 My name is Cheyenne Chartrand. I'm the Spiritual Care Provider for Unitual Inc. And I'll just say this. I'm from the Green Clan and I'm from Treaty 2 Territory. The Spiritual Care Provider portion of Unitual Inc. looks at the spiritual well-being not only the kids that we have in our care, but the staff, their families, and even the past participants. The kids, once they leave here, are allowed to come back in Texas. Service ceremony, that kind of stuff. We provide different kinds of teachings, medicine gathering. Well, cheesy to go on and on. But basically, spirituality is just kind of defined as your connection and relationship to the world around you. So anything that kind of supports that is part of the program. And in its description, each one has that we provide individualized treatment plans for the children in our care. And that goes for this program too. So it's not like a blanket or a pan-indigenous approach. We look at each child, each staff member, their family, and what they need to strengthen or renew their connection and their relationship to the world around them. So for some people, it looks one way and for other people, it's a completely different process or program. In the early stages, it was about redefining that word for people. And it became not so much success about something that's put upon the individual receiving the treatment. So that's the program. If we remain safe, if we remain approachable, that's a success. Because you want someone to ask for that help, you want someone to ask those questions. Something like self-awareness is a success where it wasn't there before. Someone coming back to ceremony, somebody participating in ceremony that hadn't before. Those are all things I think we'd consider success. It's an amazing program, partly for that one Muslim in terms of looking at spirituality as that connection to the world around you, as opposed to culture or religion or coming from, just because they don't know how else to say it, like a pedagogical kind of approach, it's not like that at all. There's a lot more peer support, there's a lot more cohort learning. There's a lot more teacher-student relationship that kind of goes both ways. Ideally, you'd see in kind of like some adult education settings, but isn't really there sometimes. It's more present. It's the extended family model that we use in our practice where it's not really staff, it's aunties and uncles and relatives. We do the linking of relatives so that it feels more like home as opposed to facility. I think it's a little bit of a mix of the two because if I had to say overarching goal, it would be to be of service to our community and our community being those future generations. And then smaller goals would be to see that increase in their knowledge and their participation in their own well-being, in their own practice, however they want to practice spirituality, however they want to make those connections. I help provide opportunity, learning opportunities, growing opportunities. I'm there as a support, as a guide, and to exploring those things. For our younger ones, they say, you know what, these are all your options. And these are the opportunities that we have. These are our ceremonies. These are our practices. What nation do you come from? Can we find out what nation you come from? These are the practices of those nations because what happens is we kind of tend to have this pan-Indigenous approach to teaching and learning and expect that that's the way that it should be. As opposed to helping the kids that we care for but also our staff look at themselves a little bit more and they have that relationship with themselves a little bit more because if we can do that and if we can strengthen that part, then that's modeling the way that they can look at the world around them. And I mean in terms of education, that's like whole person learning, you know, accessing all those parts of themselves to learn and I think if you're learning that way, you retain a lot more knowledge across even just Canada. There are several different nations of people. And so even in Manitoba, we have like what people refer to as Kree, but like they're in a new, we have Nishinaabe, we have the Dene people, we have Miti. And then as you move in either direction, there's other nations. There's Choctaw, there's all kinds of blood, Salish, Shidatsa, people going farther north to the West Coast. And all those nations have different practices, different cultures, different approaches, different ceremonies, different reasons why they do the things that they do. And when we take a pan-Indigenous approach, it's like we're saying everybody's the same and putting everybody under one blanket and not recognizing that those are distinct nations with their own laws, with their own governance, with their own methods of education and teaching and learning and their own belief systems, their own value systems. And we're just kind of making everybody, even in this day, you have people who don't know what nation they come from. So even that simple request for information can be a really big deal. It would be really difficult sometimes to tailor everything the way that we'd like it to be tailored to, but even just finding that identity and peace is really important. I think when I thought about it, it was more about whole person learning, whole person experiencing, teaching all the parts of the self, like the emotional, the mental, the physical, the spiritual. And when you're tapping into those things, I think learning is a whole different experience. When you're younger and they take you out on field trips and you're learning something about the place that you're going to go to is very much different than sitting and being talked at by somebody in the classroom. You can teach the same message so many different ways. And I think a lot of people kind of assume Indigenous education is about all going to the bush and learning at a big stage and smudging and stuff like that. And it's not, I mean, there's a real, like if you want to look at it, there's a real case for natural stewardship, things like that. Like the water protectors, that's all Indigenous education. Because you need water, you need the sustainable harvesting. If you're going to collect medicines, you need to know what you're picking, when you're picking, how you're picking, what the ground looks like, what the acidity of the soil, all that kinds of stuff come into play. Even that we have a really large population of young people who are going to be adults and taking over a lot of the positions. I think we need to expand a lot of that, to think of the economic development of our communities. And I don't mean communities as in just First Nation communities, I mean our cities, our towns, because the baby boomers are going to be kind of aging out and retiring. We're going to have a lot of positions to fill in companies, and we're going to need some really strong advocates in terms of the environment and our nature and our water, and just changing the way that we look at how we treat those as part of our world. I think things like transportation, right, is a big one. And it's simple when some families don't have to access things. If you want to access land-based education, sometimes families got to go a long way. Or it's really difficult for them to access any kind of activity or a land-based education if they can't get out of this city. They don't have the means to do that. I think a lot of support and advocacy for things like our water and our natural water protection of the land, the areas that have the medicines. We need water, you know. We need places to have clean water to do all the things that we need to do with our children. I just think that it's really important to keep an open mind when we're talking about education and learning. Because a lot of the times it's the learners that guide us. In terms of what they want to learn, what they need to learn, like this world is changing so fast. And I think a lot of the times we're stuck a few decades ago in terms of the things that we're teaching or the ways that we're teaching it. And those things need to be looked at. They need to be made more flexible. They need to adapt. That's avoiding that being talked at or being taught to approach. Pedagogy kind of comes with classroom learning. It doesn't quite work like that. When you kind of engage with people and the teacher is also the student. And the student is also the teacher. And the rest of the property is there. That's a big part of learning and education.