 I understand that Dijinta is like a university program that's land-based? Yeah, so it's a land-based university program that takes its organizing principles and knowledge base largely from indigenous knowledge, particularly the Dene. We work closely with elder professors and community experts across the north, but center on the Yonah's Dene First Nation knowledge because that's largely where we operate, even though we have started to extend a word into other regions in Dene. What is the age group or like the target audience for the program for Dijinta? It's pretty wide ranging. I think historically the program has had youth kind of right out of high school, so 18, and I think our oldest student was around 60, so but for the most part I would say that average is kind of out of high school into into your 20s and even early 30s. That's because it focuses on northern indigenous students that have kind of experienced barriers towards post-secondary education, economic barriers to kind of family responsibilities and community responsibilities that have kind of created barriers for Dene students to enter into university programs, so Dijinta kind of emerged at least in part as an attempt to kind of get over those obstacles and provide post-secondary education in the north that was accessible, but also relevant to indigenous community that's experienced in the north today. What in your opinion makes Dijinta an example in excellence in indigenous education? I think it's super innovative in terms of its programming. It was one of the first land-based post-secondary education programs that existed anywhere in Canada. We draw off of a wide range of well-respective faculty, both from post-secondary institutions in the south, but also in terms of expertise from community in the north. It really focuses on the land as a form of learning, so the land is central to instruction, and I think that this is important and excellent for indigenous education because colonialism has systematically attempted to separate indigenous peoples from the land as a source of knowledge, and what this program does is it attempts to mitigate that, if not totally transform it by reintegrating indigenous peoples into those relationships with land as a teacher, as a form of education, and then the knowledge holders that start to translate that to students. And how do you measure this as success of your program? We really do rely on the narratives and stories told by the students that have passed through the program. So students like yourself actually have really been the champions of Dijinta because it's been difficult working with scarce resources, with precarious funding with people kind of either volunteering or kind of trying to keep the Dijinta going off the sides of their desks, so it's really kind of, we've really depended on the success stories of students getting out there and sharing how transformative the experience has been for them because they're the ones who the program's developed for and who get to just kind of immerse themselves in it, whereas a lot of other folks involved in the organizing and have been a stressful kind of activist program to keep running. So we've really depended on students like you to and talk to community and bring the news back to those folks because it's your experience that counts. And tracking success has been pretty easy as I come. In terms of the data, it's like there's been a very, very, very slim rate in terms of dropouts. Students have expressed how incredibly empowered they are. And if you look at some of the alum, they've gone on to be really important things, whether political careers or emergent activists and kind of central voices and I don't know more nor all these sorts of things. It's really proud as a kind of a teacher and instructor to see students go on and do such transformative work. Seeing how the students are doing and what they've learned and everything that's like the success. Yeah, how they're able, their ability to kind of articulate what they've learned, the skills that they acquire on the land, the confidence that they demonstrate, and then getting out there and going and making a change in their communities is super inspiring to see. And I think that that is the measure of success that the teacher relies on in order to get the word out about the program and stuff. From your perspective, what is an Indigenous education? Well, I think your Indigenous education is pretty diverse and happens in lots of places. Not always, obviously in a classroom setting, like I'm accustomed to when I'm reaching out of Vancouver at University of British Columbia. And I think that the important point that distinguishes Indigenous education from other forms of education is the sources of knowledge that we're supposed to be drawing on. And that's knowledge that has been systemically erased from classroom settings historically. So that's the knowledge of elders and community experts and the expertise that they often have is embedded in place and relationships to land. So this is why I think that the ginger is so important because it's getting students out of that classroom setting, that institutionalized kind of approach and getting them out on the land, whether creating that space of learning in relationship to the land and the elders that know the most about it and the knowledge that it holds. How would you define education as an Indigenous person? Again, I think it's the same. I have a pretty diverse understanding of what education is. So I've been educated in both systems. I've learned a lot from my elders. I'm listening to kind of their histories and their philosophies and all this sort of stuff on particularly colonization and decolonization. But I've also read a shit ton of books and kind of stuck with it in the university system through to PhD. So I think that for me, education kind of encompasses navigating both of those trains. And I've kind of strived to do that in my work. But I think kind of I've come to learn over time that it's more important for education to be an embodied practice, one for Indigenous people that is grounded in that knowledge and relationships to land and community. What is your vision for Indigenous education over the next 10 years and your community and in Canada? Well, for my community, I think it's the kind of keep providing programming that is relevant to their experience and to their knowledge for students that is providing employment opportunities that doesn't rely on kind of extractive industries and becoming wage slaves within that framework, numbers as instructors and professors that work with people like me in order to kind of develop curriculum and then execute it on the ground. That is accessible and ultimately ideally I would want to see it as free for Northern Indigenous students. I think that everybody needs to have access to this education and I think that it's a right that is enshrined in many of our understandings of treaty. What is what ought to be considered owed to us as Indigenous people? Like if you could have a vision for Indigenous education in 10 years for Canada, what would it be? Well, I think it would and keep on including kind of the opening up of autonomous spaces within universities where Indigenous peoples can do programming that's not subject to kind of white demands and chains of authority so where you can create these spaces within Southern institutions or Indigenous peoples and knowledge can really thrive but also taking, this is super crucial to me, is taking students out of that kind of colonial space with universities and work with communities to develop curriculum that's kind of related to their knowledge systems and the places that house it. So like those spaces on the land that hold that knowledge and I think that those types of communities or those types of community-based education projects depend on a network of support in order to thrive. So I would like to see programs like the Chinta Pop up all over what is now Canada and be working together in order to kind of provide that framework of solidarity where we can learn from each other's mistakes but also from our successes and support ourselves doing this decolonizing education and that can extend beyond the kind of arbitrary borders of Canada too. So last fall the Chinta Hale they were hosted, we didn't hold a meeting but the partnership kind of opportunity that I got here at UBC so we had a little bit of money to try and gather representatives of land-based education projects that are happening all over the world essentially. So we had people from Hawaii doing their projects and then people from all over Canada. The idea was we need to get these practitioners and kind of educators together to troubleshoot to think like what have been the best stories of your programming, what sort of funding arrangements have you been able to create or tap into that didn't depend on you changing or compromising your educational pursuits in any sort of way and just getting kind of a sense of what people are doing out there in order to better understand and support those projects. What information materials and resources do you need to achieve that vision aside from funding? That's a good question. You need dedicated people that are doing it because they think it's just and good. I think right now you need support from southern institutions that are willing to kind of let Indigenous faculty and recognize Indigenous community members as faculty without putting restrictions on that. Man, I think ultimately one of the things that the Chintu has been striving for is to have its own independent study as a degree-granting institution because then a lot of those sorts of kind of restrictions and barriers start to be less formidable but that's in our context and I know that some people would see the university status as a trap because you have to conform to preconceived non-Indigenous kind of structures of knowledge and so on which can pose their own sort of limitations.