 My name is Sarah Longman. I'm the Supervisor for Indigenous Education for Regina Public School Division. My program is not a standalone program, it's a program within an organization. So my I guess work that I oversee is the Indigenous Education components within the School Division. So I oversee I guess the academic standing of all the self-declared Indigenous students in Regina Public School. So right now we have about 4,300, between 4,300 and 4,400 self-declared students. When we look at those numbers we break down that self-declared pool of students. 73% of those students are treaty status and then the rest are non-treaty status. A smaller portion is our Métis students and then just a tiny little spec. I think we have 10 who are our Inuit students. So we have them when they come into our School Division we have them self-declared. Let us know who they are and it helps to focus our programming dollars. It helps to make decisions in terms of our strategic plan and and how we do our budget allocations for the students. It helps for us to make our decisions around delivery of different programs for example because of our demographics and who we are and where we are in the provinces sketch one. A large number of our students are Cree from Cree Background. So one of the pieces they share with us and it's volunteer they share with us their status numbers. So from the status numbers you can pretty well find out the location of the band. So most of those treaty status students are from Cree Background. Therefore when we offer our language programs our Indigenous language programs we focus on Cree because that's who our students are. So I oversee the students. I look at their attendance and monitor all of the students on a regular basis to see how they're doing and try to make sure that our students are doing well. They're being successful and they're not falling through the cracks. Oftentimes we do have students who need students in the family that need extra support and this is just by like I said following our database and taking a look at our students in high school how many of our self-declared students are acquiring the credits that they need for that semester and are they going to be on track to graduate. So we follow them again through the data to see how well they're doing academically especially in the high school and what we can do from that is if I see a student who is falling behind in the credits that they've earned at the high school level I can tap one of our Indigenous advocate teachers who are trained teachers that work with Regina Public and they are of an Indigenous background themselves. So if I'm looking and I'm going through the data and I'm looking at credit attainment and I see you know within one school high school a number of self-declared students who are not on track to graduate they're losing credits. I you know call the advocate teacher and then they pull those students in and they take a look and they reveal okay which assignments are missed which assignments can be recovered it's called a credit recovery and what do we need to do to try to get the student back on track to make sure that the student actually graduates on time. So one of the programs I guess I oversee is the Indigenous advocate teachers program. The Indigenous advocate teachers I'm really happy to say that they are in 9 out of 10 of our high schools and we kind of take a look at all of that data and where our students are or our biggest student population is and you know where they're experiencing credits that are not being completed and we put an Indigenous advocate teacher in that high school and then their jobs is to take all of those kids who are self-declared within that building and to track their progress of all of those kids. They do that by connecting with the families well and trying to engage the families doing you know going to the home and talking to the parents and you know explaining the importance of attendance but also looking at what are some of the barriers that might be the way preventing students from attending. So it could be transportation sometimes. It could be issues that they're having with their peers. It could be financial hardships. It could be you know personal health reasons. I mean there's a number of reasons so the advocate teacher works with that family and the student to try to make sure that they you know the student stays on track and actually can graduate. So we have we started four Aboriginal advocate program in our elementary schools as well. So again we took the elementary schools and we looked at where our highest needs are so it's a needs-based type of allocation of an advocate teacher and we have four elementary schools in our school division that have a high number of Indigenous students. So that's where we position an advocate teacher in the elementary. So they're they do they do a lot of work connected with students. A lot of times the students may not feel comfortable talking to the teacher about a mark that they received and they will you know go to the advocate teacher and say can you come with me or can you go and talk to the teacher about this grade and you know can you talk to them about letting me redo this or you know there's all sorts of different things but they play up a huge role in the lives of the Indigenous students. So that's kind of one of the programs that I get to oversee and watch and develop. Another program would be our elders in residence program. So to support our Indigenous students in the building first and foremost we have our elders in residence program. They you know provide cultural understanding, cultural connections, affirming culture. They're just all around positive role models for our students. They are you know the best huggers and sometimes our kids just need a hug and they're they're so good at that. They're also there to assist and bring their expertise and their knowledge into the classroom and learning space. So we have predominantly non-Indigenous teaching staff a large number and they don't have the same level of understanding and knowledge as our elders do around our culture and around our values, our protocols, our knowledge, all of those different pieces. So the teachers will call on Indigenous elders to come in and you know do things like share a story of residential school. Can you come in and talk about you know the the constellations from an Indigenous worldview to complement the the work that we've been doing on looking at the constellations. Things around treaty what is what does treaty mean? You know with the treaty training curriculum that came out from the ministry. Our elders are huge in helping provide us support for that. They also our elders also connect with our families so every now and then our Aboriginal advocate teachers if they're going up to home and you know they kind of sense that perhaps the family would like to have an elder to come in and do a prayer. Maybe they want an elder to come in and do this bunch of new house or something. Our Aboriginal advocate teacher will team up with an elder and the two of them will go and visit the family and have conversations and see how they can help support whatever that family may be requesting. We have you know oftentimes a lot of our urban families don't or are not as closely connected to a lot of our culture and a lot of it is urbanization and colonization and the impact of residential schools and all of those pieces. So our elders play a huge role in helping our kids to reconnect. We have a lot of Indigenous students who are in foster care or have been adopted into non-Indigenous homes and they're trying to find out who they are. They're trying to find their identity they're trying to get their connections in place to their community. There's all of those different pieces and of course our elders you know as soon as they hear an Indigenous last name they can almost you know pretty accurately tell them where their families from based on their name. So they do they do all of those things but they're very skilled at developing relationships. So you know we see a lot of different institutions and a lot of organizations working with bringing in cultural awareness training for their staff. We see that in so many different sectors and so many different humongous organizations and you know we found it our experience has been it's been our elders and the relationships that they've been able to build with our non-Indigenous colleagues that have been have had such a huge profound effect on opening the mind to different ways of knowing, creating an openness about you know thinking about other worldviews, thinking about how they incorporate this other worldview into a very westernized curriculum. And just just just becoming friends you know just making that person to person that human contact has been so important and our elders are so good at doing that. Again when we are working with our elders and residents we try to we try our hardest to ensure that our people that are working within our elders program are very much mere who our community is. So in our community here we have our Lakota Dakota people we have our Cree and then we have our Anishinaabe people and our Métis people within that group within those language groups we also have some people who are very very closely connected to their culture and we have others who have been disconnected for lots of reasons. So those same dynamics that we have within our population we try to get our elders to reflect that. So we have some very traditional elders who've been able to maintain and keep their language and also elders who've been able to you know still keep some of our traditional ways of knowing them well. We also have some of our elders who are this is probably a really bad term but I call them contemporary elders so they don't have for for lots of reasons they've lost the connection to speaking their language they don't have their language and they you know their sense of understanding our culture is very much a contemporary way of looking at it. Our elders all serve a really really important role to our community our family members who have been disconnected from their culture tend to tend to gravitate more to our elders who are more contemporary rather than our elders who are very traditional. So our contemporary elders really open the door I think for a lot of further questions for a lot of further learning and understanding that happens. So they all play a really critical role a crucial role to our students to their families the students families as well as to our educators that work with us. So they're all kind of working towards a better understanding of our culture and our knowledge and appreciation of of our traditional ways of knowing and bringing and bringing that into this western curriculum and fusing the two roles together so it makes sense for the learners as well. I also get an opportunity to work with our elders advisor council which is another one of our programs and our elders advisor council is a little bit different they don't work so much one-on-one in the school like the elders in residence do. Our elders advisor council sit side by side with our board of trustees so if we're looking at our organizational structure within a school division our trustees are elected officials that actually run in their election on a four-year cycle and they get voted in by the community to be a trustee. Those trustees then you know are kind of at the top of the organizational structure followed by our director of education and all the other folks that kind of fall underneath underneath him and so so they play a critical role in you know our strategic planning. The elders that sit side by side with the trustees again you know very much like our elders in residence they offer their cultural understanding they offer the cultural knowledge and they guide our trustees making decisions that impact the indigenous students the indigenous community. You know things like we recently developed and implemented a smudging policy so of course when you're working with bringing in something like smudging into a very public institution there's all sorts of different policies that will collide so for example we have an occupational health policy that directly collides with our smudging policy. We have no smoking policy that directly collides with our smudging policy so for our trustees and our elders to work together to kind of navigate a space for how that policy could develop be developed and how it could be implemented at a grassroots level the the trustees will rely heavily on the expertise of the elders on what that would look like. So they do a lot of that with our with our trustees so so forming policy and and of course policy always informs practice as well so we have that group as well. We do a lot of in terms of our our teachers and our school administrators we do a lot of work on helping to close the knowledge gap of non-indigenous educators and administrators. Many of our folks that we work with have a solid grasp of curriculum and instructional pedagogy and all of those technical pieces that come along with having a teaching certificate but a lot of them will have grown up in a very western education system an education system that has not included indigenous history things like you know they don't understand residential schools I mean it's getting better you know our new teachers that are coming into the systems now understand and know our history when residential schools they understand what they schools are all about they can make the connection between some of those federal imposed schooling systems and the connection to some of the contemporary things around murdered indigenous women for example they can make those connections but not all of our educators can do that we still have a lot of gaps people who've gone through entire systems of education who are very highly educated that have never had an opportunity to learn about our history around the residential schools here in Canada. It's only been really really recent lost decade that people have been exposed to that information so we still have large knowledge gaps of people who don't have that understanding so what are the work that I do as I try to provide as much as that of that background for the staff as possible so they can re-engage in a culturally proficient way with our families with our with our students and of course with our elders in our community so you know what are what are the long-term residual effects of the residential school and how does that play out in our classrooms on a day-to-day basis so we talk about trauma and you know how trauma plays out in many of our students who have been exposed to violence in the home who have been exposed to you know some of the chronic issues that have come through intergenerational trauma and how do you build a safe learning environment for those students so that they're not triggered time after time after time so for example a small example as you know many of our children who've grown up in with violence around violence will react to to certain loud sounds and oftentimes those loud sounds you know is could be one of their triggers and when someone who is experiencing trauma unresolved trauma they will react and respond to that trauma to that stimuli in the environment not knowing exactly what they're responding to so a lot of the work that we do is is trauma-informed practice teaching our educators and our staff what trauma-informed practice looks like we do culturally culturally affirmative I guess resources bringing in contemporary representation of who we are so we try to do away with all of the stereotypes that are inside books and teaching educators about the impact that has on some of our young people especially our young kids who are just starting to read and they can't make sense of the context that rely on the pictures and if the picture is filled with a negative cultural stereotype you know the kids will buy into that so I guess part of the other the other important piece of work that we do is is you know Indigenous education is not only important for Indigenous kids but it's just as important for non-Indigenous students as well they need to understand that they themselves have probably some stereotypes that they need to work on they need to have those stereotypes replaced with accurate information otherwise there's a whole bunch of assumptions being made about a culture that's totally and accurate some of those stereotypes left unaddressed will turn into something really big and ugly and it turns into before you know what that's racism it's the seeds of racism and so a lot of the work that that I do with with educators is you know helping them to bring in good content good accurate information good literature from our own Indigenous writers accurate representation of who we are as Indigenous people to help break down a lot of those stereotypes I also do a lot of work with trying to bring about a solid queer language program which is really really tough to do trying to align resources trying to you know clean up the stuff around the interchangeable use of different dialects for example so a lot of our non-Indigenous educators wouldn't be aware of you know the difference between the th dialogue to Korean and dialectic but kids who are learning this language can definitely differentiate between the two dialects at same time so again you know working with the educators to to understand those pieces of language is huge so a lot of the work you know as well as managing the students and managing some of these programs have to do with you know always thinking of what are some skills that I need to bring to our non-Indigenous educators so they can do the absolutely best job of engaging teaching and building pod for Indigenous learners and their families so that's huge that's a lot of work I've been in this job for six and a half years now it's a fairly new position that was created within our school division to kind of have some kind of oversee all of the programs that we have in place however there have been people that have been doing this for long before me so we've had we have you know cultural our cultural liaison person who's been there for a number of years as well and his job is to connect with our community and to find the people in our community that are really talented at doing things so you know he's pretty connected to the community so if someone is looking at can we have someone come into our fine arts classroom and bring in Quilling he'd find a person in the community that knows how to do Quill work and we'll bring them into the classroom and connect them in the learning environment with the educators as well so he's been he's been doing that work for for a long time so I think within our school division I'm going to say safely we've been kind of doing this work and it's been built on every time something new kind of comes in I think it's probably safe to say it's been 20 years that has been happening so it's fairly fairly young I guess right so yeah I look at the number of first of all our self-declared students so when I first started doing the self-declared work and trying to measure the exact number that we had in our school division our numbers were actually quite low it was 2700 six years ago and and today we're at 4400 so it's not like we've had a whole influx of indigenous families moved to the city in the last six years I think we've done a better job of promoting culture in a very positive way so now our numbers went from 2700 six years ago to around 4400 now so that's a significant increase in students and families who self-declared the other piece that I look at is our graduation rates for our First Nations meeting with students that number has increased I mean it's nowhere near where we need to be but it's a heck of a lot better than where we were when we initially started so we are you know we're around 57% grad rate we used to be around 27 so we've improved by about 30% and I know that we could do better in how we do this work so you know how is the gap closing I mean it's a tough gap to measure I think the other gap is just the number of non-indigenous educators now who are incorporating on a regular basis indigenous ways of non-indigenous knowledge and that's a tougher get that's a tougher number to try to measure but certainly you know if we look at things like you know smudging in schools and the only first role this thing all people were really apprehensive and kind of not sure on how they should do it and of course there's this being predominantly non-indigenous people doing this and now we've got schools that sponge on a regular basis we have entire schools that smudge on a regular basis we have you know we have on the 28th of March we have our annual feast and round dance coming up for we join a public school and something we started four years ago so this will be our fourth one and it's hosted by a different high school so when we talk to our elders advisory council about how we could do this they suggested to us that we uh do you know each high school kind of be the host do we go in kind of this clockwise direction in selecting the host so this year we're kind of up in north now and so our northern school high school is going to host this feast and round dance and it's also in partnership with all of the elementary feeder schools around that high school so it's um being put together by predominantly non-indigenous staff and I mean that's a huge task of course they're being guided by you know we we provide direction guidance and our cultural liaison you know puts the important pieces in place but a lot of the planning a lot of the preparing of the food is done by our female elders so our female elders will go into the school and work with the staff the female staff on how to cook the food um prior to that we had a you know a couple months ago we had a ribbon skirt making night where we had one of our our community ladies that knows about ribbon skirts come in and do an explanation about it and anybody who was wishing to make their skirt at that time she would take them through that so there's been a lot of work and you know just to see I guess a level of of how receptive people are now and incorporating what we do and how we do things into a very Western structure is is astonishing to see I mean honestly I just never ever believe that we would be at this point and you know just it just goes to the work of you know the Indigenous advocate teachers the elders that we have in place you know our trustees and our elders advisory and putting together the all of the pieces come together so we could see something like a feast around us being held in one of our predominantly you know white middle class schools and neighborhoods so I don't know how we would measure that in terms of numbers you know the openness is just I just know that you know we have grown leaps and bounds from where we were you know seven eight years ago to where we are today I thought I used to know but then I've kind of changed my my understanding as I went as I went along and became a part of it I don't know if we've really figured that out yet because it's so big you know I think it encompasses a few pieces I think it's it's it's certainly our traditional ways of knowing it incorporates our worldview it incorporates our language incorporates our relationships our relationship with our land our relationship to our identity our kinship relationships all of those pieces are part of it and coming together and knowing who we are as Indigenous people knowing the difference between being you know an Indian woman and being an Anishinaabe very very different and I think that journey in between those two pieces of definitions I guess is is kind about Indigenous education means to me you know and then talking to our elders again and thinking about what they say you know they talk to us and I've heard so many times and it's kind of cliche now but you know education is our new buffalo is the other thing I've heard as well and you know if you think of a system and a structure in place and it's something that we need to sustain us to sustain sustain who we are as Indigenous people to sustain our communities our well-being you know our future our young people education is is where we need to go it's what does that education look like is is kind of a huge question for me because I see the the best of both worlds for our students you know understanding our culture and our language at the same time knowing how to utilize technology and using that technology to promote who we are but also to share our voice in a very powerful way to unify you know the tribes of Indigenous people around the world like around the world so that we you know all become a unified force when we're looking at things like you know the the the pipelines and the deforestation and you know the murdered missing Indigenous women and technology is huge and bringing those issues to to light and bringing people together so I think it's a little bit of everything it's a little bit of you know taking the best of of the Western world finding a way to utilize that to promote and sustain who we are as Indigenous people at the same time reconnecting with our cultural language at a very deep level and using those values to to move us forward while bringing the next generation behind us so laying a strong foundation for the little ones that are coming behind us I have huge dreams I want I want to see you know I want to see Indigenous directors of education and the public systems I want to see you know our schools reflect and have a high number of Indigenous educators so that our kids have those role models that they they can look up to so they have teachers who have a similar lived experience yet can demonstrate to them what resiliency looks like we need to have those people within our institutions we need to have our non-Indigenous people clear space for Indigenous people to be the ones at the front we need our Indigenous or non-Indigenous allies to kind of step back and and allow Indigenous people now to to take the reins and take the lead I think all of the answers that we need lie within our our communities and I'm going to be very biased but it's it's about our women and you know I really see Indigenous women taking a strong stance and shifting and and changing things for our kids for our communities in the next 10 years I'd love to see you know the graduation gap closed I'd love to see you know our students not only you know graduating and with a grade 12 and finding you know a job I want to see you know our Indigenous kids coming out with an engineer degree I want to see them as doctors I want to see you know our Indigenous kids walking through the hallways of Harvard University because of every single right to be there I want to see our Indigenous lawyers who are Indigenous pharmacy pharmacists and I really love to see them you know walking hand in hand with their language intact and their identity of who they are and these are going to be our folks that are going to kind of lead the way so that's my dream for the next 10 years