 The Inuit Studies Program is a two-year diploma program. What are the age groups or target audiences? It's for anybody that wants to take Inuit Studies. It can be anybody. They can be elders. They can be young people that just finished high school. As long as they meet the entrance requirements, they have to be able to talk in Inuititude because 99% of the courses are in Inuititude. We do have a student who does speak very limited Inuititude, but he understands a lot of Inuititude. He just stopped talking in Inuititude. But with prompts, he's able to do it in Inuititude. In year one, there are basic language courses, as well as courses about Inuit cultures that we just learn about in school now, such as Inuit cosmology and shamanism was just taught last month. We all know that we don't really use shamanism anymore, although we believe that there are shamans, but they have gone underground. So a lot of us, even up to my age group, we do not know very much about shamanism anymore. The shamanism that was a big part of Inuit culture has been done away with by missionaries. So in the 1990s, the program got funding to interview elders from different parts of Nunavut, and one year they decided to interview elders about shamanism. So they created a book all about shamanism, and that's the book we use in our course. That's just an example. Right now, the Inuit studies students are doing drafting patterns and skin sewing. So again, there's a big difference in age groups. There are some really young ones who just recently finished grade 12, and then we have older students who are in their 50s. So in between that age group. In this course, the younger ones have never really sewn skins, even the inside part. And on the other hand, we have people that are master sewers. So there's a big range of skills even in just one class. So that's the course that's on right now. They're learning how to make patterns, traditional patterns as well as modern. And then sewing. Right now, they're starting with slippers, seal skin slippers, and they're going to make something else after they've finished the slippers. So they're learning how to make patterns that will fit them. We're trying to get away from small, medium, large, extra large kind of way, which is very generic. So part of the course is to measure to each student using traditional measuring skills with hands bands and other things like that. The courses taught this year in first year are technology and morphology of Inuktitu, professional development, translation methods. Right now they're doing computer technology. And the next course they do before Christmas is legal. Legal one. There's five legal modules. And in second semester, they're going to take medical one. So there's five legal modules. Legal one, two, three, four, five. And we also have medical modules one to five, where they concentrate on learning terminology and translation for learning medical terms in Inuktitu. Then they also have a course called simultaneous translation one, where they learn to, where they learn, sorry, I'm on the wrong, wrong year, sorry. After Christmas, they're taking Inuit art history, music of the Inuit, language in Inuit society, methods of social control and traditional activity, where they do something hands-on. For traditional activity, the very last course after, in the winter semester is making small tools. And maybe Ulu, Hungra or Panna. So those are the courses for this year. The last few years, we've been getting younger and younger students who have never even heard about our ancestors and how they lived. They have a little bit of knowledge. They've heard a little bit, but not in depth. So the courses that they take teaches them about our Inuit culture and language. At the end of the two years, their knowledge of Inuit culture, Inuit language and culture grows considerably. And it is one of our more popular programs. They're always very excited to learn about traditional Inuit culture, as well as today's culture, because we don't just dwell on traditional older information. We try to make everything that they are relevant to today. The challenges are now younger students not speaking Inuktitut very well. Their level of Inuktitut is weaker. And the challenge, that's usually the main challenge. Because the courses are taught in Inuktitut. Every single one of my students in this course that I'm teaching has a different dialect. I have nine students at the moment. They're all from a different community. So we discuss a lot of our terminology in different dialects. The example that we used the other day was terminology about family. What does relations mean in your dialect? What does family mean in your dialect? What are our parents? What are our siblings? Such as things. We didn't finish because we didn't get very far. But even in that, because family is such a strong cultural strength of our culture, we have very intimate attachment to our dialects. So we have to respect each other's dialects. Inuktitut is all one language, but we have such different dialects where sometimes a word can have more than one meaning. So we try to be respectful. We try to know what a word can mean in another dialect so that when they become, when they have graduated, they'll have learned a lot more different dialects than they did when they came. We're using textbooks that were published in our programs in interviewing elders. We're using a lot of our grammar books that were made in the 90s. They really need to be updated. But at least we have some that we can refer to. We really need to update them. Such things on financial terms, environmental terms, climate change terms, elder terms, government terms, and all those grammar books that are from different topics. So those help a lot. When you have many different dialects, you kind of have to refer to such books. Some are written in South Baffin dialect. A lot have been written in North Baffin dialect, which is closest to all dialects. But it is very dependent on who the author is. I see it in our language classes because we have had students even this fall who get angry because they don't have an instructor from their home community and they're demanding that they get an instructor from their home community. Luckily, those are far and few apart. But we deal with things when they do come here and say, do we just tell them, look at how much you'll have more knowledge of other dialects than when you came. So sometimes we have to deal with that. Indigenous education is any education that comes from Indigenous peoples' cultures and language that is authentic rather than just translated. It's very important because it is our cultural language. It is part of our identity. It saddens me that in major areas such as a halui, children don't speak it anymore. It's up to us as parents to keep it alive, not the schools. But the schools can certainly help. They can be a big part of our education, but we shouldn't leave it up to the schools to teach our children our native language. It's really important to maintain, to keep it alive, to speak it as much as possible and not to mix the two languages so much because when we start doing that, we weaken our language by using halui dialects while speaking in native. To me, that's a very quick way of weakening our language because it's so easy to speak in English. It's so easy to just revert to English when you're speaking, even to each other as in a week. Indigenous education is really important because I'm from an age where when schools first started, everything that we learned about was from the south and written from southern peoples' culture, which were often very opposite from our Indian culture or indigenous culture. I'll give you an example. I've taught children for many, many years and when I was teaching science, one of the concepts when you're teaching grade one is living and non-living things and they give examples of a cup is a non-living thing, a plant is a living thing, and then there would be examples of rocks being non-living things, but in our culture, rocks are living things, rivers are living things or creeks, but they're not considered living things in the textbook. So there would be little periods where I would omit them because I'd rather teach them. I would rather not mention those as non-living to little children. So Indigenous education is very important because the stories, the content of our Indigenous education comes from our holistic beliefs. It's really important because what we believe, what we say is just as important as anybody else. That Indigenous education be part of mainstream education, not just as an add-on but a bigger part of our education system, education curricula, resources, videos, books, posters, anything that comes from the Indigenous people. For example, when high school students have to dissect animals, that they can dissect animals from up here, such as fish or tarmigan or a bird or whatever, that somebody caught rather than ordering frogs from some store down south as some teachers have done because they were so used to doing that when they taught in the South. They just automatically thought, okay, we'll order frogs. I would not want to touch a frog. It's a yucky thing because I'm not used to it. But I've taught with high school teachers who are non-Inuit that instead of using frogs, they went tarmigan hunting and used tarmigan to teach biology and dissect birds. To me, that's an Indigenous education, a part of Indigenous education. Indigenous education also validates our Indigenous beliefs about ourselves, about our world, about the animals, about the ocean, whatever our world consists of as well as our spiritual beliefs. So it is very important and I hope to see it a lot more within the next 10 years. That in its studies program, expand. Right now, it's a two-year diploma program. It would be really good to see it as a part of a degree program in the future. And that the funders, the student funders see it as a valuable program. Sometimes the funders say, what kind of job does it lead to? Is it a training program? And sometimes they have in the past been reluctant to fund students because it doesn't necessarily lead to a job. Although it can be, this program can be a big part of any job because they will have a lot more knowledgeable Indigenous culture and language having gone through it.