 Hello everyone, my name is Skandawana Swamp. I'm from the Mohawk Nation. I originate from the Mohawk Nation and I'm now living with my family in Six Nations Reserve. I was asked to come here today to speak about my experience teaching here at Trent University. I'm currently the Chair of Indigenous Knowledge here at Trent University, which is the first of its kind, and I believe the only one in existence in all of Canada. I have been teaching now here at Trent University for the past ten years. I'm currently in my 11th year of teaching. I teach several courses on Indigenous knowledge in both the undergrad level as well as the PhD program, and have been also caught upon to share some of my knowledge in other courses around campus, in the education department and cultural studies. Some of my motivation for coming to this university to teach was really bringing the voice of my people to the university. I was given a lot of guidance and encouragement throughout my life, shown many examples from many of the people from my community in how to raise awareness and educate the outside world about my people. I bring a lot of those stories into my classroom at both the undergraduate level as well as the PhD level and share these experiences, share the teachings that I've acquired throughout my lifetime of learning. Many of the things that I share within my class are some of the rich cultural knowledge that my people have been able to maintain despite all of the struggles that we've faced since contact. And I am very grateful to my parents, to the elders in my community, to my family, to the community as a whole, and to all of our nations throughout the Ladino Shwini Confederacy for being able to hold on to so much knowledge. I am very passionate about what I teach in my courses. I am very passionate about this knowledge and ensuring it's survival into the future coming generations. My approach to teaching within the classroom is based highly upon the manner in which I pass this knowledge onto my own five children. The experience of having children who are not only able to communicate in the Mohawk language or Guanyang Geha, but are also able to communicate in the Cayuga language really uplifts me every day. I share the experience of passing on these teachings, the language, the culture, teaching them about ceremonies, and I share those experiences with my students here at the University to demonstrate to the students, faculty, staff, anybody who desires to learn more about my people that we are still here. We are a living culture. We are still practicing the things that we have practiced since before contact. And my teaching style is that of a very personal experience. It's very personal to me to share these things. I know it may not necessarily be my approach to teaching is drawn from these personal experiences in my life to relate the importance of the culture and the language to everyone. And it may not be the approach that the institutionalized learning applies, but in relation to the indigenous knowledge that I am sharing, it is very important to maintain that sort of teaching method. It's important to create a relationship with the knowledge which you are learning about. And in order to really truly understand what that relationship is, I bring in my own experiences. I bring in the stories that I've experienced since I was a child, since I was a teenager, since I was a young adult, coming into becoming a father and all of those things, they all contribute to how I approach teaching. Some of the activities that I share with my students and allow them to experience, I use a lot of hands-on learning. One of the major assignments that my students have recently participated in was the weaving of a wampum belt. This was a pretty big undertaking. It was a replica of the Wisk Nihonohanjadega Svanta, which is commonly referred to as the Hiawatha Wampum Belt. But in our language, it actually translates into the Five Nations Territorial Belt, referring to the original Five Nations that make up the Lydid Nushuni Confederacy, which are the Ganyang Gahaga or the Mohag, the Onayang Dahaga, the Onayda, Onadak Gahaga, the Ganyang Gwahaga, Kayuganation, as well as the Onondawaga, who are the Sena Kanishin. And it was a pretty big undertaking. It's a very large belt. The imagery from this belt is the foundation for the flag that is commonly used to be representative of the Lydid Nushuni Confederacy. And this belt was then donated to the Akwesasne Freedom School, located in the Akwesasne Reserve. And this past August was auctioned off and purchased by a community member from Akwesasne. And it raised $1,850 in support of the school, which is then applied to continuing the Mohawk Immersion Program at the Akwesasne Freedom School. So things like that, I've been able to incorporate into my class. While we were in the Wampum Belt, students were able to learn the history of the belt, the origins of each of the nations, and how they came to put their weapons of war aside and come to a common understanding of peace and promote the good mind and create unity amongst themselves. So I think it's a really important teaching that has been able to be incorporated into my class. I also do this project with my Indigenous Knowledge 4100 course to do the same thing to create an awareness of these belts. The students are able to learn about our treaty-making processes that existed amongst each other as Indigenous nations and then after contact with European nations. So it's important learning, learning about the history of my people, learning about the language of my people, learning about our cultural teachings, our values and beliefs by actively being involved in the hands-on activity. So I apply a lot of experiential learning within my courses. Another project that I was able to have my students participate in is the creation of a condolence cane. The condolence cane is a mnemonic device that is used by my people to remind them of the oral traditions related to the foundation of the Liddino Shunni Confederacy. This condolence cane is specifically used within an ancient ceremony that was passed on to us by the peacemaker and it is a roll call of the 50 original Lodianeso. And we do a replica of this cane to come to an understanding of the origins of each of the 50 chiefs' names, their meanings and their relationships to one another both within each of their respective nations and how those nations relate to one another. Another activity that my students participate in is the creation of pictographs, taking one of our stories and using pictograph writing to relate to to relay the message of the story. I feel it's really important to do this project as it helps students understand the importance of oral language learning. Pictographs are not necessarily a written language but it is the way that my people historically have communicated with one another. Pictograph writing was used to mark certain events that have happened. Oftentimes the historical record may tell you that these pictograph writings were found on trees and they were records of historical events. So one of the stories that I have my students produce a pictograph. One of the stories that I have my students produce a pictograph about is the origin of the clan system. The clan system of the Ludinoshuni people is our foundational teaching which provides structure to our people. The origins of the story itself relate back to our first experiences with death within our amongst our people and how at that time really crippled our society where we were really unable to to cope with that with dealing with death. And what we were able to accomplish was there was a young man who at that time had proposed to the elders that they gather at a certain place along the river. And what had happened was that as they gathered at that river this young man had given instructions for them to cross this river. And there was a log laying across this body of water and people were instructed to grab onto an overhanging vine to help them cross this river. The people followed this young man's instructions and about halfway through only half of the group were able to make it across this body of water when the vine had snapped. What resulted from this event was the creation of the two sides of the longhouse and the separation of clans. The women, the eldest women of each of the respective families that were gathered there were instructed to be mindful of any special circumstances or events that they experienced. And many of the women responded that they had seen various animals and birds. Some of them were some women in the water like the turtle and the eel. Others were were running about like the deer and the bear, the wolf, as well as the beaver. And others were flying overhead such as the hawk, the heron, and the snipe. The women on either side of this river had experienced seeing these different animals and the animals which were seen on each side of the river then became, you know, seen on each side of the river then became the clans by which each of those families were to follow. And the young man had pointed out to them that he said, Which translates into what we call in today's time matrilineal descent, meaning that our lineage goes through the women. So our clans pass on through the women's side. I am Wolf Clan, I am Wolf Clan because my mother is Wolf Clan and her mother was Wolf Clan. And her mother was Wolf Clan and so on and so forth. So all of the female relatives of these women carry on that clan into the future. So this project of doing the pictograph writing based on that teaches my students to learn and understand the meaning of the clan system beyond it being something to use as it teaches them to learn that the clans are about responsibility rather than just an identity. So our responsibility as related by this story teaches us that on one side of that river and the respective clans on that side when experiencing times of death or in any times of need that is the responsibility of the clans on the other side of that river to come to their aid. And so this works both ways when one side of the house experiences a loss of a loved one. It is the responsibility of the other side to come to their aid to take care of everything that needs to be taken care of burial, the speaking, cooking, cleaning, the digging of the grave, all of those things. So it is a really important structure for our people. Some people call it the backbone of our Confederacy. And when we experienced contact following the matrilineal line, the European nations in order to, I guess, destroy our people had to first dismantle our clan system. They did this through the creation of status cards, which follows your male lineage. And in many ways, many of the laws that were passed that were used to assimilate our people were aimed directly at destroying the clan system. In today's time, we are starting to experience a time where we are relearning our ways. We are revitalizing ways which have become weakened over time. We are relearning our languages. We are experiencing a great resurgence. And our young people are demonstrating to us that they are being born with this strength that they will uplift our people into the future. And so the experience that I share in my class are how these young people are accomplishing these things, how that long house that had become weakened in the past is now beginning to be repaired and becoming a stronger house. The long house which I speak of is not a building. It is a metaphor that was given to us by the peacemaker that we call ourselves Ludinoshuni, which is, we call ourselves, we call ourselves the Ludinoshuni, which means they who build the house. I want to share an experience that I had in my first year of teaching involving the given of an assignment on pictograph writing. In my first year of teaching here, I had offered a course on Ludinoshuni culture and traditions. And I had a student who had taken this course and one of the assignments I had given was to do a depiction of the origin of the clan system. After several classes covering this topic of the clan system and its origins and its importance to our people, learning thoroughly about how we apply the clan system within our societies and how it forms the foundation of our society as a people. The student had taken from the pages of, and grandma said, that's a book that I use as my main textbook for my courses here at Trent. And Tom Porter shares a chapter about the origin of the clan system in his book and grandma said, and students use this chapter to learn about the origin of the clan system. And they're instructed to give, they are instructed to produce a pictograph project based upon this chapter. So when this particular student had arrived to class, she came in carrying a big bundle of paper. So this, the expectation of the students for this project is to produce a, the expectation of the students in my class when producing the pictograph writing assignment is to create out of postage paper what appears to be ancient writing on a leather hide. So I walked them through the steps of how to create a pictograph assignment. I teach them how to tear at the edges of the paper to make it look more like a piece of leather hide. And they then crumple up this assignment, which is very hard on the student to do, to work so hard on an assignment and then to be expected to just crumple it up. The act of crumpling up this paper softens the postage paper giving it more of a leather like appearance. So one day, one of my students walks in and bringing in her depiction and she comes in and she has this large bundle of postage paper. I would say it was approximately three feet wide. So generally the assignment expectation is to produce a pictograph, which is about three feet wide by about four feet long. The student brought this assignment into my class and I realized it was a really large project. So I brought her up to the hallway of I brought her up to the hallway of the Indigenous Studies Department and and beginning at the stairway next to the Olive Dickson reading room, she began to unravel this assignment exposing all of the pictograph depictions of the story that she had created. In the unraveling of this assignment, she became as she was unraveling this assignment, she was walking further and further away from me to the distance of David Newhouse's office, which is approximately a hundred or so feet away from where she began. And I was in such awe that a student was able to create such an elaborate assignment and it demonstrated to me how personal this student had taken the knowledge which she was learning about. Not only did she do a depiction of the words which were contained within the chapter on the origin of the clan system that was written by Tom Porter, but she also applied much of the oral histories, the oral knowledge which I had shared in class into this assignment. This assignment was more than an assignment and even to use the word assignment to describe this is I would consider it being inappropriate because this was more of an epic art installation piece. And at the end of my first year of teaching here at the university, Tom Porter was given an honorary doctorate from Trent University. The day before the graduation ceremony, the day before the convocation ceremony where Tom Porter was awarded this honorary doctorate degree, the Indigenous Studies Department had hosted an event honoring Tom Porter as well as graduates. And as part of this ceremony, this student's work was presented to Tom Porter as a gift. And he's held on to that and to my knowledge still holds onto this piece. So over the years, in the past 11 years, I've experienced many projects come before me similar to this one. They may not all look the same, but to me it demonstrates that many of my students are coming to a true understanding of the importance of the knowledge which is being shared within the classroom here. And it is especially rewarding knowing that many of the students who are producing these projects, this may be the only exposure to this type of knowledge that they've experienced. Every year, as part of my courses, I assign a project on the Thanksgiving Address. The Thanksgiving Address is what we call in our language, which is translated into the matters which come before all else in given things. So within our communities as Lidino Shuni people, within our communities as Yunguanyang Kahaga, Yunguano Shuni people, whenever we gather together as whenever we gather together for ceremonies, for social events, celebrations, meetings, we always begin with an acknowledgement to the natural world. We begin first with ourselves as people being the youngest of all creations and we work our way up from the bottom of our feet. We're given thanks to our mother, the earth, to all the waters that are running, the oceans, lakes, rivers, streams, waterfalls, wells, all the fish and the bugs that live in the waters, to all the different types of food sustenance we have, to the medicines, to all the animals, trees, birds, we move our attention up to the sky to the four directions where the winds come from, to our grandfather, thunder beings, the two orbs of light in the sky, the what we call the elder brother sun, our grandmother, the moon, to the stars which help our grandmother moon light up the nighttime sky and bring the dew drops to the far sacred beings, messenger beings that bring our words of thanksgiving and prayer to the creator and look after us every day and every night so that no harm will come to us as we do all about this earth and finally to that place which we call the land of the creator or that original place of life. We greet all of those things and we say thank you to all of them for they sustain our lives here on this earth. It's an important teaching. It is a foundational teaching for our people. It is very important teaching that I believe is very important for students here at Trent and really everyone in the world should be learning these words to be thankful to all of creation. It teaches us the value of respect in the earth and all inhabitants, all things that come from her, all things that sustain life. I incorporate these teachings of the Honda Galihua Deku into my course and I asked the students to produce projects based on the teachings shared to them through my course lectures and through our textbooks on the thanksgiving address and it is a creative assignment that my students are able to produce. Our teaching as a people is that each and every one of us are born to this earth and we are gifted with a special gift and talent. So when I ask my students what their special gifts and talents are, many of them are artists, many of them are musicians, poets, writers, photographers, all sorts of gifts and talents are shared within my classroom. And so rather than asking my students to produce a project that is all the same, I give them the opportunity to use their own creativity in producing these projects. So I wanted to point out one project today by one of my students. Having a large classroom, when I began giving this assignment out in my first year of teaching, I had about 15 students. A couple of years ago, I had to offer a larger course on an introduction to Indigenous knowledge, which then resulted in 54 students being in my class. And now this year, I have 90 students in this course. So it's a pretty massive undertaking for my students to not only come to an understanding of what the Baha'u'llah and the Gali Hodeq are going to do, but to have them all produce these creative projects. So I want to go back to that first year when I had this large class of 54 students. It was my first experience teaching such a large class. And one by one, my students began to hand their creative projects in based upon the Thanksgiving address. I had one student who waited very patiently for the entire class to hand in their projects. She stood there holding this yellow plastic bag. And I could only guess that her assignment was inside of this bag. She held on to it very tightly and was very hesitant when it came time to hand in it to me. Before handing this project to me, she said, I want you to really take good care in handling this project. It means a lot to me. So I acknowledged her and I said, I understood. And I reached my hands out and she handed this assignment to me. I took it and just as she had instructed, I took great care in handling this assignment. When I began to go over all of these assignments, I saved this assignment for last. I had put it aside away from the others, as that was what the student had instructed and asked of me. When I finally got to this assignment, I opened up this bag. I reached my hands in and I pulled out what appeared to be folded up cloth. I began to unfold this cloth and what I began to unveil was a very beautifully decorated hand sewn, hand embroidered, hand beaded quilt blanket. I was in such awe that I took this assignment and I was very proud of this student so much that I went to my mother's house and I shared this project with her so she could see the beauty that this student had created. When I returned back to the university and handed the projects back, I asked my student to stand in front of class and to share her project with the rest of her classmates. She stood before everyone and she began to explain that she had spent 200 hours producing this quilt. I was taken aback by spending 200 hours on an assignment for a class. It spoke a lot to the knowledge which was being taught and it spoke a lot to me as a professor that I felt at that point I was really accomplishing what I was setting up to do. The student began to present their quilt to the rest of the students explaining her motivation to her designs. She had very intricately sewn, hand sewn, hand embroidered fish swimming in the bodies of water. She had beadwork to illustrate the stars in the night time sky. It was a very beautiful piece of art. I even joked and said I would like to purchase this from you. Her reply was I cannot sell it because this blanket is something that I am going to present to my future child and I was very moved at that time because to me that was a true demonstration of what Indigenous knowledge was. It was a demonstration that she understood that Indigenous knowledge is something that has to be loved. It is something that has to be cherished. It is something that you have to have a relationship with. I was very moved that day and every year I share this story with my students to help motivate them to create their own creative projects. Every year I receive assignments similar to this assignment in the passion that they put into them. When asked about how I assess my students, I look to how they walk, how they talk, how they act as a result of being in my courses. Grades, I guess I would consider in relation to my own personal learning although they are important. They sometimes do not convey the true essence of learning and the assignment that I just spoke about I feel truly is a demonstration of what has really been learned and accomplished and taken one of my courses. When I think about education and where I want to be in 10 years, 20 years as a people we've grown up not necessarily thinking in time spans of years but we say the future days to come. When we speak about our past we say things that have occurred long ago. So where I would like to begin in explaining where I would like to be in 10 years I would like to first share some insights into my own past as the youngest child of seven children to my parents Jake and Judy Swamp. Throughout my lifetime growing up within this household there were many experiences that were shared with us, many teachings. We were allowed to be actively participant active participants in our traditional governance. We traveled a lot with our parents to attend grand council meetings in Onodaga which went to Nioge or our central fire to the Confederacy. Along the way met many of our knowledgeable elders, knowledge holders, ceremonial keepers, heard many of the stories of my parents' experiences growing up in our community and what it was like to be traditional to be followers of Longhouse Ways. My mother often spoke about the struggles that she had talking about how she would often get in fistfights with other girls her age. Her and her sisters became very strong-minded women as a result of the challenges and struggles that they experienced as young girls being Longhouse within our community. When they were young being Longhouse being traditional was not something that people wanted to be. People spoke very low of people who were followers of Longhouse Ways. They ridiculed them. They suffered a lot of abuses both from within our community and from the outside laws were put in place to discourage gathering together to simply dance. Laws were put in place to assimilate us, to make us lose our culture, to force us, to do away with our traditions, to strip us of our languages. My parents grew up in this time and when they became parents they began to raise their children in a certain way according to the traditions of our people. There were other parents who were raising their children at that time who were also actively taken out upon themselves to empower their children. In the early 70s they began to take a stand and they made the conscious effort that they were no longer going to live their lives according to what they were forced to do which was to erase their culture and to erase their languages. They made the effort as an act of resistance, as an act of resilience, as an act of reclamation of their culture and their languages. They did this by way of giving their children a Mohawk name only. I am one of these original children who were given the Mohawk name only. As a young boy I always understood that there was a responsibility to that. I don't carry a Christian name, a common name. My name is Kahandoone. It means place of the big field. I understood what my parents were trying to do at that time. When I was a young boy I became very defiant and very strong-willed. My mother shared this story with me as a young boy that when I was about five years old she gave me a couple of dollars to buy a toy. When I got to the corner the cashier charged me tax and I told the cashier I don't pay tax. I'm Mohawk. Those were the types of values that were shared within my home. Those were the types of things that I grew up with practicing. Those are the types of things that I now share with my children who only have native names as well. When I look to the education system of the future I have to always consider what it was like for my parents when they were going to school. Fortunately for them they did not have to go to residential school but it didn't mean that they didn't experience the same type of abuses within the schools that they did attend. They were still punished for speaking their language. They were still ridiculed for being traditionally minded in any way. They were still discouraged to speak their language. I remember one time attending an event in Akwesasne. It was called the early years program and what they had done was they gathered all of the children who were in the daycares and the head start programs, senior kindergarten, junior kindergarten, grade ones through four and they brought these children together at our arena in Akwesasne called the Atnawala Kowa Arena. My children at the time were students in the program, Skawa Jila Mohawk Immersion Program, and all of their classmates, all of the kids that they went to school with, everyone that day were dressed in full outfits from head to toe, moccasins, ribbon shirts, bridge class leggings, skirts and leggings, powwows, shawls, bustles, roaches, gastoas, beadwork. There was about a hundred kids all dancing in the arena to both a big drum from Ottawa that was invited, sharing powwow music and also to a group of young men from our community who were sharing our own traditional longhouse music. I remember observing my parents when they came into the lobby and very quietly to one another, I remember them speaking to each other in the language and my father looked at my mother and he says, would you have ever imagined that you would ever see a day like this? It wasn't announced to everyone in the lobby at that time, it wasn't being directed to me, it was simply two people who had experienced a childhood of struggle, an adulthood of struggle, in trying to maintain being Ganyang Kahaga. When I think about the education system of the future, I can't help but draw from this experience because not so many years ago, the things that I speak about in my class, the dancing, the songs, the teachings could very well have ended up in me being put in jail, being punished, being verbally attacked, being physically attacked. Today I am the inaugural chair of Indigenous Knowledge at Trent University and as I had mentioned earlier, the only one of its kind in Canada. I am doing the work that I am continuing the work that my parents had started, that individuals like Tom Porter, Ron LaFrance Sr., Moes David Gung, what these individuals did to share their wealth of knowledge with our people and with the outside world. I continue that work and I try to do the best that I can possibly do to continue it on into the future to ensure that there is a voice for those people of our past that had their voice taken away. I stand in my classes sharing the teachings that were once not allowed to be shared. My students are learning about my people. They are broadening their understanding of our ways as Indigenous people here on Turtle Island. Being the inaugural chair of Indigenous Knowledge here at Trent University, I have a great responsibility not only to the University but to the people from which I come from. When I look to what I would like to see with Indigenous education in the next 10 years or Ohandu Wahni Zaladinyungi, I imagine a time when there are not only one chair of Indigenous knowledge at each university, but it would be so great to see an entire department of Indigenous knowledge holders within each of those universities, not only here in Canada, but in the United States as well. I would like to imagine a time when my children would be able to walk into a university and they would be able to be educated not only in the Western way, but to also be able to have the opportunity of becoming fully immersed and educated in Indigenous ways of knowing.