 I'm Boas Dey Mitagyapi, Mito Aja, Leslie Ann Wilson, Matoska Oyadi, Nakona Oyadi. So what I said is, hello my relatives, my name is Leslie Ann Wilson, I'm from White Bear. I'm Nakoda. Nakoda Oyadi, that means Nakoda people. Right now we're working on putting together, we're learning as much as we can right now and sitting on a council of grandmothers reclaiming our indigenous birthing methods and teachings and all the teachings that go along with womanhood and to do with families. It started off with midwifery, just kind of andula training and it's way more than that. We never named it yet, we are just calling ourselves like indigenous birthing. We're working with all age groups right from younger, like the children, all the way to the grandparents. It's for family and more targeting the women to have healthy babies and healthy families because the women are sort of the backbone of the family and so it's for the women to feel confident and to empower them to take back their own sovereignty over their own bodies by birthing their babies and having more of a say instead of just the way it is now. The doctor kind of ties everybody up to the bed and it's not very friendly and it's not a very good experience for a lot of indigenous women and this is something that we always took care of before. We're hoping to accomplish healing empowerment for our women and our children. We're hoping to eventually hopefully have a birthing center, family center somewhere where people know they can go with their everyday things that come up. If your baby's sick or your little girl's starting her moon time or just different things that are coming up or your grandmother. Maybe she's getting old and she's getting ready to leave this earth. You know how we can help our women raise strong families again. Well, myself I work in, every month I do a full moon ceremony which was passed to me by my mother and I went to Bemidji, Minnesota to meet up with Doreen to learn more about it because I wanted to know what it was all about because I have relatives from Turtle Mountain in North Dakota but they kind of lost their teachings about it and so I wanted to know, I guess from the source where it came from, Medewin so I went there and so I offer a full moon ceremony. I offer coming of age for girls and like circles counseling and sometimes women will contact me like if they've lost a baby or something I help them to go through that as well. So it's just a lot of things to do with a woman's life. I would say success is people doing things with it like for instance the little girls would start their strawberry fasting and then at the end they'd graduate from the strawberry fast and I met a few girls who said that it was like life changing for them like they were kind of going down the wrong path like you know temptations and whatever and then after that they totally had a lot more confidence in themselves and the choices they were making so it helped that way and we don't have like certification or anything like that it's kind of like you do what you can and we would like to see all of our people be back on a good road again all of our people who are struggling in life right now it would be nice to see them all back on a good path again a spiritual journey and healthy families it's pretty high now and it is increasing because all of us are kind of kept pretty busy there's a lot of teachings that go with it so you have to kind of start from the beginning and go like in little steps because you'll have an overload if you try to learn everything at once so that's what we're finding that it's very busy and there's so many problems in the world our kids are faced with nowadays like for instance drug abuse it's so rampant and so deadly and scary that we need to do something and as mothers and grandmothers we're the ones that will stand up to this and say we want our children to live so I think it's just everywhere we go when the women speak people are listening now I guess one of the problems we had in the beginning was a lot of I don't know how to say this but a lot of people would just want to come to a class and then take off with it without actually living that life or following the grandmother teachings because that's something that we have to do is we can't not follow the grandmother teachings there's protocol so I think that was one of the things that we had a hard time not a hard time but we had to really make it clear that you have to do those things and it might take a long time to actually get to a comfortable place where you could work with people yeah so not to take anything for granted I guess just to get people involved and then of course money there's lack of funds of course when we want to do something there's always that everywhere every program anything to do with our people also there's no money all the time and I think another thing is we're struggling to keep we're struggling to keep it at that level as grandmother teachings so that our people aren't going to lose this because a lot of times you share your information and then some of you will come along and just take off with it and then you have all these people that are doing like way out there stuff like I'm just going to give you an example like Sedona or somewhere like that you know they wrote a book and all of a sudden you know people were getting hurt we don't want that to happen so we're really strict about it and we take it very seriously perspective would be learning from the land learning skills that are going to help you and your family survive and be at peace and one and one with the earth and giving kids the chance to experience that because we learn by experience for a long time our people and from no fault of their own it was through the residential school experience and everything like that the foster care experience they had no clue you know they walked away from those places feeling lost and broken and so I think that it's really important that we give them our children the truth and help them be really strong and proud of who they are take care of the children are the future leaders they're our future take care of our children take care of our earth like our water and all the land all the beings on the land to take care of those things so that our children and our grandchildren will always have that what I do tell my grandchildren and I'd like it to be carried on in and our family is where we come from and the struggles that we had getting to where we come from and I'd like them to learn how to take care of themselves on the land and tell them stories about the land so when my kids were little I used to take them out snaring and my nieces and nephews used to take them snaring rabbits fishing like snaring fish I teach them about the animals and I used to like doing that and teach them how to cut the fish make dry meat, stuff like that just so that they had that experience and they knew and I'd tell them if you have this you'll always be able to take care of yourself there's one teaching I'd like to share and it's about how you carry yourself when you're first born you're a baby you need help to do everything you get carried, you get dressed somebody feeds you you kind of like play a lot and you learn about the world that way and then as you go through that childhood stage that's when you're exploring the world and then when you get to the teenager stage we don't have to we don't say teenager but to that place where your the change starts happening where you go through your passage of rights that's when the young people need help it's like a baby again because it's a transition so you transition there and then their adults and then they're still going to need help when they're young adults because they never did this before and so and then when they get old enough that they'll look after their elders and so it's kind of like a circle of life the whole circle and it repeats itself over and over I tell my kids that and my grandchildren I think my grandchildren they totally got it like right away and just to look after your body be conscious of what you put into your body like eating, drinking be conscious of that so that you'll be leading a healthy life that's something I always teach my children and grandchildren and something I'd like them to teach their grandchildren to take care of yourself take care of whatever is around and to share don't let anybody go hungry like don't my kids won't eat in front of people like unless there's enough for everybody like that so I think those are really important and the sharing is something that's very universal so we share everything like we share our food our home sometimes we share our teachings we share whatever we can I do I do some ceremony teachings I teach this all the time like it's just a part of me so it's something that just comes naturally and I go around and talk about it and end up with the same same type of people that want this and we always end up teaching the kids and there's a million ways to teach kids and have fun what I'd really like to see is for our indigenous people they're the experts for them to be asked the questions instead of us sharing with somebody and then they take it and they teach it but it's not part of their life and so that's what I'd like to see is for our people to be teaching these things wholeheartedly in every domain physically, mentally, emotionally and to be able to walk in both worlds you basically need survival skills something that kind of drives you people who are always really hard workers very hard workers we always looked after things to make sure that nothing would go wrong and just for the love of our kids and so for indigenous education that's what I'd like to see is more community not just the education system, the school but the community coming in to the school and helping with the education of the children because that's their school so that they can own it and use it and some people have real creative ways of doing things so I think it'll turn out really good if we do that and just stick to it which is what a lot of people are doing now they're starting to have like outdoor education lodges they have lodges for different teachings there's people that come and get the kids in the spring to go to help out at the Sundance they're getting that experience so I think that eventually I'd like to see us be able to do those things and not to be afraid of losing our language losing our way