 My name is Harold Rizvi. I was a Southern Toshoni teacher for the Yukon government. I taught anywhere from kindergarten all the way to grade 12. Over, I think I've got five, four or five years of total experience. It was a little bit different between kindergarten to grade 12. Obviously it's going to be, it's going to transition between the levels. But overall the goal is language proficiency and cultural reconnection. People getting back involved with something that they lost or their ancestors lost or maybe even somebody like myself that didn't grow up learning the culture. Something new that is just brought into your life and it just, you can embrace it. When I started out, I started teaching grade 8 to 12. And then I did that for a few years, took a year off and then I started teaching kindergarten to grade 3. And yeah, no, I've got a wide range of experience teaching at all the different levels. It's, you know, just like any language program. It's like the schools offer French, they offer Spanish, German, you know, it's the same thing. For the high school here, we call it ath-pask. Ath-pask is the language group that Southern Toshoni presides in. And of course we taught Southern Toshoni the language specifically. But a lot of the culture, a lot of the values, the languages, they all tie together. That's how strong the ath-pasking culture is. And then at the lower level, it's just native language. Just kind of dry, very simple. It's just, you know, it's a course that kids get to take that they get to learn a little bit of language. They get to learn culture. They get to play games, spend some time with elders. Yeah, no, it's open for everyone. Of course the predominance of the people signing up were Indigenous. But I mean, it's open to everybody. I mean, even for myself, like, when I started, I started when I was seven. And, you know, like the, a lot of the people that I was going to school with, not very many of them were Indigenous, but a lot of us were taking this class. When I started taking it myself, it came available at my school in grade two. And it was either that or French. So there was the option. So I'm like, I've got, I've got the First Nations background. So of course I wanted to take, take the language because I've never, never heard it, never spoke it, never dealt with it before. So it was a huge opportunity for me. And then there were other students that were taking it as well. But it was definitely a little bit smaller than the French class was. Definitely, I would say it probably fell off even, you know, it was a lot more popular when I was younger, especially when I was coming through high school. Like, I think my grade 12 or sorry, my grade 11 class was seven or eight people. And then, you know, I started teaching the year after I graduated. And my grade 12 class was one student. And my grade, I didn't even have grade 11 class that year. My grade 10s, I think I had four or five home. So, you know, the, the want for, for students is, you know, it's dwindling because, you know, it's, it's, it's easier for them to just not take a language at all or to find a way around it. But it's just, I don't know, it's just weird that the students, they don't want to connect with, with their heritage, with their culture. And it's just, yeah, we did a lot of land-based learning. Thankfully, like when I taught high school, I taught at Puerto Creek. So we were, you know, we were out, I could, you know, walk two minutes, we're in the bush. So we did, we actually did a lot of lessons outside of the classroom. And, you know, we got to, you know, learn lessons where I can incorporate, incorporate language, culture, and, you know, being there, just land-based learning, where you get to learn everything, you get to embrace it, you get to live it. I think it's huge. Yeah. I mean, teaching in a classroom is all right. But I mean, you know, that's all you're going to learn is like, no, reading, writing. And, you know, you'll pick up a couple of nouns. But it's like, if you're out there, you're doing it, you're able to manipulate things with your hands, you know, you can teach somebody about how to take sap from a tree and like, you know, just cool life lessons that, you know, you don't get in a traditional classroom. And that's something that you get with, with a Southern Toshoni class is because we're not just, we're not just language teachers, we're, you know, we teach the culture, we teach the heritage, the history, and, you know, we put it all in and we get to do stuff like that. You know, we get to go out on the land and, you know, just walk through and do our entire lesson, just go for a walk. You know, like if we're on a unit that's animals, go through and look for animals, you know, just anything like that. And it's not something that you get to do with math class. A lot of people for them, like, it's their way of connecting to their culture. You know, like they, a lot of people are like myself, you know, they didn't grow up with the culture. You know, like I grew up in a very colonized house, like very, we grew up here in Whitehorse. I never went on the land, you know, didn't get to hunt, didn't get to do stuff like that. And then, you know, as soon as I'm in my classroom, I get to, you know, I get to teach these things that, you know, I didn't get to learn when I was very young that I didn't grow up with. And these kids, they might not have that opportunity either. So for them, this class might be their only way of getting that kind of culture that, you know, that they just, people just don't grow up on anymore. I mean, that's the only way you really can teach it. I mean, if, if I want to, I can sit there, I can put a bunch of words up on the board and I can get them to repeat after me, but it's, you know, what are, what are we going to learn? We're going to learn a little bit of language, a couple of nouns, a little bit of sentence structure, but I mean, Southern to show me is more than that. Southern to show me is a culture. It's, it's a way of life. And, you know, it's not something that you can just teach in a classroom. It's got to be dynamic, you know, it's got to be, you got to be going out, you got to be learning, especially like the culture has got to be intertwined with it. Seeing as it's a school program, I mean, there were grades. But I mean, overall, you see it in the kids, their demeanor walking in the door, like it's so many of the students, especially at the younger grades, like they're just, they're excited to be walking into the class. When you get a kid that's excited to walk into the classroom, that means they're going to be able to learn. It means they're going to walk out with something, whether it's, whether they take home one word, all the words or even a little bit of culture, like it's, you know, you see it. And then you see kids using it outside of the classroom. That's huge. And you don't really get that up here. So like that was just wonderful to see. So that was definitely one way of, you know, measuring the success is, you know, kids are using it outside of the classroom. Indigenous education to me is just connecting with culture. Culture is a very broad subject. A lot of people and they think culture, they think it's like, oh, it's just ways of life. Well, it's, you know, it's ways of life. It's, you know, elders. It's how you're raised. It's language. You know, all of this stuff together builds culture. And without culture, we don't have anything. And we need culture in order to teach Indigenous education because culture is Indigenous education. There's, there's a lot of ways that we used to be taught. Like I know for myself, growing up, I learned all of a sudden to show anyways. And it's just, it's just not taught anymore. You know, like, as soon as you reach a certain age, you know, and you're, if you're a boy, go to live with your uncle. If you're a girl, you go to live with your aunt. You know, it's just, it would be, you know, how you raise, it would just be a little time that you spent away. And it's, you'd learn values there. And it was, you know, just something traditional that it's just not there anymore. That's a pretty loaded question. I mean, Indigenous, it's, you know, there's tons of ways of looking at it. A lot of people would see, you know, what the government sees. Like, you know, someone that comes from a specific First Nations background, they've got two First Nations families, they've got a status card. But it's like, you know, Indigenous is just, you know, embracing culture and just having a love for who we are and, you know, what we're about and just living the lifestyle that we were meant to live. The stigma around, like in a classroom about being Indigenous and, you know, what Indigenous is, you know, it doesn't really portray in a classroom because in the class, like, when you teach language and you teach the culture, it's, you're not necessarily teaching to make somebody Indigenous or two Indigenous people. So it's, it's there, but it doesn't, you know, it doesn't need to be mentioned that it's there. Education is just, you know, going from one point to the other. Everybody learns. People learn their own way. That's something that, you know, the education system today struggles with is, you know, kids learn in their own way. But education is building life, you know, getting the steps and the tools that you need in order to succeed. And just getting point A to point B, being Indigenous, it built my education. It made my education who I am. I mean, my career started when I was seven, when I started to actually learn something to show me, you know, it's created who I am today. It opened up the opportunities that I still have today. Being, you know, being Indigenous, I get, I get the opportunities that, you know, not everybody gets to have. You know, I'm, I'm looked at first when there's a job out there for Southern to show me, you know, like I've got the, the skills that I've built up from my, from my past, from my history that give me the tools that I can succeed today. Fluency. I mean, that's, we're working on it, but I mean, we're, we're losing elders, you know, our fluent speakers are, they're not like they're anymore, you know, and our resources and our tools, they're just starting to fade. And the want to keep our language alive and keep our culture alive is, you know, it's doing the link. So, you know, there's people, people like myself, the language teachers who, you know, we're, we're really advocating for young people to get involved in language, get involved in culture, spend time with elders, you know, and try and keep our, keep our language, keep our heritage, history, culture, keep it all alive, because it's, it's a tough fact, but it's dying. And, you know, it's up to us to do something to keep it alive. Canada is currently working on their language revitalization. But I mean, it's, it's tough to look at Canada when you're so close to it here. I mean, I can see, you know, what I can do in a school. And then, you know, I can see what I can do in a community. And then, you know, I can branch out, I can see, what can I do in the Southern to show me area? And, you know, that's just, that's just cracking the surface. There's so much to it. And like getting to Canada, like there's just, there's so much to it. And I don't think I've seen enough of Canada to see what other First Nations are like. But I know, like for us, as Southern to showing people, like we're, we're on our way. You know, we're getting there. We're, we're putting the tools out there so that, you know, people can learn and we're taking the proper steps. I guess if I had the knowledge I had now, when I started teaching, I mean, there's so much and like there's still so much that I have to learn. When I started teaching, I didn't have access to a full-time elder. So I didn't really have the resources I wanted to start from. But now, like even like my language has gotten better. You know, I've got a more in-depth idea of, you know, what culture is and, you know, stories and, you know, stuff like that, that I didn't necessarily have, you know, six years ago when I started teaching. Funding is huge. I mean, funding is a lot of it. Like, I know when I was teaching high school, I was very blessed. I had a pretty good account that I could, or a budget to work with. So, you know, like, I had a Promethean board, like a smart board. You know, if there's something that I made for my classroom, I had access to it. So I was funded pretty well. But like, I know other programs that I've worked with, like I've worked with the Native Language Center to college. I've worked with First Nations privately. You know, the funding is just not there. And for us to do everything that we want to do, it's then it's got to be, you know, it's got to be changing where the funds are allocated. Like, we're doing what we can with what we've got. But, you know, starting to seem like it's just not quite good enough.