, Maddie, how do you feel? You know, as an Aboriginal person, how does it make you feel? She thought about it dutifully, dutiful daughter and she said, good. I said, really, you got two parents as teachers and that's what you got from her, you got good? The old college try, I got to try again because clearly it's not me or my questions, right? She's not thinking hard enough. So I come back and add it again. I said, no, no, no, what does it mean to you? Like as a Tsimshian, as an Aboriginal person, what does that mean to you? Talk to me about that, what does that mean? Cool. And that's what I got. And I thought, well, okay, I need to think about this a little bit more. So off I go and about two or three days later, it hit me like a brick wall. If you would have asked me that question when I was nine years old, you would have been met with shame, embarrassment, dumbfoundedness, unknowing. If you would have asked my mom that question, who at nine years old had now been in residential school already for four years and would have been met with something completely different, which illustrated that continuum of growth and hope that within three generations, you can see the difference from what you can imagine my mom's response would have been to, you know, cool that Madeleine at nine, having been in the school system already since she was four, certainly hasn't had the same experiences that I had or that my mom had. And that makes me feel so hopeful, so hopeful. And lastly, learning involves recognizing that some knowledge is sacred and only sharing, it can only be shared with permission or in certain situations so that we need to respect when our kids are not able to tell us some of the things that we might be curious about, that there could be ceremonies, there could be big house practices that they're not permitted to share. And it's our job, of course, to respect that. Learning is embedded in memory, history and story. And I'm going to close now with a quote from Richard Wagame's about story. All that we are is story. From the moment we are born to the time we continue on our spirit journey, we are involved in the creation of the story of our time here. It is what we arrive with, it is all that we leave behind. We are not the things we accumulate, we are not the things that we deem important, we are story. All of us. What comes to matter then is the creation of the best possible story we can create while we're here, you, me, us, together. And we can do that and we can take the time to share these stories with each other. We get bigger inside, we see each other, we recognize our kinship, we change the world one story at a time. Thank you.