 Bonjour, my name is Jess and I'm from Sault Ste. Marie, I'm a member of the Bachelor in First Nation and that's home for me. I work for the Four Hours Youth Movement as the Executive Director and the Four Hours is an organization that started in 2014 as an opportunity for us to engage Indigenous and non-Indigenous young people in relationship building across the country in support of reconciliation. I think our programming is really centered on the belief that young people need to experience something together in order to build relationships that transcend events, transcend funding agreements, transcend the parameters of a program and that we really need to come to understand our identities and the pathways that have led us to really decide that reconciliation is something that is important to us. And so we use face-to-face dialogue as a tool for us to be able to start to engage in those conversations and build those relationships. And we see young people, we work with young people between the ages of 18 and 30-ish, young people who are like influencers in their communities and the spaces that they're starting to enter into so that they can start to shift systems, shift the conversation based on how they want to see the future to be. We work with young people between 18 and 30. We really focus on bringing people together face-to-face. And location and geography and land are really important to what we do too as well. So in the conversation about reconciliation we can't be leaving out those things so as much as possible we're out on the land or away from the city so that we can, I think, begin to feel what it's like to decolonize our minds through reconnecting with the land. And that's where our conversations flow from. Our programming uses an intersection of Indigenous knowledge, art space, methodology and social and innovation practices to think about the systems to bring people together to convene a difficult conversation. We really focus on people thinking about who am I in relation to the conversation about reconciliation. Identity is such a big part of our communities as Indigenous people and something that's been taken away from us. And also something that we know that we can rebuild for ourselves. But not alone, right? And this also is an opportunity for us to really come together with other like-minded people who are on that journey of discovery together to pick up the things that have been lost but are there for us. We really work with young people to hold conversations that are relevant in the context that they're in. So we have developed a framework for cross-cultural dialogue that really helps us to imagine to think through the ways in which that we can safely engage Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in conversations about colonization, in conversations about the history and ways that actually centre the Indigenous young people's needs, their perspectives, their stories. But also gives opportunities for non-Indigenous people to connect themselves to that too as well. We've worked with young people in the health system. We work with young people who are on reserve, off reserve. Conversations between Indigenous and newcomer youth, Indigenous and people of colour as different conversations than you would have with Indigenous and white young people. I think the aim of the program really truly is meaningful relationships. We have grown up in an apartheid system. And so there aren't a lot of spaces that exist just naturally for young people to come together. I think universities are great places for that to happen as young people have. Start to have agency and start to question things, but for the generation that we're working with oftentimes we haven't been educated about our history even as Indigenous young people. And this is a place for us to talk bravely and safely about those things and to think about how can we start to push back against those things together. And what we're really trying to do I think is create a social infrastructure of change makers across the country who understand and can relate to each other by doing that hard work about who they are. And so we really encourage those kinds of conversations and use tools and facilitation techniques that support. Yeah one thing I think that is exciting about the work that we do is that we work both in community and across the country and so giving young, in particular young Indigenous people the opportunity to leave their community but to come back with new ideas, new experiences but connected in a deep way to the young people that they've met. So they're going back into their communities but they feel a support system around them even though geography is in the way of that. There's some things that we've learned about how we can really create family. It sounds really cheesy but it's like you actually need to start to create family and build family as a way to think about building community and building networks. I think it's an example of how to work in complexity and emergence because when you bring Indigenous young people together without a prior relationship with them or knowledge of their history you don't know their story. And so you really need to be, I guess this is really what our work does is help to build capacity of young people as hosts of conversation cross-culturally. And so these young people need to be sensitive and considerate of all of the different intersections that young people might bring into a conversation about reconciliation and so it's about meeting people where they're at but also, and I've said this before, it's like centering the needs first and foremost of Indigenous young people in those spaces. So I think it's an example of how you can use a framework as a basis for how you might teach or build an experience with young people together but not something that's a step-by-step guide. It's about values and a different way of experiencing... I keep saying the word experiencing. Really what we try to do is to create conditions for the collective knowledge of a group to define what the learning is. And so we need young people, we need facilitators, we need people who can host conversations that allow for that magic to emerge. And our framework is a way for us to think through how we can design those experiences together and there's different things that are important in doing that. It's like a big team. There's not one person who holds all the answers and so your team of facilitators also needs to represent the diversity of the young people that are there because young people need to see themselves and who's sort of leading them and they need to be able to trust you to be able to hold that conversation to be considering what they might need. Working with culture and ceremony is like part of what we do too. That's really essential that we have that space for that spirituality to enter into these conversations is someplace that I think Western education really shies away from. And as I spoke about before too, the other teacher that's in the room is the land and there's so much that the earth can teach us about what the relationship is that we need to strive towards because of what we can see and we can observe by being out on the land and being in conversation with each other and the conversation could be silence, it could be walking through the woods, it could be learning about the medicines and the plants and that healing that that has to offer us and the healing that we have in ourselves to offer each other and so we really work with those kinds of fourth dimension aspects of energy that are out there for us. For me that's what Indigenous education could be. It's like that's any time that I've been able to spend time with elders, it's like that's an elder and educator is a conduit for that level of knowledge and we're not there, I mean that's like master level stuff, right? But it's like those are the things that we want to work towards and what we try to support each other to learn more about to bring into these kinds of conversations. Reconciliation, reconciliation, reconciliation is like a buzzword used at Nauseum and so it actually has shifted in its challenge and because Indigenous young people are disconnecting from this conversation about reconciliation because the way they've experienced it and I think that the way that they've experienced it is that again their voices are not as important as others and so I think that the impact that I have seen when we're able to really the impact that I see when we're really able to like animate our framework to the best of its I guess potential is that you have young Indigenous people stepping up into their leadership in like new and exciting ways. An example of that is a young woman coming to understand what her Anishinaabe name meant by being a part of something that we did. Like it helps to further her story about her name based on how she was able to show up in that conversation. I think that to me is like success and it's very hard to measure that too right and everybody wants to know what are your outcomes. A lot of the stuff is that we're just actually just we're really not sure like the work, this environment of reconciliation is so new and so fragile and we don't know what the outcomes are. We're just actually just really trying to to do this work from a place of deep integrity and accountability to our communities and to the people that are part of this found family. We've tried developmental evaluation and it's tried to box us into a different kind of way of looking at the world. We're now sort of exploring the metaphor of seed saving as a way to look at our evaluation. We've tried different kinds of evaluation models for four hours and probably over the past year we've been kind of turning into the resurgence of the work of Indigenous people in food sovereignty and seed saving has been something that our communities have done for thousands and thousands of years. The seed savers, the people who were responsible for that were responsible not only for the harvest of the community that season but also the generations beyond that. So you're always thinking about what are we saving now for our families now but also into the future and so if we think about evaluation that way we're able to use that metaphor of seed saving to really expand what we could think would be possible for impact because it's not only about what we're doing now it's about what planting those seeds will grow for the generations in the future. So that's kind of an experiment that we're doing right now around evaluation is like what does evaluation look like if we think about it in the metaphor of seed saving and there's knowledge holders around seed saving all across the world too. And we hope that one day we'll have a seed bank that people can actually access whether that's a physical thing or what it would be but it's like and in some communities seed banks you can take from a seed bank if you give to the seed bank so there's that reciprocity embedded in that that is to me deeply indigenous. So yeah, so that's how we're trying to shift evaluation. If I think about someone like Shakwita I think that what Shakwita's experience was like is strengthening the solidarity between the black community and the indigenous community and the realization that although our stories are very different we've experienced colonization in a way that has placed our communities in a certain standing within society and that there's a place for us to work together to liberate both of our communities if we can find that connectivity to that story. And so I think that like working with like Shakwita as part of our steering committee the reciprocity to that is that for indigenous young people we can learn about that too, you know like we can learn about the black community we can learn about how diverse the black community is within Canada and the stories of the diaspora and the fact that some people because of colonization actually don't know where home is and so we can also recognize the privileges that we have to know where our home is and where our land is so to me like those things are so special for like that fabric of relationship that is the foundation for what Canada could become so, yeah I mean like non-indigenous young people who are part of our programming I think are always very grateful and blessed to be in the presence of indigenous young people who are able to step into their leadership because that is such a gift to be able to see that and to be a part of that and the things that they're able to learn about the history of Canada but also the way that they can now see the world because of that perspective that they've been separated from for so long is also like such a valuable thing it's like a piece of Canadians that has been missing and they don't even know it's missing and a lot of non-indigenous young people are angry you know it's like once you start to actually reveal this history like we were born knowing this to a certain extent by like non-indigenous people when they find out they're enraged and this gives them an opportunity to work through relationships to actually take action on that anger and to open the doors to places where they have access to that indigenous young people may not and that's that social capital that is actually what we need to spread around because it's the social capital that actually decides who's in and who isn't who gets the money and who doesn't get the money who gets the opportunities and who doesn't and so I hope that what we're doing is actually not necessarily something for this generation although we will start to see like we will start to see the harvest of what we're creating now but really what the work that we're doing is for my nephew and my nieces and so when they start to step out into the world outside of the safety of their homes and their schools and that sort of thing that they have a very different experience about their identity as indigenous people here's how we can measure like our impact it's like are our children friends like will our children be friends and will we have tea together when we're in our fifties it's like to me that's like because having a relationship with somebody that is impersonal and professional gets you so far but having a relationship with someone that's at the level of love is a place where you will call that person out on their bullshit because you love them and that person will hear you because they love you but you'll also invite them into your life in your world and that's where the apartheid starts to break apart that's where the Indian Act in a way starts to break apart we focus so much on trying to dismantle the Indian Act but there's possibly other things that we can be doing outside of that so the Indian Act is irrelevant no matter what because we've built something completely different than what was even possible through dismantling the Indian Act definitely would love to share with you our framework for cross-cultural dialogue and over the next sort of I'll say five month period we're doing a lot of writing and reflecting about what we've been learning over the past year which we'd like to also share to the world some of what we do is open source so it's available for everyone but we have a lot of internal documents that we use for our facilitators and we don't share those with the world because it's important for us to one connect to have a relationship with the young people who want to use these tools and to be there is a support system for them as they adapt them for the context or the conversation that they're looking to have and when when people can access things without having done some of that groundwork that's when things can actually be dangerous especially for indigenous young people or racialized young people and so we've made that conscious decision to not do that for everything that we like all of the facilitation tools that we use the way I like to sort of put it is that you can change all the curriculum in Canada to include indigenous history indigenous stories and indigenous perspective but if that content is still being told from a racist lens or an ignorant lens that's what you're imparting on young people they're actually being empowered with knowledge but they're still upholding those stereotypes because of the way that that has been taught and so like to me that's like still also a very like a tricky thing and I don't know what the answer to that is because I think yes we need to have that curriculum in our schools but we also need to work with teachers so that they believe in what they're teaching because that's also the problem I think is that they don't believe in the value of why they should teach about indigenous people I don't know I don't think I've experienced indigenous education I've experienced like indigenous lead things but they're all within the western system and I think probably the closest thing that's an example of something right now is named Kiyoshbukon which is a land based culture camp that has elders living there who you're cooking with studying snares with you're actually building relationships with like over time and I think that I just went there for one day and played Go Fish with with one of the elders there and the amount of like language proficiency I guess it's such a snobby word the amount of language proficiency that I got from saying Go Fish but like it hurt my brain in such a good way it was like oh I needed this you know it was like working out my brain and I was just playing a card game for maybe an hour just a card game you know what I mean it's a it really like I guess the closest thing that I can think of that is Indigenous education is land based and experiential where the language is deeply where the language is connected to what we're doing because it's not it's not just about like what we're learning in English it's about expanding our understanding of of it through our own languages how would I define the word Indigenous I you know it's a government term that's used to umbrella Indigenous people and white wash us but I also I also think of Indigenous as of the land like the the roots of that word speak to the people of the land so I'm Indigenous to this land and so I like to think of it in that way but you know I'm a Nishinaabe and that's really important for people to like hold that and to challenge non-Indigenous people to like do the work to just find out where you are or find out who that person is and it's very easy for people not to do that you know so Indigenous Indigenous is like a loophole because we work with like a diversity of Indigenous young people it's a way to to to represent First Nations Métis people with one word I guess it's just quite a word yeah it would be like what would be the future of that word you know like that's the thing that I think is kind of interesting like maybe but here's the thing like we're creating an Nishinaabe school in Bawatin it isn't an Indigenous school it's an Nishinaabe studies you know and so like that is like I think where we need to like root that education in the teachings of those nations to which that land has been stewarded for time immemorial there are no time constraints to your learning your living your learning probably the future of Indigenous education if I could speak my language fluently it would probably be the biggest one I'm limited in my capacity to envision the future that I would like to create because I can only speak English I think that the evolution of the human like the evolution of humanity is limited by the languages that we speak and because we only put pennies into the resurgence of Indigenous languages we're actually shooting ourselves in the foot for the future of this country I think because in that language is unlocking the key to climate change is unlocking the key to um disease and disease prevention is unlocking the key to social justice inequities and the way that we just treat people we don't have the language for it in English so yeah that interestingly enough I was on a panel with a guy named Indy Johar who works for this organization called Dark Matter Laboratories in the UK in London and we had this talk about computer programming and the potential of technology and he was talking about that we've reached actually a ceiling in our capacity to code because our language can't keep up like our verbal language can't keep up with the concepts that are possible to create through computer coding but then the conversation that we had was what if we were coding in Anishinaabe like what would be the matrix style computer programming that we would be able to create so to me the young people of the future like young Anishinaabe people will be coding things that will like finally develop a time travel machine or a teleportation machine which is what I could use because I'm on the damn plane so long it's like you know that's the future of technology is in the language all sorts of different things