 Yeah, Elliot, my traditional name is Ciel Shawat, and I am from Couchin, and I am in my fourth year of my Bachelor of Arts degree in Indigenous and Holmok Mestima Studies. And for my internship, I am involved with the planning and organization of the Land as Life Cowitson course. My name is Lori Meyer-Dreese. I'm originally from Edmonton, Alberta, and I'm an instructor in Indigenous Holmok Studies at Vancouver Island University. I've been here for 21 years. I've had the great privilege of teaching and doing a lot of learning myself in Sonnenmukh Territory and Couchin Territory, and all over the central part of the island. I'm really blessed to have had elders like Koshima, Ray Peter, Colossal Whit, Ellen White, and Florence James as my teachers during my time here. Wonderful, thank you. So we'll start off by maybe just describing the program, starting off with what is the name of the program? Yeah, so our program, it's a 300-level undergraduate course. So for third-year students, although we let students in from a variety of levels, depending on their personal relationship with us, but we prefer a third year. And the course is entitled Land as Life. And what are the age groups of participants that can take this program? So the age groups or target audiences. So anybody can take this course from any age, any background. We try our best to be very inclusive so we can incorporate anybody who wants to embrace this opportunity to learn in a different environment. And I might add to that that we often have students take the class more than once because once they're in the course, they become leaders in their own right. And it's always nice to have a course full of students, some of whom have more experience than others. So it's a group of people who've done it more than once, mixed up with people for whom it's all new. Very good. So it's a program then that's not always the same program each semester? That's right. So the content of the program varies each year, depending on the weather, the land, the people who are available, the students that are there who are coming along. It's all very timely. Wonderful. And what is the aim of this Land as Life program? So with this program, we really want to demonstrate how the land is a teacher, how in indigenous perspectives it's another being. It's something worthy of respect and honor. And here in this institution, we're trying to do our best to demonstrate different kinds of libraries, living libraries. Yeah, the course really is very different from a standard academic approach to learning about the land and indigenous cultures and their relationship with place by getting people out. Another outcome, there are many, many outcomes for this course. Sophia identified a really good one. Another one is we're trying to teach people to be together, to work together and to share, which on the surface sounds really easy, but when we are in a university where a lot of us are struggling to get our individual grades and perform at an individual level, we're never offered the chance to learn together and force to share and learn how to ask for help and how to give help. And that's partly what this course is trying to teach, working together. And also being out on the territory, it also affirms connection to place. And then we have the opportunity to be introduced to land-based skills and the idea of learning from the environment and the teachers who facilitate, which are typically, again, community members or elders, people who have experience being out on the land, and it demonstrates the importance of these skills. And as well as connection to place and, like Lori said, learning together, it also helps develop that sense of community as learners here together walking through this academic journey. And maybe what follows from that is an outcome of what Sophia is talking about. It really is a cross-cultural experience for many people. Some people are learning within the context of their own culture because they come from the communities, the indigenous communities here. But for others, this is an entirely new journey into territories that they don't have a chance to see in their regular lives and working with cultures and being with cultures who are very different from their own. And that's hard work, but also beautiful work. And by embracing this method of learning, we also give back to the communities and the territories by sharing the history and allowing the people from the land to share their own stories and history as opposed to the stories being told for them. And not only do we have community teachers and elders teaching us, the students in the class are learning from one another. So there are more experienced peers in the classroom as students who are teaching the newer students who may not know, not overtly, but just by being together and learning side by side, learning from peers is an important part of the process. And lastly, I think the course is an attempt by the university and instructors like myself to respect those communities as knowledgeable, knowledge-holding people and landscapes so that the university doesn't have a corner on learning and knowing, but rather that we respect and acknowledge that there are other ways of knowing and learning and that it's our duty to engage with that even in the most basic sense. So what happens in this program? So some of the activities that we take part in throughout the course is learning some language because being out on the traditional territories, it's important to be able to acknowledge the connection to language and people in place to really understand the interconnectedness. Like when you translate the whole commutant language to English, you don't get the full meaning translating it to English it loses some of its importance and with language it's connected to everything, our history and the people, our traditional names, it's just a crucial component in learning anything indigenous related. And some of the other stuff we do is canoe paddling and pit cooking, cedar pulling, learning about medicinal plants and how to make teas and other things out of them. And we have storytelling and from the stories we learn teachings and then we learn how to respect the water, the land, the people, the four-legged beings, the feathered beings, the beings in the water, respecting everything as equal, respecting everything as important and honoring what is given to us whether it be knowledge or resources. And also we incorporate the importance of orality and memory because traditionally we were oral cultures, oral people, but losing our fluent speakers it's becoming more apparent that we need to do our best to reserve and continue our language and doing courses like this it gives us an opportunity to share it with other people and for indigenous students it gives us the opportunity to embrace our identity and connection to place as well as each other and even for non-indigenous learners they have the opportunity to connect with the land that they may reside on whether permanently or just for the school year. They have a chance to really engage with the people and the people of the land. Maybe I can add to what Sophia said very well there. Something that happens in our program which isn't necessarily a learning outcome but it does happen all the time is students take on leadership and someone like Sophia illustrates that and that she's been involved in the class a couple of times and now just by virtue of that she's starting to lead the class herself and we make room for that so that's really important. For the Land Is Life program how would you measure the successes of the program and what are some of the challenges? That's a really good question and Land Is Life is now 16 years old. We've been doing it for 16 years every year every spring and we do it in May and June because that's the first opportunity we have to really go outside and that's a time of year when things are coming alive after a long winter. It's been a successful program I would say and I know that because students routinely come back want to sign up for it again and use comments to describe their experience in the course as life-changing and that's a quote not from me but rather from those who have been our participants. We know that we've never recruited or advertised this course and it's only by word of mouth that people have come to know about it and come into it. After 16 years we have wait lists that are as long as the size of the class allows so there is a tremendous amount of interest in the course and it's very difficult to turn people away because we only have so many seats to fill. So just based on that alone I think we've got a good indication that things are going in the way that we want. We don't evaluate in a typical university or an academic fashion. The course is entirely oral. There is a small writing component but really it's just a memory aid and since many students are not used to operating in an exclusively oral environment where they have to remember everything we do include the small written component of daily reports on the activities that have taken place just for practice but I would like to move into an entirely oral and memory based course. Now to evaluate that I did a survey with elders that I've worked with for a number of years and asked them how they would assess students who have been out on the land with them and how they would decide whether that student had succeeded or not in engaging with indigenous ways of knowing and being and they all agreed that the one thing that they demanded of students was their presence so that a student could never learn if they weren't there. So that is one third of a student's grade is their presence and by presence I mean not just showing up but active presence that they're awake, ready to go, not hung over, tired, hanging back but perky, awake, enthusiastic to be there. The other element that the elders emphasized that was important if anyone was keen on learning and being or really being there was participation and again from a standard academic point of view this is always kind of a little add on extra five percent if you look like you're engaged. In this course 30 percent of the course is evaluated on whether you actually threw yourself into the activity, whether you looked for opportunity to be engaged. Perhaps it was picking up garbage, perhaps it was walking with a friend and perking them up telling good stories and sharing a laugh. Perhaps it was caring for the elder who was teaching that day. There are many roles in which a person can participate in this course. None of them are better than another. But a person needs to seek out where they're going to be active. And as an instructor it's very easy to see who's being active. It's rare actually to find a student who is not active. Those students tend to leave and we have a dropout rate of one percent or less. So every student really is quite active. And finally the last element that elders insisted was a mark of a student who was successful in this program were students who could speak to what they were going to do with the gifts that they received and that they give something back. When we learn from our communities and from the landscape there's an obligation or a commitment to give back. And whether we give back in the next five minutes or over the next 100 years it doesn't matter but we have to make a commitment that that gift was given in the spirit of passing it on. And so we ask students to present orally at the end of the course what they're going to give back based on the gifts that they received. This is very very challenging, also very emotional for many people. And the last day when we all do oral presentations and people speak to the gifts they've received, what they're going to do with them. We often are very very moved to hear what they plan on doing. So really the evaluation scheme or the rubric is based on how elders have routinely looked at young people or people who are learning and try to evaluate whether or not they're worth investing in. And when students are active, present and make that commitment, then it's not difficult to be with them. We know they're succeeding. One of the big challenges that we faced in having this course is that it doesn't fit in a classroom at a university, doesn't fit in a schedule. So we've had to fight to have the course be in a seven day sequence. We've had to fight to receive funding for buses and for transportation to get out onto the land. There's a lot of concern within the university setting around liability. So making a fire on a beach, of course, involves some risk. Using sharp knives when we're cooking food and being in an environment that's not a sterile kitchen, that involves some risk. Canoing, when we do canoeing, which is a prominent activity out here on the coast. It's customary in our local communities here not to wear life jackets because you have to be in touch with the water and have a sense of the power of water. So again, from a university point of view, this is more liability. And the university has had a tremendously challenging time dealing with this so far to the point that they haven't dealt with it at all. So we continue to take the risk and do so by trying to be responsible. And we really want to honor our communities and do what they ask us to do for learning, not do it the university way. Another challenge has been to honor the communities and their landscapes. We treat the landscapes and the communities as if they're free. Just like our libraries on campus, the communities are libraries. We don't pay a subscription fee for the communities for our indigenous teachers. Perhaps we should pay for the territory that we're using as our learning base. But it's presumed that this is all sort of easily accessible and that we're entitled to go out there as university students when really, I would say, we should rethink that. So funding for the land and for the human resources involved in this course is hugely problematic, still unresolved. And I would challenge anyone interested in this kind of course and this kind of learning to not start their course until they've dealt with that. It's really difficult and I don't mean to be sort of hypocritical because we have our course, but we've been lucky to receive an endowment, rather large endowment, to cover some of those concerns. What is your perspective on the importance of language and land-based learning as revitalization in indigenous education? To fully embrace our history and our culture and for the continuation of it, language needs to be involved in every aspect. Language comes in our stories and our history and our teachings, our traditional names. It is involved in ceremony and song and it's part of holistic learning and really knowing who we are as Hulmukh people, First Nations people. We've lost a lot of our fluent speakers and people who did speak before, no longer speak now, more so over the past few years. We've had programs such as Silent Speakers come out, which is for people who either understood Hulkmatenam or fluently spoke Hulkmatenam up until the time of a traumatic instance happening to them, such as the Indian Residential School. So the program, I had the opportunity to sit in on this second day of this program because my grandmother, Trisha Rice, she is one of the mentors. So these people are going back to the language, going back to fluency, but they also have to take part in the healing process of it. I believe they called it, it starts with a C. It's very therapeutic for them and it's a healing journey in itself. So trying to, for these people to come forward and speak the language themselves as well as teaching it to the younger generations that can still be very traumatic for them. So it's a healing journey for the students and understanding the intergenerational trauma. It's a healing journey for the teachers in opening up themselves to the potential fear or anxiety that comes with not only speaking the language themselves, but passing it down for their loved ones to speak or their community members to speak because of the fear that was instilled in them. So that is a big part in revitalization of the culture and the resurfacing of a lot of what was lost as well as taken away. So it's a large component in Indigenous learning and Indigenous perspectives is embracing what has happened in the past and how we can work together to move forward. So language is everything. And I underscore that with saying land and language are the same, one and the same, the language comes from the land. You can't understand the land if you don't engage with the language. And that doesn't mean fluency, but it does mean stepping into it and opening yourself up to it. If you remain close to it, you won't understand. So it's that, that's significant. Through the language we can understand the interconnectedness of the land, water and the beings, human and non-human alike. What is your vision for Indigenous education over the next 10 years? So on a personal note, I really love to see an increase in Indigenous scholars with the movements that have been happening and that have become more prominent as people coming into their own and being a voice not only for themselves, but their communities as well. And through education, we're finding a way to move forward and better ourselves and better our communities. And I'd like to see more academic institutions embrace and incorporate Indigenous episteme. Like here at our university, we have the Community Cousins Peer Mentorship Program and that gives people a sense of community and identity and a family here at this university. And we have our elders in residence and we have our language courses. And it would be really nice to see more academic institutions incorporate that. And it would be really beneficial if all students could have a better sense of recognition and acceptance for the opportunity to obtain holistic learning. So recognizing, respecting and accepting the differences, but also seeing how it's beneficial across all disciplines. So just a willingness to move forward and be connected and co-exist. Yeah, and we were discussing this before we went on tape and I think one piece that I agree with everything Sophie is adding there, it's all beautiful. The acceptance of difference is really quite difficult and in an academic environment we often like to critique difference or work with critiquing each other etc. But working on acceptance and specifically accepting difference is a whole other level of high diplomacy and learning how to love and share that isn't something that we practice routinely academically but it's something that's really, really important in this context. So that's important in this class and I think over the next 10 years I hope to see more of that. As my generation of instructors move away and the new generation of young teachers like Sophia and others move into these positions. It's very heartening. Thank you. Wonderful, well thank you very much to both of you, Lori and Sophia for taking the time to share your words and share your perspectives when it comes to Indigenous education and for sharing about your program at Vancouver Island University and how that's been a benefit to the people and the students. So I thank you very much for your time.