 I guess it goes back a long ways. I first started just going out with elders and teaching people in young people in elementary school and teaching people in my community about things. I've been involved in a lot of different projects over the years. I conducted ceremonies in the penal institutions in the prisons and I guess in education that way because a lot of the men I worked with there had never experienced much knowledge about their own background and the indigenous culture that they came from. A lot of the men in prisons are disassociated from their communities. And as I said, I worked within my own community and trying to help people understand more about their culture, working with elders in that way. And then I started teaching at a university. I first went to the university as a clinical counselor and with a focus on, I guess back in the 90s it was really building programs that would help students integrate into mainstream institutions. So students were coming to Queen's University from all over the country and helping them sort of sort things out as they encountered problems in the university and sort out some of the problems they were bringing with them. So I think that was kind of an education of way too. But then I started teaching with Evelyn Peters who focuses a lot on Aboriginal urban life. And then I started teaching courses on my own and Queen's University is a very white school. It's a very, except for the students who, the foreign students, primarily Chinese and Arab students, it's a very white university. So the courses that I've taught over the years have maybe five or I would say about five percent students with an Aboriginal heritage. And so the focus of my Aboriginal education or Indigenous education at university has been mainly focused on helping non-Aboriginal people understand the Aboriginal experience in Canada. And so I taught course called Introduction to Aboriginal Studies. I taught a course called Topics in Aboriginal Studies, which was more about contemporary politics. And recently I've sort of moved into, in university, more Indigenous theory. And I have taught four times now a course where we bring students out onto the land. After about eight weeks of theory, then we bring them out for ten days into the portion. We'll let them bring a knife and a sleeping bag. And we promise them that we'll give them a thousand calories a day and they have to find the rest. That way they're sort of learning firsthand. They're immersing themselves a bit in a relationship with the land and a relationship with one another that has to be cooperative. And that way they learn why the theory is important, I guess, why they have to develop horizontal communities and horizontal leadership, horizontal decision making. So that makes it sort of real. I like that a lot, but that's an expensive form of education within universities for sure. There's so much in communities because in communities everybody comes and volunteers. We have lots of community volunteers come and help with that program. And for them it's a bit of an education too, which is fun. And lately, in the last couple of years, what I've been doing is taking the introduction to Aboriginal Studies, which I've taught at Queen's University, and offering it to local communities around my own community. So we did an eight-week session in Sydenham, and then we went to Perth and taught it three times. And just for, we just advertised it and ordinary people who've never been to university, some of them have. But they want to know something about the Aboriginal experience in Canada. So some are Aboriginal people, I'd say about 10% of those people who live in those communities and are integrated into those communities come and take the course. So it's a bit of a mixture. And then this last winter we did a course in Kingston. And so over that period of a couple of years, we actually were able to, Maggie and I worked on it together, and we were able to get about 150 people, much more educated as to what's going on with Aboriginal people in Canada. What's the meaning of what they hear in the news? And I think one of the interesting things that comes out of that community education, and it's all volunteer. I don't do it for any money or anything like that. But what comes out of that, this gentleman came up to me and he is about 65 years old, probably retired from his occupation. And he said, you know, I live through a lot of that things that you were teaching. And I knew about them, but I never knew how to analyze them. And that's really, really important in Aboriginal education is giving people the tools to be able to take the data or the examples and be able to sort of take them apart and understand what the, you know, how they came about and what happened while they were going on and what the consequences of a particular event might be. So and how that relates to them as settlers. And one of the interesting things that's happening, you know, the first time I heard the term settler use was an elder in my community always referred to the white people around as settlers. And you know, people, I hadn't heard people use that term before, but that was about 40 years ago. And since then a large portion of the Canadian population actually, well at least the population of younger people can refer to themselves as settlers and know that that's a term that requires them to do some thinking and do some analyzing and do some growing. So it's not a negative term, but it's a term that really places people or positions people who need to know more about Aboriginal people. So I'm rambling a bit, but yeah, I have this very sort of eclectic or very horizontal process that I've been involved in teaching. I make a, they said before, I make a very distinct difference between Aboriginal education and Indigenous education. All human beings, all human beings in the womb have no expectation of being born into a modern world. We have 150 or 200,000 years of genetic development that helps us become Indigenous because the majority of human life has been Indigenous. And so we have all of the emotional intellectual tools to live Indigenous lives and to be educated from birth on as Indigenous people. But as soon as we're born, we get weighed, we get measured, the complexion of our skin is recorded, our parents' ethnicity is recorded, and then we are assigned an identity which then determines the course of our education. And for an Aboriginal child, that means the course of education will be to be integrated into a larger culture because they're presumed not to be. And for the non-Aboriginal person, they're assumed to be already integrated. Even though they've got 150 or 200,000 years of genetic development that tells them that they're supposed to be something else. So as children, they struggle away and learn to fit into a world too. That's quite foreign from what we're prepared to do as human beings. So Indigenous education, if you use the term Indigenous education, that's learning how to live with the ecosystems that we're relating to, that we relate to. And that is very far and few between. Those lessons are few and far between unless, you know, as Indigenous people or as people of Indigenous heritage, we're born close to people who are close to that and have that education through a familial or community relationship with the land and with the ecosystems around them and the lessons that they need to know of that. Very few people are fortunate that way anymore. Being raised on reserve does not guarantee that you're going to have an Indigenous education. In likelihood, you're going to have an education that is an Aboriginal education that teaches you to integrate into a larger society. And even your peers and your family will put pressure on you to move in that direction because that's where success is considered to be found. That's where Aboriginal education and the family sort of takes over. And for most people who are non-Aboriginal, who are not of Indigenous heritage to this land, they're taught to sort of just ignore that because it's periphery, it's orientalized, it's the other, and it's peripheral to their success. So they're taught to ignore it, although it's really, really important because to know the land around you, to know the environments around you, the ecosystems around you, you can learn the names of trees, but if you don't know how the trees relate to each other or to the soil, you don't really know very much. And most people in this world, in this modern world, that's as far as they get. It's just knowing that what a maple leaf looks like. But if they were asked to identify the bark of a maple tree, they wouldn't know what they were talking about. So, but they do know Shakespeare and they know geometry and arithmetic and all of that stuff, which is, those are important things. But so that's the complexity here is that we live in a society where some people are taught that Indigenous education or the kind of education that we're actually born to have is periphery to us and not important. And we're taught that the information that we should have is really, really important for our overall success. And that's to profit from our education. I started, it's, you know, I mean, I've gone through an education myself. In the 1960s and 70s, my interest was on the rights discourse. The community that I belong to, the Art of Algonquin First Nation, a few older people were still around. And they reminded a lot of us younger people how important their Indigenous knowledge was. So when their wild rice stands, they still harvested wild rice, they did other things. But when those wild rice stands were challenged by the government and a commercial harvester, they asked us to fight with them and we did. And so we really focused in on understanding what our rights were as Aboriginal people in Canada. And we saw that there was a great, a larger movement outside of our community that was also preoccupied with the same ideas and the same sort of quest to have those rights recognized and established. And we worked on that. But as we worked on that, I think we matured and we also saw that and the elders, I think, reminded us of this is it wasn't just a matter of rights, but there were responsibilities, that the responsibilities outweighed the rights discourse. And to learn those and learn and live those responsibilities was more important, which changed our whole sort of, changed my strategy of looking at things. And as I began to try to understand those responsibilities, it also became evident that I needed to learn a lot more about the land and about my relationship with the land and how the things that I had learned as a child were applicable to that knowledge. And so I moved from there to an idea of, let me understand what re-indigenization is. This isn't just an academic exercise. This is really something about re-imagining and doing. And so I started to study re-indigenization. And then this is where the 10 years come in. I started looking at who was looking at the future because if I wanted to work on educating others, educating myself as to what this whole re-indigenization process might look like and how it was going on in other places and to recognize it, I had to have an idea of what the world was like 10 years from now, 20 years from now. And so I started studying and researching those who were actually taking a look at that. So I found out that most of the major corporations now have departments that are dedicated to future studies, even the Goddard Space Institute at NASA. Because they want to put a man on people on Mars in 50 years, they need to know what the world is going to look like in 50 years. So, and it started my practical mindset, that's important stuff to know because if indigenous people are going to survive, if indigenous cultures are going to survive, and if those of us who have been alienated from our indigenous roots want to reclaim it, then we have to also know what the world is going to look like in 10 years or 20 years. And frankly, that's a nightmare. Colonialism is collapsing of its own weight, but imperialism is still rampant. The imperial states are still, you know, they think their survival is so important, they're willing to negate the survival of other people. And that makes this whole process of re-indigenization difficult, not just for people of aboriginal identity and indigenous heritage, but everyone. So, that sort of changed things to where it became important to look at the processes and the strategies. And I guess this is where my education is going now. My own education and what I'm doing with students is helping them look into the future a bit. And to see what qualities, really to know what what indigeneity is, rather than look at it just from a rights perspective, because our responsibility is to survive. And so we need to look at things like cultural drift. Why do indigenous cultures change? How do they move from sort of one set of narratives to another set of narratives? And why do they do that? And because we have access now, and it's amazing that we have access to genetics, how the genetic and cultural co-evolution takes place. Because clearly over the last 100,000 years there's been a tremendous shift in our evolution in genetics and culture. And they've worked together. So that's part of indigenous studies, I think, in my mind, is to help us understand how that happens. Those are the kind of things I'm interested in. And also, as I've grown, I've also recognized that there's less and less of a difference between Aboriginal people and settlers. That while there are clearly differences in economic conditions, there's clearly differences in who can exercise particular rights, most settlers, or while they don't live in overt oppression, they live in very closed systems. And they're not allowed to move out of those systems. The same way that our ancestors found themselves living in worlds that they knew intimately and then being excluded from those worlds, most settlers don't live intimately with the world around them. And so they've already been conditioned out of learning about living naturally with the world around them. And sort of waking them up to that too. I'm not very satisfied with the course that institutions have taken. Most institutions are now buying into, or most Aboriginal people within the educational institutions are buying into political reconciliation. And this is about the evolution of colonial society. It's not about the evolution, it's not directed toward the real evolution of our own societies and our own cultures. We're being taught to sit in the back of the bus. That's what, in my mind, that's what reconciliation is. It's being taught to sit in the back of the bus and be happy with that. Because it doesn't give us rights to land, it doesn't give us autonomy, or it doesn't give us sovereignty over the course of development, or the course of how land is used. And so that's really problematic and I find that a lot of departments of Aboriginal studies are going along with this idea of indigenizing the institutions. Well, these institutions are medieval European institutions. I mean, the university, the hospital, well, not so much the hospital, but certainly the universities, the churches that are what we call democratic governments are all medieval institutions, medieval European institutions. And they come out of a period that we refer to as the Enlightenment, but the Enlightenment was a way in which European societies were allowed to live well because others suffered. And that's not the qualities or the philosophy or the spirituality of indigenous people. And that's what I'm really worried about, is that we can become just as, we can become co-conspirators with our enemy. So we have to be really vigilant when we work with any of the institutions. We have to be confederates.