 My name is Darlene Daniels. I'm with Apikie Weiwen, which is part of New Directions for Children, Paddles and Families. Apikie Weiwen is a 40-year-old program that works with fostered and adopted individuals to assist them in finding their place in the community. And what we've experienced in 40 years is that it's changed quite a bit from when we started to now. So we've taken Dr. Martin's Broken Lakes theory of reclaiming youth at risk, and we've developed it from there. So we have a wide range of programs, educational programs for fostered and adopted youth. And the goal is to find their sense of self-identity, where they belong, and what their gifts and talents are. And we do it through a variety of activities. So we have powwow club, circle, singing, drumming, and they also learn to make their own regalia, beadwork. And in there, you know, some people have a skill, some people don't. So they learn, you know, that's where they're belong, you know, where they find some sense of belonging. And then we also offer contemporary things like filmmaking, video filmmaking, art classes. And we use the art in a sense of that's how we communicated. That was our written language a long time ago. So we look at how art has played a really integral part of our community and our culture. We have language classes and we've had it consistently go on for 10 years. So we have some fluent speakers out of the U. And that we're very proud of it. And that we are also adopted that as a call to action. And that where we would like, you know, education, people to be educated in their original language. In the program, the foster adopted 99% of the children want to go back home. So we work towards creating a self of home. What does it look like? Where does it belong? If they are Ojibwe children, Nishinaabe children, they we find them ceremonies and places of belonging there. Their creed, Kota, we find them. So we don't necessarily teach them the culture per se, but we find out where they belong and how can we get the meaningful relationships that they need aunties, you know, people can become their aunties or their actual biological aunties or grandmas that we try to find where they belong. And that during their 13 age years, the history of this program was that when the adopted and fostered youth became teenagers, they all they had a hard time. Their lives became really hard. Addictions kicked in and different things. So our goal is to make sure that those hard times aren't a long term lifetime. So and we think that they don't, they don't have as hard a time because they have their journey shorter to find home because they found home a long time ago. One thing that we did talk about was the regalia making and we're sitting inside the actual sewing room classroom and that young people learn and they master how to make their own regalia or their grandmas if they're younger children. So we look at what kind of dancer they want to be and then we look at, you know, what classes they need to take to learn how to make their moccasins. Everybody can take out class at the same time or, you know, they want to make a jingle dress. Obviously young men don't make jingle dresses. So we look at what they're going to dance and we look at knowing the bottom line is the pride and that they've made something and they can walk out the community and be so proud of what they've made and share and dance with the culture. So key. So Indigenous education to me is finding out how you learn the style you learn and we have a very different experience doing that. So with foster and adopted children often they get, they get put into modified programs because they have either perceived learning learning disabilities or they can't learn because their their life is in chaos. So we've developed a partnership with the University of Manitoba and we've taken Indigenous people who are in the doctor program, the dentistry program, and they tutor our young people and in this part our goal is not to let anybody go into modified programs and that the young girls, this is another trend we see as the young girls don't, they drop out of math and science. So our goal is to not have a modified program and they don't drop out of math and science because we see it as a key to, you know, their future if they have the ground, they've laid the groundwork and that they can, they have those credits and they can go on to post-secondary education and that they also have role models. There's Indigenous people tutoring them and that they could one day say that they belong in this institution. So they're sitting in the university on campus and they really get the sense of they belong and so if they've been going for four years or five years, however long they've been going, they really do belong there. So that's a key part and that also we need curriculum that's developed for, you know, Indigenous people with things that are relevant to their life like math, you know, using hunting skills or, you know, they really need to have something that they can relate to and often the curriculum is related to white middle class young people. So and that they also have the option to learn in their language because it's a very creative language and it's well thought out and it's relationship-based so that they could, you know, develop a lot of their basic skills in their own language. In the future in Indigenous education, I first like to see Indigenous students having their role models, having Indigenous teachers teaching them ones that can understand their learning style, how they learn and I've also taught in the classroom and sometimes it was a matter of everybody getting on the desk and dancing for a few minutes but something that you can relate to that they can learn in a sense and that we know that everybody doesn't learn the same way so that, you know, we have room for students, however they learn, whether they learn visually or by paper but, you know, everybody learns differently, slightly different so how can we accommodate their learning needs? I've often heard students say like how come we have to wait to get to university to learn about our culture, to learn about our people, to learn about the history and we started it and I think it's good but I still think we have to push further to look at where it makes sense for Aboriginal students, where it makes sense for them on how they can learn and that they be part of the system and that they also grow up to teach other students.