 My name is Marilyn John. I'm on the Mealburg Lake Reserve in Newfoundland, Kine River, better known as Kine River, in Newfoundland, the San Ann School. It's San Ann. San Ann has been known as the patron saint of the Megamot people. Well, since they became Christians anyway. I don't think I knew who she was before that. My job here is a student assistant to the math teacher for junior high. So we do, I'm in the classroom with the math teacher for any kid that need help with their math in grades seven, eight, and nine. No, it's a sit curriculum by the province. Same curriculum that other schools use within the province. So I'm in the classroom from 8.30 or 9 o'clock when the kids come in. I tell three, and then from three to 4.30 I do tutoring. Years ago, when I was trying to decide what my next job in life was going to be after politics was like, do I go back to school? Do I go to university? Do I go looking for a job? And it was at a time when my brother was trying to get a business off the ground. He just got frustrated with all the roadblocks that I think that he was getting the permits and things like that. And he just gave up on it. And so I said, maybe I'll give it a try. And so I did. And here I am, 28 years later, still running a gas burn, a restaurant. And it's seasonal, but it's 28 years. And we employ seven or eight people a year. So it's the same, pretty much the same people has been with me for the last 28 years. So we've had a good staff. Well, the people, first of all, but one of the things is that we're having having control of your own education gives you an opportunity to develop programs within the system in addition to what's required within the curriculum. The other thing I think that they try to do here is within the curriculum that's there, like the social studies and the language or the literature or whether you're writing an essay or whether you're getting kids to write a story, you're trying to encourage them to put as much Aboriginal content into it as they can. The art program, the art teacher tries to encourage as much Aboriginal content into the artwork as possible. The music program in past years have had a lot of Aboriginal music and song to it. I know when my daughter was in the music here, a lot of her music was and included the language. And a lot of the kids that was their first exposure to the language years ago was through the music program. So I think we need a lot more of that. Because those are the programs that you really can include the Aboriginal content within the arts program and within the music program. If you're sticking to regular curriculum, there's only so much that you can add to the current social studies you can add a lot more because it teaches you about the different peoples within your own products. And way back when I was growing up, there was so little of it in the textbooks and so negative. That's one of the things that is starting to change as we go. And even just this morning sitting down with the kids going through their little dictionaries and trying to write the sentences using the Mi'Gama language is encouraging. I hate to be negative, but we're a long way from kids speaking the language because in the day my grandfather spoke the language fluently. He grew up with the language. That was his first language. But then when he became an adult, during his adult years, tuberculosis was very rampant around here. And the Aboriginal women were the caretakers. And because they were the caretakers and because tuberculosis was such a contagious disease, a lot of them developed tuberculosis and died from it. So back in my grandfather's day when he became a young adult, there was a shortage of Aboriginal women. And as a result, they intermarried. There was a lot of non-native women brought into the community. The non-native women could not speak the language. So children being raised at home by non-native mothers didn't learn the language because the father who spoke the language lived after country. They were trappers, they were hunters, they were fishers. They weren't the ones that was at home every day teaching the skills and teaching the language. So a lot of the skills and knowledge and language disappeared during my mother's time. She grew up hearing the language and being able to understand some of the language. But it was never passed down to us. And the other problem was at that same time the churches intervene in the political structure of the community and forbid the use of the language. My mom as a kid was punished for speaking the language. And as a result, she forgot a lot of it. She forgot an awful lot of it. She knew when she was little, but she forgot a lot of it. So trying to bring back a language that's been dead for 70-plus years or 80 years even in my mom's day who would have been in her 90s now, it was restricted. And so I mean you've got 80-90 years of deterioration of the language. Trying to bring it back. There's a big effort here to do it and you have to start with the little children because they're sponges. They learn a lot faster than most of us. And we finally got a Mi'kmaq speaking teacher here. And a lot of the kids, especially the younger kids, are more engaging in the language. As the kids get older and they become teenagers, they're too cool for that. They don't want to. That's the truth. They just don't want to. And their attitude is what am I going to do with that? Who am I going to speak to? And the other problem is that the little kids are learning it, which is great in the school system. But when they go home, that's the end of it. Once they go through the doors here, very few of the parents are encouraging it at home. So, I don't know, unless you have an immersion, a totally immersion course, I'm not sure that the language other than being aware of the language, knowing some of the language, some of the song, some of the words, maybe some of the prayers that go with it, or you're going to find fluent speaking kids unless they become fully immersed in it. And I think that's had to be a personal decision, because I don't think that's something that you can force kids to do. Especially in this day and age with so much technology, they don't see it as important. People like me see it as important. I wish that I had the opportunity, and I wish my mom had never lost it, or my dad, but it's what happens. Because part of your language comes your songs, your prayers. But then, like I say, as families become mixed, there's more and more assimilation. When I went to school, you could look at the faces in the classroom, I knew that these were Aboriginal kids. And I can walk through the classrooms now, and I cannot tell you, unless I do, because I know, but to look at the kids, I can't tell if these kids are Aboriginal. If you took them out of here and sat them in a classroom in St. John's, or you would not be able to walk into the classroom and say, those are Aboriginal kids, you can't tell by looking at them anymore, because they don't have the Aboriginal features. They don't have the strong Aboriginal genetics that we had, because we had both parents who were Aboriginal, because of the intermixing and the marriage. Now you have a kid that doesn't have those features. And a lot of kids, because they don't have those features, they feel a little intimidated by it, because they feel they're not Aboriginal. And a lot of them don't say it, but then when you get into, once I know, well, because I don't look Aboriginal, I can get away with not telling anyone I'm an Aboriginal. So there is a lot of assimilation, even this, as we become more open here, we were isolated back in my day. The only access was by boat or by water. So as you get paved highways and people's got jobs and vehicles and they do a lot more traveling, you're getting a lot more assimilation. So as assimilation becomes bigger and bigger, the job of retaining the culture and keeping the culture and keeping the language alive becomes more and more difficult. It becomes a bigger job for little communities like us who have all that access. I think the more isolated you are, the better opportunity you have of keeping your culture alive and keeping your language alive. I would like to see a lot more Aboriginal activity within the school, especially using the art room, not just for doing artwork of cities or some other... your art based on somebody else's culture, somebody else's stories or whatever. I would like to see, within the art room, I would like to see somebody reteaching how to do, say, the spruce root baskets. Spruce root baskets was one of the very unique things that used to be done around here. And it's nearly lost. There's only a handful of people that still know how to do it. What is your time to bring that back, bring it to the kids? Sure, you know, I mean, if you've got, if you've got, say, 80 or 100 kids here, if you get 10 of them that retain it and remember it, even if you get 10%, that 10% is better than nothing. Teach your spruce root baskets. Teach your mousse hair tufting that used to be there done here long before my mother's time or her grandmother's time because by then beads were introduced, but they used to do the tufting on the clothes. And there is still a couple of people left because I reintroduced it way back in the 70s. That was one of the arts, one of the craft skills that I reintroduced back into the community through the crafts program within the community crafts program was the mousse hair tufting. And a handful of people did learn it and some people were really, really good at it. And there's still one or two that know how to do it. Grab that person. Get them to teach it within the school system. Birch bark baskets. Now, I don't ever remember this community here working with quills, or porcupine quills because there were no porcupine here on the island, but it's something that our Aboriginal people do know how to do and there's nothing wrong with bringing it from the other megamaw people who know how to do it. My mom as a kid used to go with her grandmother to collect wood for making baskets. Now, we didn't use the black ash because we didn't have it here. They used the, my mom called it white maple and she described how it was used. And there's nobody here that know how to do that anymore, but the art of making baskets is the same, whether you use white maple or whether you use black ash. Teach the kids how to make a traditional basket within the art foam. Teach the fine arts. Bring in an artist to teach the skill of using your paint and your waters and colors and base your teachings on oral history or stories or the mythology or whatever. The old stories are old. That was around years ago. And those kinds of things. Part of the program, I remember years ago, I did a program with the Newfoundland Museum. And one of the things we tried to do was capture old traditional crafts or art or knowledge that was so quickly disappearing. And one of the things we did, we did bark tanning. How to tan hides using the bark from the root of the tree. We did how to make shanks, what they call shanks, which was a long booth made from the leg of the caribou. And there was what they called the shanks. There was two ways of making it. One of them was with the hair on the outside, which was used to walking on the ice and slippery areas. And the other one was one where they took all the hair off it and barked tan it and it was worn inside. We did a slideshow on how to make a caribou hide canoe. We took a couple of elders with us and we flew back in the country to the hunting lodge. And we filmed it and we did a slideshow right from the beginning to taking the caribou, to cleaning the caribou, to cleaning the hide and putting it together to making the canoe. And those are skills nobody know how to do anymore. My dad talked about using a caribou hide canoe. But you need resources to do that. You need money to do that. The school has resources but it's limited. You have to be able to bring in people who still know how to do that to teach and that costs money. Frank can come here for nothing. So you still need a lot more resources. Yeah, it's great that we have the resources that we got. But to do all these other wonderful things, you need a lot more than we have here. I think the community has got to get behind it. I remember years ago first when I introduced the idea of having a powwow here around the council chambers because I was on council at the time. And everybody was like, oh no, no, people's not going to go for that. Nobody's not going to get involved in that. You're never going to see a powwow here. You don't know when you should try. Somebody's going to start. And it was left at that for a few years and then finally it did take off. Somebody did finally do something about it. Now they've got one of the bigger powwows in Atlantic Canada. It was beautiful. It's been successful. So somebody's just got to do it, right? And that's like here, somebody's got to do it. It's not going to talk about it. Maybe don't do it. Those are the things you have to do. And you have to start with getting the children interested in doing those kinds of things. We need to have the kids like, for example, yeah, it's great to have the kids playing volleyball and basketball and everything else. But why aren't we teaching kids how to play waltz? Waltz is an original Mega Mall game. How come we don't have waltz bowls and how come we don't have, as part of the learning process here, kids learning how to play waltz and set up a little competition? I mean, you can even have Atlantic competition among other Mega Mall reserves throughout Atlantic Canada. It's fun. It's a game. Kids like games, but you've got to do it on a regular basis. It's no good to say introduce it to them and they never see it again. So those are the things I would like to see. I would like to see the kids, the waltz becoming a big thing with the kids, learning how to do it, taking it home and eventually teaching it to their children. And until that happens, it's not going to develop into something bigger. But you've got to get the kids excited and interested in it. I don't know if there's a last message, but I know some of the things I look at is encouraging, very encouraging. And some more things are very discouraging because it's not enough of it being done. Like, you know, I know where our government keeps talking about culture and everything else, but outside of the school, I see very little of it. I see very little of it. And even when I look at this new school, the school is so new and so beautiful, I think there could have been a more cultural appearance to it. Other than coming into the foyer and seeing the artwork on the floor, you know, you can walk around the school and it looks like every other school with the exceptions of posters and things that the teachers have put up themselves. And I think with governments today, they want to put in schools and they want to push them and build them so fast that they don't give any real thought to how can we reflect the culture of the community and one thing, as you come in, doesn't say at all, you know. And that would be nice. And I would just like to see a lot more. The mini-power at school is wonderful because it gets the kids excited. And kids get, especially little kids, get very excited about different things. But sometimes I think there's too much emphasis on oh, we can't let the little kids use this or use that because they might burn themselves, they might cut themselves, they might, you know, that wasn't a part of our culture, right? Our culture taught kids when they were very, very young and you burn your finger, you cut your finger, you bruise your finger, whatever, your toes or your hands, it heals. You know, it's not life or death. It's not something that you're going to die from. And it comes with learning things, you know. And kids did that and was involved in learning at a very young age within our culture, you know. And we have, all of a sudden, we've adopted that safety thing because kids aren't safe and we've gotten overboard with that. So I think you need to get back to. And I know back in the day when my son was very young, one of the things that the school had was a wilderness camp that they had and he was, I don't know, maybe grade six, grade five, grade six, when they took a bunch of kids with some elders and they took them into the bush and they gave them that experience. Kids today, kids doesn't, very few of the kids go rabbit catching or moose hunting or they're more interested in the video games than they are in. So how, you know, figure out how do you get those kids interested in learning things in the bush as learning things on YouTube, right? You're going to learn how to moose hunt on YouTube? You know, it's lovely to watch the YouTube videos, but take them and take them out in the bush. You take what's normally taught in the schools and you improvise using the materials and skills to that teaching. One of the big things I would like to see in the community outside of the school would be a cultural summer camp. I would love to see a cultural summer camp where the kids would go in and we've got all kinds of facilities here that's not being utilized in the summertime to hunting lodges. There are beautiful facilities in Hanna. Take the kids in, teach them how to build a wigwam, teach them how to weave a spruce root basket, teach them how to set a rabbit snare, teach them some of the different things that, skills that everyone as a kid learned when I was growing up, you know, and teach them to respect, to respect for the earth. Kids today take a wrapper and throw it over their shoulders, you know, and I suppose they're learning from the parents because the parents take a Tim's cup and chuck it in the ditch, so that's not when we went up river with my dad salmon fishing. My dad would go salmon fishing, catch salmon, and we'd bottle it up for the winter and put it in the cellar. If we took something in, we brought it back out. My dad used to always say, it's later to bring back out than it was to carry in. Why wouldn't you bring it back out with you? Why would you throw it in the woods or in the river? You wouldn't do that because they don't hesitate to do it because they haven't been taught. Those are the kinds of things that if you had a month-long summer camp that teach the kids how to properly use a canoe, a lot of kids should learn how to use the waterways and how to use the trails and what to look for and plants. There's a lot of stuff that they can learn in a month in a bush.