 So, would you like to introduce yourself? I'm Micheques. I'm Director of Student Services Outreach and Resources at Shingwa Kinamagegamek. And I'm a first-degree Medellin that revires Medellin. Okay. Fighting with cost drops. Tell me more about your program. So what is it called and what do you do? Here at Shingwa Kinamagamek, we offer two provincially accredited degree programs. We have our Anishinaabe Studies program, which is just brand new. The press release isn't even out yet, but it's been approved. And then our Anishinaabe One program is the language program. The language program has been going for almost 20 years now. The goal of the language program is obviously to build up strength and proficiency of Ojibwe language speakers and to sort of empower second language learners to begin that journey toward language acquisition. And then the Anishinaabe Studies program is one of a kind in Canada. Yeah, it's a one-of-a-kind BA program in Canada that focuses on worldview and knowledge systems of Anishinaabe people, particularly the Great Lakes region of Anishinaabe people. What would the age group be for these programs? So the age group, the sort of target group is sort of, there's two different, there's your standard 101s and 103s or whatever the ministry calls them. So 101s are right at a high school and so that's, I'd say, I don't have solid numbers on this. This is sort of in the development stages of our tracking systems. But for about 50-50, I'd say, 101s are right at a high school students and then mature students who come back to school. What would the target audience be for these programs? Aimed mostly at Anishinaabe people, right? That's the goal of a culture-based education institute is to re-empower Anishinaabe people and to revitalize those systems in a really good, solid, strong, healthy way. That being said though, we've certainly, we've had our fair share of non-Indigenous students and we've had a lot of international students, yeah, lots of international students. And so, I mean, everybody gets something a little different from the program for Anishinaabe people. It's really empowering to be able to relearn those things that have been lost. And then for non-Anishinaabe people, it's an opportunity to actually come to understand our history and come to understand how we can maybe build a better relationship between Anishinaabe people and, you know, standard people rooted in our understandings of things rather than, you know, always having to defer to somebody else's understanding of us. So how would you measure the success of the programs? I think there's a few different ways of measuring that. I think there's, you know, like the number of students who are interested in taking the courses and, you know, in the past two or three years, like we've maxed out all of the Anishinaabe studies courses. The last two years that we had done this here, we had to split the courses. There were too many students and both of them filled up and they were at capacity because we were just so much interested both in like his way of teaching but also in what we were talking about, right? And so I think that's one key indicator of, you know, when students from other programs and, you know, sociology students or business students or whatever are like pushing each other out of the way almost to get in the room, right? There's something that's working. One of the outcomes I think is really, it's really encouraging to see what a lot of our students have gone out to do. It's sort of twofold. There are students who have left here and gone to do really cool things that, you know, standing up for environmental justice and social justice issues and those sorts of things. But there's also students who were already doing really cool things and came here as a way of supplementing that. And so like one of those people I think about is like Grandma Josephine, right? She was doing all kinds of cool things and then came here to be a part of this. So I think the variety of different people that it attracts to the program I think is really a key indicator of people who are young and idealistic and want to change the world and people who are not quite as young but are out there changing the world, right? I think that's really cool, right? And then they work together and learn together. So what is indigenous education to you? Oh my, there's a few different things, right? Like there's what we try to do and what our mission here at Ching Bok is and what we were, like the path that we were led down by Baudweon and when he was our lead instructor here was one of the really strong commitment to culture-based education. Like we won't be satisfied with just reciting interesting facts about ourselves. It's like we have to really and truly come to understand our ways of knowing the world, our ways of seeing, our ways of relating, our ways of connecting. We have to really come to understand what those things mean. Like for us, the way that we accomplish that is through the language program and understanding the origins of Anishinaabem one and the philosophy behind the language and so there's a whole lot of learning there and then there's like in the Anishinaabe Studies program there is like learning about our history but really learning about so much more than just, you know, on 1763 the king said this or whatever. We just barely touch on that, right? It says that's really not about us. Like that's about how somebody else decided to deal with us so that's okay, we need to understand that too but you can get that anywhere, you know? So what we're trying to do is really revitalize our understanding so the world particularly, like we put a lot of emphasis every year on we've brought our own oven and say up here several years now and like start with the creation story and begin there, right? And begin at that place of the beginning of everything. That's the natural starting point for us. So is the term indigenous one that you would normally use? Yes and no. So here at Chingwok we almost exclusively use the term Anishinaabe but we qualify that. We define that as meaning First Nation, Métis and Inuit, right? And so we use the term that belongs to this part of the earth, right? Where we exist in. But we also try to take a practical view of as long as people aren't being offensive. They can use whatever term they want. But we really emphasize that sort of understanding not just what we're studying but where we're studying and so we try to reflect the language of where we are. How would you define education from an indigenous perspective? I mean that's a... We're going to be here all year. That's a loaded question. I think it really depends on the student, right? And that's why I always talked about it. When he was preparing us all to do this work is that there really is no roadmap. You can't have a roadmap for education because by doing that you immediately begin to exclude people, right? You begin to lose people along the way and people who aren't prepared for the next thing. We have to do this this week because it's what the syllabus said. We put a really heavy emphasis on self-knowledge and students coming to understand their own worldview and their own understandings of things and really challenging their own views and beliefs and really taking a really strong introspective look at yourself and your own understanding. And I think through that, that's where you can really get anywhere with it then because a student who comes here and wants... I want to understand Indian Act, I want to know that, right? Then you can pursue that. That's open to you, you can pursue that. But if you want to understand, I don't give a damn about the Indian Act, I want to know about where do our rights come from regardless of the Indian Act, regardless of Section 35, regardless of royal proclamation or whatever else, they come from the spirit. They come from that first moment that Mishko Kahavo put his tracks upon the earth, right? So if that's the way where you want to go, you can go there, right? And in either way, then you're putting yourself into that. Whether you're studying about Mishko Kahavo and that work, then you relate to that in your own way. If you're studying about Indian Act, then you'll relate to that in your own way, right? It's really... The student is really in the driver's seat in a lot of ways. What is your vision for the future of Indigenous education in your community and throughout Canada? Some of the things that we've been talking about here, so we've created the foundation now, right? Shingalak is the sort of the foundation and the beginning and then we'll be the home of wherever we take this vision now, right? We're talking now about how do we expand that now? To meet some of the more sort of existential problems that our communities face, right? And so the two of the things that we've talked about is, you know, one of the big issues we've seen is that we don't have... There's a huge gap in our knowledge and our understanding around how do we come into the world and how do we leave, right? And so we're in a very, very beginning stages of this, but thinking about the creation of a culture-based Anishinaabe midwifery program and a funeral director program, right? Because we don't have those opportunities to actually learn those things. You know, and then there's so much protocol around, you know, that we need to think about it, about how do we actually do that in a way that's careful and cautious and respectful of protocols in the community and in the lodge, you know, the grounds, right? But those are two of the things that we're talking about. Like, we don't want to just replicate something that our partners at Oklahoma are doing, like a business program that's Anishinaabe focused. We don't want to do that and things like social work, right? There are indigenous focused social work programs all over the place. So what are the things that... What isn't happening everywhere? And so those sorts of things like, yeah, like the midwifery program or funeral director program or whatever else, so that you can be certified and do that work, you know, in the province or whatever, and meet those things, but also be prepared to do it culturally, right? So those are some of the really interesting things. And then, like, my hope for across Canada is I hope that, like, I want to see, like, a hundred shingles. You know what I mean? Like, each and every community and nation is just standing up and doing this work in their own way. Because we don't want to just export what we're doing, too, right? Like, no, this works here. It doesn't mean it'll work somewhere else, right? Yeah. Can you think of any type of information that if you had now it would help to achieve your vision for your community in Canada? Hmm. There's a lot of room for information about people who are looking for real, meaningful partnerships, right? In this sort of reconciliation era or whatever it is, right? There's a lot of superficial partnerships, I think, right? There's people who want a partner just for the sake of it. It doesn't look good on their website or whatever. Creating a network and a web of people who are actually interested in a common goal, I think would be really, that'd be really helpful. Like, centralized sources of support and resources for expanding and developing programs, right? So, yeah, sort of having a network or a community of people who have been down this path before and sort of know how to get there. There's just a real practical sort of stuff, right? At least here, we've got the culture part down pat. We don't need those resources. We just need the...