 My name is Angeline Nelson and I am the Director of Community Learning and Engagement at the University of Winnipeg. So what that means is I run the Wichita-Wagonuck Learning Center here at the University of Winnipeg. And the Wichita-Wagonuck Learning Center was founded in 2006. It was a little over 12 years ago. And what our center aims to achieve is to provide services to the community in which we are involved in, or in which we are situated in. And so we're situated in the West End. We're situated in the Federal Riding Winnipeg Center, which recently was ranked number three out of all of Canada as having the highest rates of child poverty. And so I think what that really speaks to is the amount of work that we have to do, both as an institution and as a center to better serve our community and the folks that we live with and our neighbors with. And so the program that I would like to highlight is our Indigenous Math Leadership Camp. And so we have run that program. We just finished our seventh year of Math Camp. And each year we are expanding on that camp. This year we managed to do two camps for two weeks each in length. So the first one was geared towards grades one to three. Kids who were going into grades one to three. And then the second camp was for kids who were going into grades four to six. And so it wasn't just a Math Camp, but we also focused on Indigenous language and culture. We also included various other science activities involved. So we did like 3D printing. We did coding. We did all kinds of fun things with the kids. And then to kind of celebrate we did a bit of back to school shopping for the kids where we set up a Math Camp. We set up a Math Store where each kid earned a certain amount of money and then was able to spend that money for back to school. And so our Indigenous Math Leadership Camp, while the name clearly says that we are inviting Indigenous students to participate, we also have non-Indigenous kids. A lot of times that's newcomers and that's really based on the community that we serve, right? We serve a high Indigenous population with newcomer kids. And then we also have just non-Indigenous kids participating. And we really welcome that when we embrace other non-Indigenous kids to participate because they're learning alongside and they're learning about Indigenous language. They're learning about culture. And I think that's so important to learn together because we're creating an atmosphere of respect and we're teaching them while they're young as well, which is very important to do. For me, a measurement of success for the Indigenous Math Leadership Camp is really seeing how engaged the kids are to me when they are, you know, up on the end of the camp and when they're asking if they can come back again, if they can come to our Spring Grade camp, if they can come back next year to me that signifies that it's had a positive impact in their lives and that they have enjoyed their time with us. So to me that speaks volumes. And so just kind of getting back to how I mentioned that this was our seventh year. So for the past six years we had worked with kind of one cohort and every year they would come back. And so some of those youth who started off as participants ended up coming back as youth mentors because within our Math Camp we have a space for anywhere from five to nine youth leaders who are working as peer mentors for the youth participants. And they're really helpful to the teachers and they just help the overall camp. So usually like in the past we've had 30 to 35 kids involved in Math Camp for the past six years. This year because of the double camps we were able to host 55 children. And so we also were able to have six youth leaders involved. We had four teachers, four Indigenous teachers and then one EA. So we're very fortunate we have some incredible talent working with us. So the teachers are all teachers with experience working whether it's on First Nation communities or in local schools in the area. So this year for instance two of our teachers were from Russell River First Nation and they have over 15 years of teaching experience. One of them is a vice principal and then the other one was a kindergarten teacher for more than eight years. So she was perfect to have as a teacher for our first group of kids for grades one to three. So our other teacher is Robert. He is from Fox Lake and so he works with the kids year long and he does an incredible job. They're the first three, those ones are First Nation. And then we have another teacher who's worked at MYC for over 16 years with youth mainly with Indigenous students. From my perspective I think when I think of Indigenous education I think of it as education with an Indigenous perspective. So when we're doing math leadership camp we're incorporating Indigenous culture, Indigenous language. You know when we think of astronomy we're thinking of the Indigenous stories that also relate to what we learn in astronomy. Doing our best to include the language and teaching about math and how there are math lessons involved and just ensuring that we have educators as well who are highly connected to language and culture as well. Because I think that just adds incredible value to programming. Seeing the kids at graduation, singing in Ojibwe was just an incredible moment and made me so proud they were pronouncing the words really well and they had practiced and I just think they did a very great job. So one of the other things I think of with Indigenous education is language revitalization and how important that is. So as a center we do our best to offer language classes every single year both beginner and intermediate classes in Ojibwe but then also we do our best to try offer Cree or Dakota just to be representative of the territory that we are on. So the more that we can also incorporate it into our other programming the better. We're getting kids when they're really young and they're just sponges and these will be songs that they'll remember when they're learning songs in the language and they'll remember them for a long time that they can pass them down and it's just a great way to learn the language by incorporating it into a lot of the programming that we have. Well I really don't know where I will be in ten years but this just really makes me think of a really incredible story of a young girl who ten years ago was participating in our programming well maybe not quite ten years ago but there was a young girl who was participating in our programming and then she was recommended to the model school at the collegiate which is a high school basically university prep and she recently just graduated as the valed victorian of the entire collegiate so not just the people at the model school and then she came on as a summer student this summer with us and she worked as a coder she was teaching kids coding as well as doing a lot of leadership for the math camp and then just this month she's starting university so when I think of young people like that I just think how incredible is it that we were able to provide some support to a youth, an indigenous youth and hopefully have an impact right like being able to provide the supports for indigenous youth and families we want to see more stories like that for sure and we do see them a lot of the young people who are involved in the model school at the collegiate again like the university prep there is such a connection between that school and the programs here at the Wagonuck Learning Center because often the model school is looking to our program facilitators for recommendations for students who would be excellent students for the model school and so those students often they're highly supported throughout their high school and then most of them do go on to university which is an incredible story right and I think that there's so many other students that we don't know they're not necessarily going to the model school but we provided that opportunity for them to also feel at home and to feel comfortable on a university campus which can feel like a very foreign place for a lot of people if I think about my own background I grew up on a reserve my whole life and at 17 I ended up going to university and I think part of the choice in where I went came from just attending a mini U when I was like 8 years old or something and so just having that bit of comfort like it doesn't seem like such a scary place has an impact and so I hope that we're continuing to make that impact on other youth in our community right let their feeling like this is their space just as much as it's anybody else's who's going here