 The name of our program is the Maps, Films, Rights and Land Claim Certificate. We hold it annually every summer at the University of the Fraser Valley. I've been doing so since about 2008, if I remember correctly, perhaps 2009. It's a condensed four-week course in which we have students in class and in the field for an intensive four-day week, four straight weeks. At UFV, in terms of academic credit, we qualify our certificate as the combination of three distinct but interrelated four-credit third-year courses. So students, by completing this program, end up with 12 upper-level credits that they can pretty much use for program or for elective purposes. It has three courses, one taught by instructor shift from geography, two of them taught by instructor shift from history, from a disciplinary perspective. And we consider it unique. We're not aware of it being offered or anything like it being offered anywhere else, certainly in the province. My role is in some sense twofold. I instruct one of the three courses, a geography course on the use of maps in the resolution and litigation of Aboriginal Land Claims in BC, but I also serve an administrative role as formerly associate dean in the Department of Geography and also more recently in HR. I'm kind of the person at UFV that kind of makes it go from an administrative perspective, clearing it, of course, with curriculum committees, all those kinds of things that academics have to deal with and to get this offered in a unique way for what we think has been, and I'm sure Lisa will ask me, a life-changing experience for us as instructors and also for our students. And I think it was driven by a desire in the late 2000s when we had the right constellation of a personnel at UFV and a realization that there was a lot of misunderstanding out there, not just amongst the general public, but even in circles where you think folks would know better, whether it be for paralegals or lawyers or teachers. And of course, land claims being a huge issue for contemporary British Columbia has been for some time something that we could contribute. I would say in some sense we wanted to do something in terms of reconciliation before reconciliation became a more fashionable term in the latter few years. I think the impetus partly came from the initiative of the instructor ship. One of my colleagues, Hugh Brody, has had a distinguished career going back to the early 1970s when really in some sense he pioneered the whole concept of at least representing and mapping an indigenous land claim with the Inuit land use and occupancy studies of the early 1970s. And then Hugh coming here as a candidate research chair in Aboriginal studies probably I think in about 2007. For myself, I had just minted not too many years before a PhD that writ large was trying to take a serious look at the history of Aboriginal cartography since first contact in British Columbia and through to the present day. And at that time, this would have been 2006 or 2007, having just been called as an expert witness to testify in the Chilcotin title case when I did some of the cartographic support for that litigation. On top of that, UFV was really starting to get serious about indigenization and I mean in the general sense both programmatically but also institutionally. So there was a constellation of sort of impulses that came together in the late first decade of this century. And some encouragement I would say on the part of the office of the Provo for us to bring our expertise together and come up with something that spoke to in a unique way, one of the very definite and distinct social economic political and cultural challenges of our time, which is in essence, what is it that land claims are? Where do they come from? Why are they important? Why are they only on our table now and not earlier? And why is it important that we find a way to resolve what has sometimes been called in the history of this province, the unsettled Indian land question? And we thought that something that looked directly at the resolution, the reconciliation, the methodologies that one has to adopt when one decides to launch a land claim against Canada or the province as whatever the case may be, litigations that are seeking title and rights, just a huge not necessarily misunderstanding but just a general lack of knowledge out there in, I suppose, outside a very narrow portion of the academic world about what exactly are these things? And we designed it as something we thought we could deliver to students, indigenous and non-indigenous, cross-cultural. And I think in essence that's sort of what drove us, it was kind of just a few, a series of lucky events that came together at the right time and the willingness of the university to let this happen, that we were able to make it go. Hard to say. I don't think the original aim of the program has changed. The original aim was, as I've said, this is something people need to know about in all walks of life, legal, academic, pedagogical, cultural, coffee table, whatever the case may be. And so I think if we've changed anything, it's perhaps been in our approach over the last nine or ten summers that we've done this, because you learn when you're working with a mixed student population and you are dealing with culturally, politically sometimes economically sensitive topics. I think if anything's changed, it's the way we've approached the pedagogy in the classroom and in the field, the original objective, that we think there's a story that needs to be told here, that everybody needs to know a lot more about. That hasn't changed. That still holds. Well, I think we measure the success of our program. We suffer from the same difficulties that universities in general have, which is tracking the success of their students after they leave the academy or after they leave a particular program. But we do know that we have placed students in very viable occupations. We have had students over the last nine years that have gone on to be paralegals that have actually gone to law school with a view to taking aboriginal law. We have put students into the Department of Indian Affairs and the specific claim branch. So we know that they've gotten government postings. We've had at least one student started her own online Web 2.0 GIS barefoot mapping consultancy service. So we get anecdotal feedback from students that we've had in the past and know that they're very successful. Beyond that, we know from student feedback, both in terms of official evaluations, which we still have to do at a university level, but also anecdotally and in testimonials or whatever the case may be, how much this, these 16 days over these four weeks changed their lives. That taught them something about things they knew they wanted to know more about, but had not previously had the right opportunity or vehicle to get at, because there's really nothing else out there that is focused so directly on land claims, where they come from, where are they going, why are they going, where are they going, what does it mean for all of us? And in terms of again reconciliation more generally. And students have told us that it has been a life-changing experience for them. I suppose more selfishly, perhaps, we can tell from our student evaluations, our instructor evaluations, how much they enjoyed it. It's the kind of material that often in class gets emotional because it is cultural. You have students from all walks of life in our classes. Some are wounded kids, needless to say, indigenous kids, suffering the director generational effects of residential school. Personally, I was, maybe I wasn't in hindsight shocked, but many, many indigenous students at UFV having come through our program, yes, a lot of them from the lower Fraser Valley and many of them knowing almost nothing about the circumstances. For example, something as fundamental as the creation of the Indian Reserve system, where did that come from? Students just didn't know this. It didn't matter from what cultural perspective they came from. And to see the dialogue between, particularly, and I can't put it in either way, between indigenous and non-indigenous students in these classes in the field. And when I got them to do a mock Aboriginal land use and occupancy study in one of my workshops, just the focus they were bringing to this, the actual experience of being able to bring out a small piece, yes, but an image of what an indigenous life world looks like or feels like that they hadn't had the, they never even imagined could have possibly existed. So we know it works because our enrollment has gone up every summer for the last four summers to the point where we turned a half a dozen students away. Last summer in 2018, we still took in 32, which is really treading, treading dangerously on meeting your learning outcomes, which we say very clearly are in-depth participation, dialogue, the willing to ask questions, the willing to be controversial, and to hear the voices of 32 students in a condensed day, when of course, as yes, as academics, we still have all this material you want to give them. But to see them respond and focus on that. And then when all that is said and done to come out and have some of the successes they've had, they've had since academic, academically in real employment, but just in general people that have, when we see them in the hallway, still tell us how much this experience was to them personally. And we feel very good about that. So we know it works, and it's also why it was so some reluctance we had to put it off for one year this year in 2019, but hopefully we'll bring it back in 2020. And what that will give us is an opportunity to at least reboot this thing, because we do have a little bit of updating to do. But how do you deliver something like this to many people? It's almost a contradiction to where you need to go in 21st century post-secondary pedagogy, which increasingly speaks to experiential learning, smaller classes, group work, hands on applied research, those kinds of things. How do you get that in? When in some sense, the instructorship is quite specific. And I should, before I go any further, I want to acknowledge Sunny McHalsy and Dave Sheppey at Stalow Nation, who are the gentlemen that co-teach with Hugh and I, and really take both of our areas of expertise, mine such as it is in Aboriginal cartography generally, Hughes in filmmaking and representation, but also Dave's and Sunny's because they're in Stalow Nation, they work for Stalow Nation, and they bring this very unique Stalow perspective to sort of the general thematic topics that our certificate is about. And of course, that's exceedingly important for us because UFB is very closely alive with and of course, sits on the traditional unceded territory of the Stalow Nation. While the curriculum is determined, as I think I've indicated, probably as much by expertise, I consider myself as a historical geographer, sometimes a cultural geographer. But I've always felt, and obviously it's a little bit of bias there, that land claims is fundamentally about geography. And I was fascinated by maps, even when I was a kid. And so that interest in cartography and the ways in which it represents particular spaces or territories or worldviews, we think or thought at the start was a missing piece of the geography programs writ large and post-secondary generally. Never mind, as it might relate to the Indian land question in British Columbia. Hugh Brody, of course, has been making films for many, many years, Hunters and Bombers on Indian land, more recently the Kwe Kwe piece on the Healing Center at Chehalis. Internationally well-known scholar, filmmaker, most recently largely responsible for the revitalization of the first Indigenous land claim, if you will, in post-apartheid South Africa. And of course, him being here, as I've said, at CRC Chair. Dave Sheppey, I had known from earlier work when I was doing my PhD back in the late 1990s. He was then senior archaeologist at Stalow Nation. He's now got a bigger title than that, but basically is in charge of the Stalow Resource and Research Management Center, and Sonny McCauley, no introduction needed, in my opinion, a virtual encyclopedia of Halkin-Balen history and geography in Saltamakwa in the Lord Fraser Valley. And so obviously that expertise took us where we wanted to go. But I think at the end of the day, these are the things we think need to be addressed in any certificate or equivalent program. Professors that want to teach or learn something about the history of Aboriginal land claims in British Columbia, where they're going and why they're going. And so much of that is not just about the practical realities and challenges that First Nations face when they essentially are being asked to go to court or wherever to prove their existence as a people with an identity. In some sense, as I've been told many times by folks that I've worked with, why do we have to prove what we already know? That's the reality in the world of legal discourse and Western worldviews that we live in. And so much of this is not in short just about sort of the practicalities of executing a land claim. Do you have the resources? Can you get the research done to meet the whatever the legal test happens to be in the flavor of the day in terms of the evolution of Aboriginal law in British Columbia? But it's not just about those real challenges about how you represent and conduct that process. How do you film it? How do you document it? How do you map it? How do you in fact circulate it into public discourse more generally? And what are the methods by which you do so? And one of the things, of course, we ask of our students is to start being very critical. For example, about what they see even on documentary television about Indigenous lifeways and Indigenous land claims. What about popular media? What does that say? What kind of messages do those things drive? At the same time as you have blockades as at Unistotan or the Dakota Pipeline Access, there's these two poles, sort of romanticized vision of First Nations that sort of stems back to dances with wolves counterpoised against the real realities of on-the-ground conflict. So how is it represented? How is it transmitted? And for us, maps are certainly part of that. That's right down Geography's alley. And certainly representation is right down a Hughes alley. But the sort of the historical contextual stuff that wraps around that and makes this stall-o as much as anything else is the participation of stall-o nation itself. They collaborate with us. We take the certificate out of the university and we put it into the stall-o resource and resource management center at SARTUS. So that we're doing it on, yes, we're still doing it on seed stall-o territory, but at least we're doing on co-police, which is stall-o nation grounds. So the curriculum in short was by us and from us in our interests, but it also fits with the broader objectives in program development at UFE more generally. And we knew then, as we still do know a decade later, i.e. in the late 2000s, that our Indigenous curriculum was wanting. We didn't even have yet an Indigenous studies major minor. That only came later, maybe a few years after that. So as it's turned out, of course, the courses have fit in beautifully for upper level options for the Indigenous studies major minor, but they're standalone courses on their own right. And in some sense, I think we started to fill in a few of the missing pieces for a more robust post-secondary Indigenous curriculum that kind of in some sense almost wrapped itself around those. And so in short, the curriculum was driven by where UFE was going and its various state of strategic plans vis-a-vis indigenization, but something that tapped into the expertise of the people that were here on deck when they wanted to go that direction. And obviously we would bring to the table what we thought we were somewhat qualified to speak of. And that's what drove the curriculum. And I would say that, and I want to say this, we've done a lot of second guessing, of course, in terms of the fact that we are teaching, yes, in some sense, Indigenous material. The majority of us are Indigenous instructors. We've always felt, Hugh, Dave, Sonny, and I, and I think you speak for all of them, that it isn't the messenger so much as that matters than the message. Does what we offer students from academic and sometimes non-academic backgrounds, does it offer them an explanation, a vision? Or does it hang together? In other words, do the four courses which we deliver on alternating days deliberately, do they hang together through those 16 days? Does what I have to say about the use of cartography in the dispossession of Indigenous peoples as much as it can be used for the repossession process by Indigenous peoples, does that matter? And doesn't work with what Hugh has to say about other kinds of representation in film and documentation, these multiple narratives going on at the same time. I've never forgotten, when I was doing my PhD, the headline after the first edition of the B.C. Treaty Commission's 1994 First Nations Land Claims in British Columbia under the new rules of the B.C.T.C. And I'll never forget the headline in the Vancouver province. I forget what month it was in 1994. And you've seen the new map put out by First Nations in B.C. They want, geez, 110% of the province. And that call from the sort of general public has stuck with me for the better part of the last 20 plus years. No, it's not 110%, but when you start mapping Indigenous territorialities, when you start representing it, you realize, you know, overlap is part of what makes an Indigenous world different than the Western. How do those two perspectives talk to each other at a treaty table in court? By what means do they do that dialogue or undertake it? We try to be clear and nonpartisan in terms of we're not advocates necessarily for the treaty process on the one hand or in favor of just outright litigation on the other. We do give our expertise to our students that these are serious choices you always have to make, but we try to remain completely nonpartisan. We do try to walk a somewhat delicate line that sometimes touches on emotionally charged topics. It's pretty difficult to talk about land claims without talking about residential schools. And we quite frankly have many Indigenous students that have been there done that. So I just wanted to make the point that I think we're reflective enough as instructors and as a university to find the right space, in other words, and by all means disagreeing with us as you like. I think at the end of the day, Lisa, what we've always looked for, and I spoke to this earlier in terms of feedback from students, did at the end of that 16 days have an impact? Did it hang together? Did it make sense? Did the case present itself kind of as a prima facie reality a check on where we've been as a province, where we've been as a colonizing power? And we don't pretend for a minute that, I mean, decolonization is difficult. It's difficult for people that otherwise profess to know that they have to decolonize. It's still tough to do. And I'm always reminded also 140 years of colonization might take seven generations to completely decolonize. And we do tell our students at the end of the 16 days, and this is the message we repeat all through this thing, is that yes, the academic piece is part of it. You got to get the grades to get the credits and all that sort of stuff. But at the end of the 16 days, does this change the way you think? And we have so many students who are so charged up by the end of this thing, I want to do something now to build on this momentum. And we tell them, if all you ever do for the rest of your life is just change the mindset of one person, you have done that, you become an ally, you're part of the broader movement for peace and justice and reconciliation. That really is at the heart of everything we've tried to do in this certificate. It kind of grew very quickly over the first two editions. We always envisioned it as having more, I'll say for starters, more of a field experience. We haven't had as much of that as we would have liked, and I can give you reasons for that. For the first couple of editions, we also had some fascinating guest visitors. A couple of gentlemen, in fact, who were directly involved in the Git-San-Delga-Murk trial came to visit us in our first year. And something similar happened in the second year. We found, though, very quickly that to try to squeeze in all the material and get students involved, especially the bigger the classes got, time became really precious. And we did manage to develop my, as I said earlier, we devoted an entire day of one of my four or five classes over the 16 days to an in-house land use and occupancy mapping project that just gets students to actually do this from the oral history right on up in class. Would we have liked to take students out into the field and do some GPS positioning and maybe a little bit of filming? Obviously we would, but logistically, and then we squeeze in, of course, the now almost world-famous joint UFD Stull placenames tour that Sunny delivers every year. We just ran out of time. So the pedagogical process increasingly became much, again, in contradiction to what we say about post-secondary education in the 21st century, a little bit more conventional in terms of in class, but very conversational. We, of course, in each class, which we, again, alternated. It'll be me one day, Hugh the next day, maybe Dave and Sunny the day after that, maybe a field trip the next day. So there's a good rotation and students don't get sick of us in a hurry. So we wanted to have this rotational pedagogy because that helps, of course, to have the material from these three separate courses kind of hang together in a more interlinked manner as you go from one day to the next. Yes, we would have liked to retain a bit more in-house stuff, something we're going to consider when we reboot for 2020. But we wanted the classes to the extent that we had to have them to be conversational, dialogical. There is no final exam in this certificate. We only ever asked students to do four things, show up, participate, be active being one of them, participate in the in-class workshop on land use and occupancy mapping being the second one. Do for us, at the end of the 16 days, a 20-minute presentation or any topic of your choice that learned or charged you from the certificate material, which in some sense has always been the most rewarding for us as instructors because we have 25 of these things over a two-day stretch and some of them are outstanding. And what we ask for on top of that is a major project which essentially revolves around what we like to call an analytical self-study because we haven't figured out what else to call it. It's not a diary, it's not a journal, but we ask students after all is said and done after the 16 days, take off for a month, think about this stuff and write us a report on your journey through the certificate. Where you started, why you started, why you wanted to get in, what you learned from the certificate, maybe what you thought you might learn but didn't learn, the kinds of questions you came away with. And in that final project, show us some ability to think between the courses, think against the grain, how does that material hang together. And so we think four pieces. One, a written analytical self-study, which is the majority of the grade such as that is relevant, which it is of course, and the rest of it split between the oral presentation and just being there and participating and being a part of the group. And so in some sense in 16 days, that month, yes, after we're finished and you've got to write that analytical self-study, it's a lot of work. And because all of this certificate comes at you in 16 days plus an additional four weeks to think about it, it is a lot of work. But when you think about how much work you would have to do to get 12 credits across three separate 13-week courses at the upper level, it's a pretty good deal. And it works. And I'm happy to say it's exactly what UFE thinks it needs more of. Special topic, condensed, cohort-based, nonlinear timelines, because students of course work different kinds of hours these days. So pedagogically, also, yes, driven by where we say as a university we're going in terms of 21st century learning, experiential, thinking across boundaries, global citizenship, participation, all those things, but still doing all of this through courses that, yes, do have a very and sometimes intense academic focus. So an organic pedagogical process that we have adjusted on the fly as we've gone will continue to do so. And if I do have one serious want, it is to make it even more experiential, more in the field than it has been previously. Indigenous perspectives, of course, I did touch on this in terms of the instructorship of the four of us. Sunny is, of course, an enclothmuk, Indigenous, neither Dave, Hugh, or I are. And so again, it does cause us to consider the question that is still out there in circles by what dinner authority do non-Indigenous have to speak for or with or on behalf of Indigenous peoples and their concerns. And I think I've already addressed in general, we think that's a non-starter in terms of a counter. What matters at the end of the day is does what is offered make sense? Does it hang together? Is it an argument or a statement or a case that seems intuitively to be justifiable on the evidence? Indigenous perspectives, of course, are a huge part more of Sunny's and Dave's course, because Sunny takes them out and into Saltamaquo, into the Lord Houser Valley, and gives them a geographic tour from a from a Helcambilum perspective with his place name tour. We use Indigenous research methods. I think I've spoken a little bit about that, dialogical conversational. We have no final exams. We have no midterms, which are totally Western forms of assessment, to say the least. We find that in offering a significant portion of the grade in terms of an end of 16-day 15 to 20-minute PowerPoint presentation of your choice, we've had performative presentations, student performance musically, how does Indigenous music relate to the resolution of Indigenous land claims, for example. Students get an opportunity to do all kinds of performative activities for lack of a better term as part of their assessment. Obviously, our authorship, to the extent that we go to outside sources, a lot of Indigenous authorship, both from a theoretical and research methods standpoint, also from a content standpoint. It's true that those of us in sort of Western culture cannot ever fully understand an Indigenous perspective. And also, of course, we get representation of those perspectives from the students and our classes themselves who speak up and often speak up bravely, boldly, emotionally. And at the end of the day, they tell us that they very much appreciated the way in which the class generally, and the instructor-ship in particular, was able to be accommodating, was able to have people's voices heard, if sometimes controversially. And that was both often support or critical. That's all part of it. So we do the best we can. And actually, for me, perspective is really what it all comes down to. Really what this certificate is about is perspective. It's about, in essence, it's about the resolution and the reconciliation of two quite different worlds and two quite different worldviews that came into collision on the Northwest Coast specifically, earlier elsewhere, and has brought us to this place. So I think it's something that needs multiple perspectives. It needs perspectives from both the Indigenous side and from the non-Indigenous side, because ultimately, what land claims are about is about the negotiation of a space between two quite different worldviews. One has recorded its history in documentary fashion by lines on maps and in written texts and legal discourse. And one that has hung on to that legacy orally through memory by the oldest form of knowledge transmission we still know, and for lack of a better term, storytelling. And anything that helps us in the certificate tell a story may be the best way to put a point on this. Okay. My name is Lafacetsi, I'm the secret strength inside, also known as Albert Sondheim-Kelsi, I'm the historian and culture advisor for the Estonian Research and Resource Management Center. Let's do that job and experience that I bring some expertise, I guess, to the course, which is called Indigenous Maps, Films, Rights and Land Claims. It's actually a certificate that is offered by the University of the Fraser Valley. My role is one of four instructors. The other instructor is one is a geography professor, the other one is a filmmaker and then one of my co-workers who's involved with the treaty and then myself as the historian and culture advisor. Okay, what the program is about, looking at the history, mainly in BC, looking at the history of what's called refer to as land claims, also included in there, you look at the treaty and rights, those are things, but you'll notice the first part of it talks about maps and films. Okay, so it's all about land claims and treaty and the history of that, how the land was acquired by the provincial government and now, and then now looking at ways that we as First Nations, throughout BC, using maps, using films and using other means, like negotiations and such things as that, to get our land back, and the different opportunities out there, I guess, are different programs like the specific claims and the treaty, BC treaty process, treaty negotiations, that sort of thing. It's pretty well for adults mainly, post-secondary students because it's operated to EFE, so I imagine most of the people are all post-secondary that again, we have the age group, doesn't matter, a whole wide range of pages. Well, I think one of the main things is to teach people about the history of how the Canadian and provincial government had acquired our land without signing a treaty, even though it is part of their law, part of their requirements that they're supposed to sign a treaty, they're supposed to purchase the land off us, but BC is one of the only places in Canada where there's no treaties. So how do they get the land then if they sign treaties, you know, east of us? So there's a big history there, you know, a lot of racist policy and a lot of other things like that is to conflict of interest, things like that, as to how they acquired the land. But in our eyes, we install people, we view it as it's unseeded, we still maintain our Aboriginal rights entitled to what we call softmouth. And part of the aim as well, as my involvement with it, is to show what aspects of our culture, what aspects of our history, in terms of our Hawaiian language, what are those things that show that relationship to our land. So I want people to understand in the end that it is within our culture and in history that we get on this land, you know, we still do on this land, we still maintain our Aboriginal rights entitled to this land. It's a unique Aboriginal rights title, where we have aspects of our culture, such as Swachhwam and Squelkwa and Shui, which is basically the creation stories, the history stories, and then our Shui meaning spirit or life force that we share with ourselves and also everything else that's around us, like the mountains, the trees, the ground, the grass, everything has a Shui. And we have that connection through that Shui. And then also we have obligations to take care of things, expressed by our chiefs as softmouth to equal meaning this is our land, we have to take care of everything that belongs to us. So as part of my contribution to the class, I take them out on a tour, a seven hour tour from Chulalak here all the way up to Yale. So mainly the upper bird part of the Stullo territory, share with them anywhere from 100 to 120 place names, talk about the various aspects of our culture and history, including the Swachhwam, Squelkwa, Shui, talk about the different beings that the Navik are aligned to talk about the place names, whether or not it has to do with the resource activity or just the geographical place name that's used as we in the past just to travel up and down to the river. The river was our main transportation corridor. So a lot of the places were used as a means of understanding where you're at or as a place name that shows the importance of the area in terms of the resources that are available there. Yeah that's my main contribution is what I just just shared but the other contributions of course there's Ken really whose background is geography and but not only as a instructor but also he works with first nations throughout DC helping them with their maps. One of the things that we find is maps become really important as a way of documenting the traditional use activities of our people, documenting the fishing grounds and hunting areas, those sort of things and also documenting place names, archaeological sites, those sort of things. So that's what Ken really does and I think he takes them to an exercise so that they can learn you know if they're interviewing someone how do you take that information from from a knowledge keeper from a resource user and apply that onto a map you know and also the importance of wow is that because of the fact that we're going to court, we're going to treat negotiations, all these different things that we do it has to be done in a manner that is legal, that would be legally recognized as well so there's a certain process that you have to do when you're doing that. The other part of it is to film, okay so Hugh Brody while recognized a filmmaker not only just working with indigenous people here in Canada but also in other areas of the world including Africa, some work with Inuit and and understanding you know the problems that indigenous people go through with their land being claimed and then also looking at he's able to film their culture or their activities and as a way of using that to show through film you know the connections that people have and the importance that they maintain for their land and their resources. And then the next one will be Dave Chappie, he's the director for the Stalin Research and Resource Management Center and also he's the head archaeologist, his background is in archaeology so he started working for us here at the Stalin with the back with this archaeology but over the course of the years has been become more involved in many aspects of our cultural history you know especially with the with the books that we've written like The Atlas Stole the Coastal and Historical Atlas, he played a big role in the book about Tifra Latzad and also a big role in the book about the Telfant, a giant called the Telfant and I think the most experience I can bring is that he's also the technical advisor okay for the treaty negotiating team so when we look at the makeup of the treaty negotiating team for the Stalin for the film of treaty association of course we have our political advisor, the legal advisor, myself as a cultural advisor and then Dave Chappie is the technical advisor so basically he's the one that does the reports, takes care of the finances and provides all the you know coordinates to different committees anything that's needed by the chiefs of the Stalin for the treaty association that's needed you know some of the different funding that we get as a he's involved with that so he brings that experience to to the program there definitely is a difference it does it is making a difference because one of the things that we make sure that we do we get at the beginning we go through the introduction everyone has an opportunity to speak as to why they're in the program what you know what their objectives are what they hope to learn and sometimes they it's very short like what they're saying you know sometimes you don't wonder are they just here for the marks and know or what is it do they really have an interest in in first nations culture and history did they have an interest in the whole treaty process and land claims process but in the end some of the comments that the students have is that they changed their whole perspective they don't realize you know what the government had done to us you know all the different ways that they've undermined our rights and titles of the land they don't realize you know that there is the anti paul lachlaw that we weren't allowed to vote until 1962 you know the paul lachlaw around until 1951 and we weren't allowed to hire uh lawyers we weren't allowed to gather more than six people on the street you know those sorts of things they didn't realize that that was there that woman could lose their status by marrying a non-native person but woman without status would gain status by marrying a native person right so all these uh inequalities that are a part of the uh uh provincial and uh federal government right so in the end i think uh they have a better understanding of that and of course there's a lot of misconceptions that are out there where people say you know all our schooling is free all our housing is free you know we don't pay taxes all those sort of things right and so we know that those misconceptions are out there so as part of the program we address that and let them know you know what the real story is you know a lot of us do pay taxes you know and there's a bunch of things that uh they just uh had different ideas about in at the end of the program it really opened their eyes and a lot of them like my contribution with the um place name tour uh a lot of them said they're gonna now look at the land differently they're never gonna look at it the same because of the different names that we have and the different things that are out there on our land mainly through my involvement uh Dave Shepi as well because of his involvement working with Distolo for many years all the way over a decade now he's been working with us and so he's acquired quite a bit of knowledge uh because of how to have some of the different research initiatives and also going out and and interviewing elders uh so he's got quite a bit of knowledge of that so he's able to present some of that but the other main perspective I guess is from myself because I am a stall person and uh as the historian and cultural advisor over the past 33 years uh interviewing elders and mainly for understanding place names but at the same time uh the chiefs whenever it was first hire one of the things they understood is that um fluent help families speaking elders have a different world perspective they view the world still an installed perspective whereas those of us including myself who was raised with English as the first language although my father spoke Alcatmacht and my mother spoke Alcatmielum but they couldn't talk to each other so English was also a language but I was introduced to each of the languages but not to the point where it could become fluent it could could speak it right so uh over the years then interviewing the elders finding out these different uh different perspective that we have when we view the land like the real eye opener I think for me was the term I mentioned earlier so in 1988 I only been working for three years when the late Tilling of Terrorist of Charlottesville told us that when the chiefs used uh used to meet and talk about the land question they started off with that statement and they used to meet up in Yale so it's an important meeting ground up there and she brought me right to the place she opened the rocks she's able to tell me where so-and-so sat all the different chiefs sat she'll be more my great grandfather Dennis Peters where he used to sit and she said that the beginning of the meeting they all started off with that statement so this is our land we have to take care of what belongs to us so I remember when she first mentioned that and you know just been working for three years you know all these things were what is it she's talking about you know yeah this is our land you know the first statement has to do with our average rates and title we own this land it was ours but it also says we have to take care of everything that belongs to us so I mind my mind was what are they talking about so over the course of the years interviewing the elders that was also the back on the mind trying to get it get out of it what is it that they're talking about and so with the tours that I do when I take the students on the tour all the different elements important elements like talk about the place name talk about the meaning and quite often just by getting the meaning you don't understand what the name is about right because like the example I always use is the name for hope is calls means bare of all and I tell you that and I get a button under oh why do they call it bare of all right then of course you need to know the geography of the land you need to know that the river runs north to south and turns west there you need to understand that as you move from Vancouver up to hope the mountains narrow like a funnel effect so there's a steady wind that's constantly blowing in the town of hope doesn't it blows so strong it doesn't allow the branches to grow on one side of the tree so if you go into hope you look in the tops of the trees you're gonna notice calls bare of all on one side of the tree right so the significance of the name is important as well because quite often you get the meaning all the meaning does is add another question is why do you call it that right so that's part of the part of the training you're ensuring that that meaning and that significance with them and then looking at the different elements to me that are important out there so not only with the place names but elements of our of our culture and history including the two main aspects of our oral history the shokyam and the squawk well now we're mentioning the talk about the shulit also they have different beings that we inhabit our lands like different slalikum we have this all underwater people we have the muni steve the little people that inhabit the forest and and so I talk about those at different stops and talk about the importance of those and how we take care of them how they take care of us talk about the different ceremonies we have like the mornings that we do in the spring in the fall talk about the origin of the shweichwe mask talk about how it's the only mask that's left today talk about how a little bit about the winter dance and spirit power those sort of things almost all the elements so the stuff that when the chief said we have to take care of everything that belongs to us one of my objectives is so that people have a better understanding of what belongs to us and why do we have to take care of it right and to hopefully through those stories about you know that they're out there on the land that they do better understanding of that it's important because one of the things is because we continue to be an oral oral culture and you know so I shared the two main aspects the shokyam and the squawk well you know other ones are like the word for scolding like schooling is another way that you you've passed on teachings and you know we continue to do our gatherings are done when we still call witnesses you know everything's done orally as well right but one of the things is to maintain the integrity of our oral history we have to tell things the way they're told to us like in frank malin sanchez from me could be us he's the one that talks about that you can look see that in the book and you're asked to witness and that's what he explains is that is you're told someone by now there you have to tell it the same way okay you can't you can't make the story more exciting or or change it you know to make make it more exciting you have to tell it the exact same way right and then by telling by doing that not only are you letting your audience know that this isn't some idea that you just made up or came out with and you offer the name so so when I just talked about the importance of that I just for a footnote at frank malin as my source he's the one that told us the importance of telling the stories the way it's told right and so but the other thing too is we have a protocol where we are not allowed to mention names of deceased people certain times of the day mostly at night the elders say like rosy and george and elizabeth fairly insane that if you say the name it's almost like you're calling their spirit and you should only call them when you have something for them and that's when we have ceremonies where we have things for them that's when they call them but the rest of the time we should just let them rest don't don't and I don't be calling them but one of the things is is that since I started this job in 1985 working with probably about a hundred elders I think over the years and they're all gone now so what are the names that their names of deceased people my feeling is that it's like I'm calling them to decide to be beside me their spirit to be beside me to watch over what I'm saying to make sure that I say that the way that they said it right so maintaining the integrity of that oral history by mentioning their names so that's my view of it as well