 Urban Circle Training Center. We have a holistic program here for the students. It covers the life skills part, the cultural and traditional teachings and along with their regular curriculum. Because of the past and what happened in the residential school, a lot of Aboriginal people lost their culture, their history, their language, just everything. The goal is to bring them back to that, for them to learn, to give them that opportunity to find their roots, to touch base with what happened, because a lot of students are going through a lot of crisis in their life and not knowing where it came from. So a lot of that helps them to rebuild foundation to be successful, to know who they are, to heal. We do a lot of that. We help the students, the life skills coaches, the elders and the teachers. Everybody helps them in some way. We teach them about the seven sacred teachings that a lot of our people lost, the values, the ceremonies. You know, ceremonies they may never have had an opportunity to have out there in any other place of learning. They get to come to us or the life skills coaches. We work together and guiding them and helping them through the healing process. Part of that is teaching them about the effects of residential school and the trauma that children went through. It's passed down to the generation, so they're still carrying it. We believe that they cannot deal with it unless they know where it came from, the root of it. In my own personal healing journey, that's what I have experienced, because I'm a residential school survivor. My children, my grandchildren, now I have great grandchildren. My grandchildren are still being affected by what happened. So that's just an example of the students that come here. Some of them are adults and they've never known what really happened. So it's a great educational experience for them to know that, to know the history and to build their lives back up after knowing that. We go anywhere from, correct me, I'm not sure, but I'm sure it's like when they become an adult here in Manitoba, it's 18, right? So it's 18 to any age. We've had people in their 60s here. The programs we offer is based on the teachings of Aboriginal people, and it's successful because the students have that opportunity to deal with their issues and also to be recognized as and equal to everybody. They are assisted and counseled and they're given that one-to-one help, counseling, emotional, spiritual, physical, and mental. All those components are taken into consideration when a student comes in here. We offer any and all kinds of help because of the experience that we have, the wisdom and the knowledge of the elders that's passed on to them. I know there's no other place that I know that exists. When I went to school, there was nothing like that. So this is an exceptional place of learning and when it comes time to graduation, we don't have to talk about it. They'll share what they have got here, what they got here. We look at the whole person's life. We don't just look at the academics. Like somebody could be really smart, but they could carry a lot of stuff that's going to affect their life down the line. If they don't deal with it, if we don't deal with stuff, it continues to surface. But if people know what they need to do to better their life or to heal from the multi-generational trauma that they've been through, in our teachings, in our life, we don't separate anything. We don't separate our emotional, our spiritual, our mental, and our physical. We try to include everything in there. That's why it's so different and it's more effective with Indigenous students. I'm not sure how it would work for any other people, but it gives them an understanding and something they could connect and relate to for once in their life. I'll just give you an example. When I was younger, I attended one of our traditional ceremonies and I never felt so much that I belonged somewhere. That sense of belonging and finding your roots is probably the most special experience a person could have. That's what we help them to find. That's the key for our people. I see it happening all around when people connect to that and when the students connect to that, like they walk in these doors the first day, you wouldn't believe it's the same person at the end of that 10 months or six months, whatever, how long their course is, because they found something. They found themselves. They found their spirit. They made that connection. So they grow from that. We encourage students to look within themselves to find what they want to do in their life, to search and recognize the gifts they have within themselves. Because in our teachings, we believe that everyone is gifted and talented with something special and that they have a purpose for being here, a purpose to fulfill on earth. So that's the other thing that helps and then they begin their search in a positive way. They go to positive things like the ceremonies, the sun dance, the vision quest, our traditional medicine camp. They just search and they just go and that's where they find their way. There has been a big change in all the years of my life. When I go back, when I was a young person, starting, you know, like going to school and searching for who I am, what I can see is a big change happening because even right now it's happening with connecting our people back to the things that were so important to them. And one of them is connecting them, reconnecting them back to the land, back to their roots and having them and not just teaching it on a Blackboard or whatever or video or having them actually experience those things. For example, being at the camp and actually going into the sweat lodge, being in nature, being in the natural environment, learning from that, learning from being on the land, land-based training they call it now. We've been doing that all our lives myself and Elder Stella Blackbird that was part of this, which she retired. We've been doing that for years. Now we have a camp where we teach right on the land. We have a connection. We have a link from Urban Circle to our medicine camp. So if there's any students that want to further learn about their culture, then we keep that door open for them to come there. And right now our vision is, I guess, to see that happening, to have that land-based thing because a lot of the students here, they live in the city. They don't have that opportunity to reconnect with the creation out there, the land, the water, the trees, all that. I think that's so important and it's also a very important part of their healing. And to be in an environment like that has a lot to do with the energy. A lot of people wouldn't understand that, but we know because we experience that all the time when we're working with people up there, with all the stuff that's happening now. We see it all around us. It's so negative, this environment. I come here and I can't believe how negative, how things are happening in the city, the violence, the drugs, the stuff that's killing our people. But you go out there and it's a totally different world. It's like two different worlds. And I think it's important for people to reconnect to that so they can find that that stillness and make that reconnection spiritually. And our people really believe in the spiritual part of connecting with that because that's how we get our guidance. That's how we find ourselves. We find our purpose when we make that spiritual connection. And it has nothing to do with religion. Not the way it was pushed on us in residential school. That was alien. To me it was alien. I could never get it. I think for the other educational institutions, the government and all the people that have taken that away from us, they need to learn what we know. They need to be educated because obviously they're not because there's still lots of racism out there. There's a lot of judgment about Native traditional ways. There's a lot of people that think that we don't know. We don't know anything that we needed to be educated or we had to be Christianized or whatever. They need to turn that around and they need to start learning. It's their turn. They talk about reconciliation with the residential school stuff. We are working on our healing because to me reconciliation is healing. Not just us, but the people out there that inflicted that stuff on us. The government, the churches, you name it, the residential school, the people that work. I think that needs to happen, that has to, because if you're working on relationships, individual relationships, everybody has to do their part and it's not happening on their part, on the rest of the world or whoever is involved with it. We are doing our part because I can see it growing in my own First Nation. We did a lot of healing in our community and that's why I'm sitting here today to share that. That was my journey, learning about myself, my teachings, so that I can pass that wisdom and that knowledge and having that understanding and having that acceptance of who we are because I know we're not accepted in our own country by our own politicians or churches or you name it. We're not really accepted and I've worked with churches, but I stopped because they weren't doing their part. It's not happening. I can see that and even all the things that were supposed to happen, they're not happening. The racism is getting worse. As far as I'm concerned, it's getting worse. I can see it because when I go home and I come back to this city, I face it every day. Whenever I go in a store, whatever I do, it's there. It's sad, but it is and people don't want to look at that. They have their heads in the sand and they just don't want to admit it that they're still treating our people like that. So they can continue to do that, but we're going to continue to grow and to heal and we're getting to be a very strong nation again. I guess this is going to take us the road or the path that we're taking right now, right here in urban circle. That's a very good example because I don't know of any other institution, even if it's Aboriginal run that really does the work that we do here because we really care about the students. We treat them as an equal to us no matter what kind of position we are or education we have. We never look down upon our people or we never try to be above them or below them. It's about equality and that's our teachings of our creation. We're equal to everything and I hope that people start waking up because our people have woken up already long ago. I know I did over 40 years ago. I'm 66 now and I started my healing journey when I was a young woman. I lived in a city, I experienced all that stuff and I think it's gotten worse than better. Yeah, that reconciliation thing is not even true. There's an example. We lost our land in 1930s. I just met with riding mountain national park. I sit on a board there and we had made an agreement and a lot of the agreements are not being kept so they don't respect our like we have medicines out there. Those are our life, our traditional medicines that we pick out there and they still continue to try to spray the land with chemicals. The place is clean. There isn't any kind of environmental pollutants that are really there because there's nothing there. It's just pure land and there's no industry. There's no anything like that's going to cause chemicals to affect the land and sometimes they go ahead. They're supposed to consult with us when they're going to spray because we pick our medicines in certain places and we can't go and pick them where it's been sprayed because it's going to affect people. It's not going to work. It's just sad that people think that they can continue doing that and get away with it. This is facts. This is true. I experience those things every day, different experiences of not being listened to, our word, not being taken seriously or people just walking all over us. That's how I feel. When I speak, I don't beat around the bush. I say what comes from my heart. That's what our teachings are to be true and honest. If I lie to people, then I'm lying to myself. I just speak the truth. It might hurt people. Our people might say I'm negative, but I'm not. I'm speaking my truth to protect what's ours.