 It's a good way of reaching out to people who want to learn the language, and so I created the Cree Language Videos for Facebook, about four or five years ago, and so in this site I post Cree Language Videos, I will post grammar items in there, and basically I found that if we have videos of grammar, people see it and hear it, people tend to pick up a lot more, a lot faster, but the main thing that drove me to creating this site was I was asked to do online Cree classes for our department, and I wanted to provide videos for the online classes, but there was no way to do it, the way with what we had to work with at that time, so I created PowerPoints, and you cannot upload PowerPoints onto our online classes, which is unfortunate, so I found out we could actually make those PowerPoints into videos, and so once I made the videos, I posted the videos on Cree Language Videos, and from there I took the URL connection and posted it onto the online classes, so students were able to get the URL connection from there, and they just went right into the Facebook page for that when they wanted to listen to that, so that started off with the stories, with the grammar lessons, and then after that I started doing the stories with the traditional stories, and so I posted a few of those on Cree, in Cree, during the Aboriginal storytelling month, which is February, here in Saskatchewan, so I made some videos of me telling stories and posted them onto this site, and last year, last February, during the midterm break, I went to the first Cree storytelling camp in Big Stone Lake, just west of La Ranch, and so we told stories during the evening, and one of my former students, we videotaped the stories, the storytelling, and one of my students former students took the videos and closed captioned these stories, which is really good, so I have me telling stories, and you can see the Cree right in there, and so that's one thing we did, and it's an exciting thing. People would go onto the site and they'd get excited about the videos, and then they'd want a copy of the videos, which you cannot do, it's impossible to upload the videos from Facebook to yourself, so my son, who is an IT person, created a link for me to be able to do that. People can actually go into the site and I provided a link where they could actually upload these videos onto a USB and use them. Now, the other teachers, Cree language teachers, want to use the grammar videos in their classes, but a lot of First Nations schools do not allow their teachers to go on Facebook during teaching time, but there's nothing preventing them from using these videos off their USB. You just were able to use these videos in their classes using the link that my son provided. A lot of people wanted these things, and the thing is they want the videos, and I'll show them the link on how to get the videos, but then they want the PowerPoints from where I made these videos, which I can email those PowerPoints to them, and so these are teachers. I know of one student who actually made MP3 files out of all these videos, so you could listen to them in the car while she's driving. Here's the audio, so it's becoming useful that way. A lot of people don't know that they could actually make audio files out of these things. It's just very simple to do, actually. I teach the Y dialect, and I am originally a TH dialect speaker, so I tend, I've been doing this for 30 years, right, and I tend to mix up my dialects still to this day, and so I'm glad that I work with other people who are Y dialect speakers, so they will correct me. If I'm using a TH dialect word in a class or in my writing, they'll correct me on it. I have somebody from London, England, who regularly goes onto the page and will talk, will put something in, how happy it is to be able to listen to the story. A few years ago, too, I had a student project where they posted, they created an online How to Say It in Cree booklet that we put online, and somebody from England went into that site using that booklet, just a book that itself, no audio on there, but looking at the grammar from there, and he actually wrote me a letter based on that, I asked him, how did you write this letter? He said, you're online, online, wow, is that a good, just the initiative that the student took, to be able to teach themselves to these things, and it was great. So social media is great that way. With this audio link, with these videos on the Cree language videos, people are able to see it. Teachers out there want to use the videos that we have, and so they'll contact me, and I'll send them the power points for them, so they can use it, and I'll also show them how they could upload the videos themselves if they want to do it. There's another page, Cree Word of the Day, where people are asking for words, and we have, that is a really active site. We have all people, all dialects contributing to that page for words, which is really great. Hit the share button, and off it goes. It's really nice to see, and some of them do ask, you know, but then I usually tell them, if it's on Facebook, go for it. In a few years, people, more people will be willing to tell stories, and post them on the page, and other people have created their own Facebook pages to teach the language. There's a young student in Edmonton who created Cree Morphology page. She's just wonderful stuff, and so there's that wonderful teaching tool, and her videos are just awesome, and so we see this happening in social media, helping to save the languages that we have, and so it's good to see. It's important to me because one of the things, perhaps the most important thing that happened, that got destroyed during the residential school years, was the loss of language that a lot of us faced during those years, but more importantly though, us, we were in school during storytelling season, what they call storytelling season, because traditionally, storytelling, stories were told in the wintertime, and so we were away at school during those times, so we no longer heard the stories, the traditional stories, and the traditional stories contained everything we needed to know on how to live in this world, and so we were missing out on our education because of big residential school days, but this offering, this online thing where stories can be accessed at any time of the year is perfect, it's the perfect way of getting those stories done. We're talking about decolonization and reconciliation, and the only way that we could actually do that and be successful in decolonization is to get to know the stories, our traditional stories. You are in a quota, in a quota has stories, Cree has stories, and each of our tribes have our traditional stories that we need to get back to, because this is where our education is on how to be who we are as First Nations people, and a lot of people don't know the stories, but so this site provides that opportunity for people to get to know the stories, to hear them in the original language, and to also see them written. A lot of differences with, like there's a lot of traditional stories that have been written down into English by ethnologists throughout history, and we at First Nations University have INDL classes, Indian Language Classes, Indian Literature and Translation Stories, Indian Literature and Translation Classes, where we look at the collected stories by ethnologists, and look at various versions of these stories, and try to see, okay, where did something lose in translation, what got lost in translation, so a lot of people only have access to the English versions of these stories, so it's important that we tell these stories in the Cree, and start telling these stories in Cree, in Dene, in Dakota, Dakota, and so though, in the Schnabbi, in our original languages, because that's where our stories, our lessons are in the original stories, you know, there's some of the translated stories, for example, a story called the Shaddai Dancers or the Dancing Ducks, that's been collected numerous times, I don't know how many versions there are of that in English, and it's a quite a lengthy story, but one of the collections I saw was the story itself written in three sentences, in English, so that's the kind of stuff you run into, these collections, you know, you get this shortened, leave a lot of the story out, but doing it with the original language, you get everything. It means going back to the stories, indigenous education means going back to the stories, and finding out what the lessons are in the stories, and what is it that is there for people to be educated. It also means going back to the land, and land-based education, which is a movement happening right now in some northern communities, and I think it's happening in Edmonton, it's also happening in Saskatoon, you know, land-based education, and that's part of indigenous education, but the main thing about indigenous education is the sacred stories, reviving those stories, students being proud of who they are, and where they come from. Today, there is a lot of young people thinking, asking, what good is our language? What's the use of learning our traditional ways? This is the situation today, and with land-based education and indigenous education, working with computers since 1985 in computer, computer generated language assistance, and it's been wonderful. I've loved computer stuff, and my kids have grown up with computers all their lives, so nowadays, I just sit back. If I need help with computers, I'll call one of my kids. Basically, to keep on going, I can make a move, you know, and persevere, because a lot of young people will face discouragement when they try to talk their languages, because they face people, people will criticize them, because they don't pronounce things properly, and they'll get laughed at for mispronouncing things. Sometimes you can't help the latter, because we end up swearing when they didn't want to swear, you know, I laugh at those situations, but the thing is to keep on trying, and to know that to get something done, you need to spend a lot of time on it, in order to learn something, you need to spend a lot of time on it, and that's where a lot of people don't want to do, don't realize that, and they figure, it's here, I should know it right away. If they could keep in mind, how long did it take them to read, and use the same analogy to say, so how long is it going to take me to learn the language? What did I do to learn to read? You spend a lot of time on it, right? So that's what you need to do to learn the language, you need to spend a lot of time on it, and this is basically where people need to pay attention to. You need to spend a lot of time on there, you don't expect to learn something right away. I think it is more accessible to do it, because there are apps in certain languages, Cree has an app, quite a few of them actually, Anishinaabe has an app, I don't know about Nakota or Takota, I haven't seen anything to that effect yet, but the other languages in the States, some of the languages in the States, Cheyenne has an app, and Chickasaw, I don't know if Chickasaw has it, but some of the other languages in the States have apps on there that you could have, but it's really good, but the thing is also other First Nations people are actually starting to write their posts, Facebook posts, they're starting to write them in their languages, in their languages, they may spell the wrong, but that's okay, you know, because you weren't a perfect Spanish from the beginning, from the time you started trying to write, right? That's something they have to remember, they can't spell perfectly but they're starting to write the language, a friend of mine just sent me an inbox message yesterday in Navajo of all things, he laughs at me when I tried my Navajo on him, because I cannot pronounce some of their some of their sounds in Navajo, it's been nice to get that, but I have had students say that, people say that they appreciate my posts that I see, that they see in on Facebook, and the person from England is just awesome there, because he's always forever talking about how excited he is to get this stuff, and there's an old man in North Carolina who is Anish Nabi, originally Anish Nabi, but he lives in North Carolina, and he comes in and writes in Cree, and he's just learning this from the online stuff, because he's alone in North Carolina, there's no Cree over there, so whatever he does in Cree is picked up from the social media, this is really good to see. I'd love to see more activities online, for other languages, and it is happening, it's really nice to see, the other thing that is keeping us away from a lot of us, hesitate to post things online, it's basically, traditional storytelling was traditionally done in the winter, and so come summer months, nobody wants to tell stories and post them online during the summer months, and I have an older cousin who gets involved in Cree emerging camps during the summer months, and she actually tells traditional Cree stories during the summer months, and I'm like, what is she doing in North Carolina, this is forbidden, and she says, well, this is the only time she has to be with these people, so she's open to telling the stories, you know, like we have to change new things, traditions die if they don't change at the times, you know, so she's telling stories, the traditional stories in the summer months, you know, she's going to be, she is meeting a lot of resistance, including from me, you know, but then I see her point, so I'm willing to do the stories in the summer time now, because we need to change a few things to be able to make these things happen, and to be able to keep these stories.