 For the past few years I've been doing cultural arts engagement. I don't know if I call it a program. It's just an opportunity for schools, for people who are interested in learning more about the cultural arts and kind of what I call the original arts of the land. When I grew up I found that the art that we were learning was more western and we didn't have a huge focus on the traditional arts that my mom and my grandma were doing. So that just kind of became an interest for me to try to help more people learn how to do cultural arts. So in my program or what I offer schools is there's a lot of opportunities I actually don't even know how to put it all together. So I try not to be a one-off craft. I try not to be just come in and do a project with no history connection. So one of the things that I encourage is that before I go in to do actual hands-on art experiences is that we have a conversation about culture and how arts fits in culture. And not just first-nation culture but all cultures in the world because every culture in the world has their own forms of expression and the forms that we used a long time ago were the original ones here. So I like to tell people about that. And then I like to talk about how I go about collecting, preparing natural materials for a lot of the arts opportunities. So in a regular classroom setting I can't do that at all within one class block. So I also think that when I do that talk beforehand and I kind of have a provide opportunity for the kids to experience like washing fish scales or dying porcupine quills that, you know, like what are we going to do next? You know, it kind of creates I guess a further inquiry like they were interested, right? Instead of just kind of this is all your supplies and this is what we're going to make, right? Before I go and do any art I feel like that kind of stops it from being just a token craft or a token activity that we get to learn more about even the relationship to the land because a lot of my material does come from the land that as our ancestors have always had a relationship with the land and we encourage to continue that so that's a neat part of my job is that connection to the land too. And I get to kids to just kind of experience that and know that that's what our ancestors did for thousands of years. So I hope that kind of sums up what I do but I mean it's just natural to me to go and share and that's what our family does. When I first designed this cultural engagement that I go into schools with my first audience was students. So I former employee of Edmonton Public Schools and one of the things that I had the opportunity to do was to pilot this project while I was there and I found that it was easy to go into elementary schools because kids are just more excited for learning. I just had this idea that old people were already set in their ways and that high school kids don't want to be involved just from experience. So I first designed it for elementary school and then from that just going to different schools or different programs offering it through teacher professional development and things like that. I learned about taking all of my activities and making adaptations so that all ages could do it. So my original target was elementary school but now that I found there's a huge demand for what I do. There's a lot of people that are interested in bringing in cultural arts into the school whether it's because of all what's happening with reconciliation or learning about residential schools or people just trying to incorporate the history, the original history of Canada that you know there's a high demand for it so then I started to play around with different ways of delivering information. First simple topic so for example like porcupine quill work. Porcupines or the quills are dangerous, they're sharp so right away you don't want little kids playing with it but how could you create an opportunity for them to understand the concept of quill work. So being able to do that I've opened my audience a little bit more and then there are places where I've been to quite a few times so I feel like maybe those quillers can be advanced by now but we can go into different variations of quill work. So starting with basic understanding my original audience was elementary school but now I deliver to early learning all the way through high school including teachers and staff, staff PD, retreats so just to people who want to have a cool cultural arts experience but then it does teach a little bit of history and I try not to scare people off. I mean try not to make it too hard, make it easy enough so that people can complete and have a cool experience. For the original audience that I had developed this with like the pilot project in Edmonton it was really in my heart I wanted our First Nation Maintain Inuit kids to see culture in the city to find a sense of identity because we all know that when we have a strong sense of identity we can pretty much tackle anything but coming across a lot of young kids that might have grown up in the city don't know their extended family from whatever First Nation community they come from so one of the beliefs that we always had at my face of employment was our halls, walls and resources should reflect our population and the schools that had a high Indigenous population were kind of my... they had a soft spot, like I have a soft spot in my heart for them because those are the kids that probably needed the most that connection to identity because you know you are First Nation when you are in a group of other people so whether that's a comfort in identifying yourself as okay it's okay that I'm different because I am First Nation but then one of those things that I can do is make me strengthen me as a First Nation person so a lot of my projects I hope that the children or the people that participate came up with a stronger sense of identity with a passion for exploring further into the arts you know a long time ago I was taught that our forms of expression, our arts are tools just for economic or to make money they are ways to help your mind and your heart it's storytelling so it takes care of our health and well-being and that's kind of what I would wish my participants come out with is recognizing that it's helpful it's not just something to do that the more you do it could be calming it could be relaxing it could be kind of your own therapy but you know it's pretty powerful when you can do storytelling in many different ways so that's kind of what I hope for a lot of people that experience the cultural arts with me especially the kids but you know when I target the teachers I hope it's something that they can take into the classroom so that the kids can see themselves in the classroom because that's where they come from that's their own history so I guess another thing that I want people to understand is I got to travel all over the world I'm a volleyball player so I got to go all over Canada played in the United States I even got to go to Europe but I found a lot of times I was defending stereotypes or I guess breaking myths about us and it just kind of became my line of work I guess is trying to help people understand rather than getting mad at them that they don't know the real us and we have our own ways of doing being so creating that understanding for all people is that in my heart I kind of think it will eliminate racism one day because of the kinds of conversations that I have because when I parallel cultures we're not all different we're actually kind of the same it's just that those tiny elements that make us unique are different and creating an understanding is kind of I guess the overall objective my heart is with the kids because as adults we can design programs we can say hey these are cool these are going to work but if the kids don't love it they're not going to gravitate towards it and they're not going to just naturally want to do it all the time so I'm scared that culture is going to become too much of just a subject one day that we can just have this experience and you know they fall in love with it and want to learn more so when I go into school usually before I go I offer the variety of topics that I like to go in with and like I said I like to have a conversation to start with so the first conversation I like to have is about culture in general all cultures in the world have common elements and for someone that you know comes from culture it's easy to say oh in your culture this is what you do in my culture this is what we do you know so we do paralleling instead of just pointing out the differences so for me that cultural conversation is the most important thing that I take into the schools as it is a conversation that I can say you know when we learn about an art project you know we can go back to all those common elements and see how it fits so that's the first conversation I go into I call it like an introduction to culture because it has those common elements that I can I guess refer back to when I do the cultural arts another thing that I like to go into the schools with is talking about traditional foods so my mom is Lorraine Yuzichipi and she has been doing traditional foods presentations my whole life I don't remember if she ever didn't do presentations but she liked to talk about how we can harvest the food from our own land from our community that it's a healthier way of living so being able to have a conversation with kids create an experience so when I go into a classroom and do the cultural or traditional foods presentation I take in little samples of all the food that we collect from Stanley Buffalo and we make a version what I call grocery store Pemicin but it's just because all the food comes from the grocery store so it's one of my popular ones a lot of people like doing that one it's simple it's fun it's delicious one of the other kinds of stuff I go in with I guess another topic is traditional games I know there's a lot of traditional games workshops and stuff that people go to but when I do my presentation on games I like to talk about how there's different stages of learning in there and helping kids recognize that they're actually learning instead of just playing a game I feel that the traditional games equipment because it's made of natural materials I can talk about the relationship to the land again I can talk about you know when we're done playing with it we can give it back to mother earth it'll turn back into earth so those kinds of things but recognizing the different stages in games and sometimes we don't even know we're playing a game and learning at the same time so kids find it awesome when they realize that they can learn through game and then sometimes I get the I wish I could play games all the time to learn instead of doing schoolwork so that's another one of my favorites so those are the kind of tune I wouldn't say artsy but the rest of them are more project focused so I like working with natural materials so the most requested one right now is pretty penquill work there are places where I have done a visit where the kids actually wash clean and dye porcupine quills before they use them which is I think a real thorough experience right like they get to do that otherwise people that don't do that I just come in with colored quills already so they don't get to see that process so there's other materials that I dye I also dye horse hair, moose hair, fish scales, the porcupine quills and caribou hair because they teach all kinds of cultural arts and one of the things through doing the natural material collection and washing and prep and dye I talked about how different groups of indigenous people might not have used all these materials but we all have a common relationship with the land and a lot of our things are harvested the same way so with the cultural arts I like to talk about teaching quill work, bead work we're known for our bead work but a lot of times people don't recognize that our bead work actually evolved from quill work so a lot of our beading techniques are old quill work techniques so having kids realize that oh okay I get it those are kind of those things that make sense right so I like working with leather so a lot of times when we do a lot of our art I will use leather I feel like I can say that's the original canvas of the land and so a lot of our painting a lot of the hair embroidery will go on leather working with power flesh you know power flesh is actually a French word but the rawhide component of making containers and things like that the kids can make a little envelope depending on the time I have some people have made boxes or other kinds of containers which involve math which a lot of people don't realize too like the already components of that exist from school you know the science in it the math and the literacy the numeracy like all that kind of stuff we can pull a lot of that from these cultural arts and find ways of enhancing those elements I guess but you know it's fun when we can do it from an arts perspective so a lot of the arts that I do go in with it's really I like to teach the technique so that kids learn to apply the technique rather than assume that the technique is only for that project so when I do quill work I will teach quill wrapping and sewing down the quill in three different versions so instead of just making a project so then they apply the technique to the project which I think is more freeing more liberating in a way there's room for creativity whereas if you go in with a project that already has you know its limits it's not as fun same with beading I go in with just a beading technique I go in with three beading techniques and then the kids get to create something on their own so I think having that flexibility is really important so I've also done collaborations with other kinds of art so for example this one time I had a junior high art project where our theme was reconciliation and the calls to action so I've taken the three days that we worked with the kids and broke it down into learning about those calls to action reconciliation having those pre-conversations then learning art techniques and then watching the kids come up with an art piece influenced by the calls to action so whatever calls to action spoke to them the most or one that they wanted to focus on whether it was a call to action that was important to their family or in the direction they were going if they wanted to be in the health field or in education so they picked one call to action to portray into art so I have one school right now that applied to do all the 94 calls to action into an art piece so hopefully we get the grant but it's creating opportunities like that that I love to go into places and talk about we don't have to follow this agenda in all the topics that I send out but that we can also come up with our own version last year I worked at Valkyrie School and we did a piece dedicated to the missing and murdered Indigenous women of Canada and so the kids did some research and they found information that you know it told us all the locations of the documented cases of missing women and then so our art piece it was funny because our art piece it was a leather and we strung it up like on a high tending frame and then we did an image transfer of all the provinces across Canada but when I brought the leather it was already in the shape of Canada so I thought that was really like it was meant to be kind of thing so then when we did that the kids learned how to do we just did a quick daisy chain like a daisy flower so they made these little flowers and documented all the locations on that hide where the missing cases were so for them to go through that realization you know that these are real people that they had to look up a name and to see where they went missing from then to find that on the map and then to document it in a way like the cultural arts on the leather with the beads and the flowers the flowers being connected to the environment and the land it was a really powerful experience because not only was it the kids when people would walk by they're like oh where are you up to so it invited a lot of people into the classroom which also created more opportunities for the conversation for missing and murdered Indigenous women but that's probably one of my favorite things that I've done in the classroom but I like to design things because teachers, schools, the audience that I go to whoever I coordinate with knows they're people the best so I'm always willing to design something whether it's unique, whether it's something that I've done already but to create an experience that you know that they're going to have conversations about for a long time and then lead into other conversations last week sitting in the kindergarten class after I've been there quite a few years you're like what are we going to do next you know it's the people that want more that's kind of what I go like there is a huge need for it but when I see kids finish a project when I see kids bring things to parallel the significance of it you know that's what it's then they get it right like I feel like they get it but when it comes to kids it's just the fact that they made something so I'll give you an example one of my schools that I did we did a doll project where the kids all made dolls so we started from scratch and we just had leather and we stuffed them and then the kids designed clothes and to hear stories a year later where the kids still carry their dolls or see pictures on Facebook of those kids with those dolls I guess the stories that come from the parents too I'm thankful for parents that reach out to say hey this actually meant something to my child I guess it's just mostly the feedback I have this thing about I know education you know they give grades and things like that but I feel like when it comes to things that have to do with identity maybe we shouldn't do that that how can we really measure like oh you are doing 70% in learning your language what does that say about how we're maybe not influencing this person to just learn so I get scared that I hope my arts and my opportunities never turn into a child receiving a grade because I'm hoping that it influences you know their identity their sense of self that's one thing I'm always scared of the success I don't really depend on grading or I don't have a criteria mine is just as long as they try and they get to hear the stories of the connection to culture the connection to the land a little bit of history of how we got to this place from doing these arts a long time ago to now like for me that's enough for them to know to learn and I can't force them to do more art or to like it but I don't know if I have any real success measurement but I guess the stories the feedback the demand the desire like a lot of people want to want to have this in their school want to have their students experience it and it's time for us to do that we're going to help people well the other thing is there's a lot of there's not a lot of funding out there for artists to go into schools schools have to find ways so I've had schools that apply for grants through SAS Cardsport so last year we got three grants this year I had seven schools apply you know for the November 1st deadline so for it to go up from like more than double rate so the the the desire for it is there but I think if it was any other kind of opportunity like you know field trips and stuff like that there would be money because it's unique it's hard for schools to get me to come in whereas when I was in Edmonton because it was my job it was easy for me to go into schools I had my budget and it was at no cost to schools right so but now it's a cost to schools because well I'm not a paid employee the nobody has all the materials that I use so to have that supplies on hand and people want it but yeah I'm just the interest I guess is my the interest for it would probably be my measurement it's since I've come home there's a lot of people I want to invite me to their schools to move back to Saskatchewan I found that it was a because people didn't know what I did I was in an area where nobody experienced what I do in the schools that it was almost like a hard sell I felt like I had to convince people a lot more in the beginning whereas now I just you know I get emails or phone calls and asking my availability but the hardest well not the hardest part but I mean I don't see it as a barrier but because I've been doing this for a long time my back my educational background I actually am not a teacher I don't have a B.Ed I went to school to be a welder I wanted to do I wanted to be a welding artist I wanted to do metal sculptures and I also did a cultural arts instructor program which you know I learned a lot about the arts in the north so when I when I tell people that I'm not a teacher I feel like they look at me like I have less oh you know like I'm I don't know I just feel like okay I don't qualify to be here but then at the same time I I can see the there is a lack of cultural arts knowledge and ways of incorporating cultural arts in the classroom so for me that's my strength and luckily when I did work with Edmonton Public you know my supervisor and my co-workers you know there was a lot of collaboration and when I designed this program you know I got to go into the schools and you know those teacher colleagues that I had you know helped me and we basically just kind of I think because they were open to it right to them it didn't matter if I was a teacher or not it was my abilities of being able to go into the classroom to create these opportunities for kids coming home and trying to tell people you know this is what I do to not be an actual teacher I don't want to call it a barrier because I don't I mean I don't see a need for it for myself because I love doing this and it's not a huge criteria for myself to do it's a passion it's something that I already know so going into the classrooms is just natural anyways my whole life everybody said that I should be a teacher but I didn't want to be a teacher I don't want to teach people stuff that they might not like so I'd rather create cool experiences for people so yeah when I first came back it was a hard sell but now other people know what I do yeah I think I like that I don't have to work every day I don't have to I'm busy all the time and I can be free for a lot of things it's like when I worked with Edmonton Public I had a lot of requests outside the district whereas I'm a district employee so it was really hard to say I want to help them but I can't because my job limits me I have my area, I have my school so now that I'm just doing independent contracting then it's easy like I travel all over the place and it's awesome I'm missing out on kids whereas when I was in my other job I felt like oh I only have these kids but these kids need it too so just being free I feel like it's better but yeah that was the only bit I'm in the momentum now, the challenges aren't really there so think of my ancestors our method of nurturing a child to have the abilities and skills that they need to be contributing to society I guess you know when I think of those old ways I feel that's more truest to indigenous education rather than the western way the ways of doing that is also different as we didn't have classrooms no authoritative figures I guess in the groups but you know from going into classrooms now I find that the whole idea of culture in the school can be a little more specific to to be a little more specific to the truest cultures of the land here so when I have that conversation of culture in the classroom I talk about six common elements the first element is language the second one is kinship the third one is the process and transferring of traditional knowledge the fourth one is the connection to the environment the fifth one is the ceremonies and celebrations and then the last one is the forms of expression so part of the reason I teach people is to tell people about those six common elements and these elements came after attending multiple kinds of cultural awareness trainings other kinds of events where people were trying to talk about indigenous culture but for me working in such a diverse area in Edmonton I found that these are things that everybody will understand not just indigenous people but all cultures in the world so paralleling those conversations so that we have common elements of culture was I find it more comforting rather than just always finding out a difference and then you have to know those differences so when I think of indigenous education I hope that I don't sound like I'm bashing western education but you know there's when it comes to language we're not all on the same page when it comes to language there's formal communication and we learn how to read and write then formatting and things like that whereas there's more of feeling and consideration and compassion and empathy when we communicate in person which is more true to culture as when we transfer traditional knowledge you know they're not giving us tests they're not giving us assignments or things like that so in how we communicate with one another I feel like that's kind of there's a difference in that so the cultural component for language and communication I feel it's more person, not person or I know empathetic when we do it in person so the kinship system so in our families we have all of our cousins which are like our brothers and sisters so we don't have a kinship system regular education we understand people's jobs roles and responsibilities but in a family you learn from people so growing up I was able to go and live with my auntie or a couple of my aunties because I have a lot and they all had different things to teach me but in my culture I understood that they might have things that my mom doesn't see it their way but it's still helpful to me and that's why she sent me because there's things that I could do and learn from other people and when I think of a classroom setting to be able to learn from other people there's no flexibility in that there's one teacher responsible for all of these things so when my mom sent me well not sent me I sounded like she's forcing me away but I had opportunities to go stay with other people that was for me she knew that it would strengthen me or mentor me into my own strengths and abilities which I feel like this is how I would love to learn is to go and spend time with people that will help me and when you think of a family structure that's kind of our role and our job is to help that way compared to a classroom setting or in education in your own and you might not have that relationship with people that are there doing the same thing so when I think of how we transfer traditional knowledge our format in western ways really you have your teacher who's kind of giving instructions you sit behind a desk or at a table and I was taught our traditional way of learning you're spending time with the person there's no barriers in between you and you're learning hands on and they're not going to say you know here's your assignment come and show me afterwards and give me a mark I know I was already talking about that but even being able to ask for information we're told that okay it's time for science it's time for math whereas if I were to go and seek traditional knowledge I make that choice I take that tobacco and I'm going to offer it I know what I'm getting into because I'm seeking that information so being able to apply that transfer of traditional knowledge process I feel more connected to our indigenous ways to our culture so just acknowledging that you're going to go and learn something that you're making an effort you're taking that offering I feel like because our kids don't do that for all the other subject things it's a bit of a disconnect but when I think of the thinking when you're done, when you're learning, when you've learned what you needed to learn and you have that opportunity to say thank you or to give a gift what we gift people when they give us their time and their knowledge it feels like it comes full circle that you got what you needed so that you give that way and give that gift and teachers don't often receive that from students an example I always give in school is have you guys ever taught your teachers thank you for teaching me about math I'm going to be smarter with money when I grow up those kinds of things but it's not part of our process to teach kids to be thankful for what they're learning in the classroom so when I think of indigenous education from that perspective I think there could be a lot more relationship that way talking in a full process of acknowledging what you're getting and then being thankful for it afterwards when it comes to the connection to the environment every culture is connected to the environment and there's so much information in there and I think of my arts process I have to collect wash clean dye stuff I don't just go hunting for art supplies we have a relationship with the land and how we use it even when it's the food that I eat the lunch that I have the water that we get all comes from the land so when I was growing up in school in the community I also went to school in town and then I went to residential school so when I think of the connection to the land and the environment I didn't have that when I went to public school because I felt like because we had more activities at residential school and at home that were connected to First Nation, to our culture I felt that relationship was there but I didn't feel when I was in public school and sometimes I worry that when I go to public school that connection to the environment is not identified or pointed out to kids as much as it was when I was in school in my community and residential school I keep in mind my own experiences when I go into schools I really believe that the environmental connection is really important because our food how we behave on the land what our buildings are what comes around our buildings I guess and I remind kids even though we have we talk about our own traditional territories plants, animals have traditional territories and the cities that we live in are part of if we removed it all there would have been plants and animals that lived here too so I think that environmental connection just really acknowledges the space of where people are learning even though we're in a building that we could acknowledge that there was animals and plants whose natural home was here the ceremonies and celebrations when it comes to education we celebrate finishing school they're graduating there's all the holidays that we celebrate in education we participate in Valentine's Day St. Patrick's Day but none of those are original to this land or come from our people and the things that we do celebrate are kind of past tense if you will so when I think of graduation it means you've completed what you needed to do to get to a certain point but a long time ago our life celebrations were your inability to do things so when you became a provider that's when you were an adult you could do all these things you have these abilities so we don't really when I think of our own celebrations we could encourage people to be more I guess it's a different in a different way our celebrations our ceremonies in a school are rooted I guess in the culture so that's one thing that bothers me so when I think of education that way I would love to see that we celebrate the coming of age type of things rather than just birthdays that we celebrate events that are gonna teach us more about the land or the time of the year watching the stars and things like that instead of Christmas and New Years which are just done by a calendar system and then the last part I guess the forms of expression and that's kind of what I like to focus on and that's the art piece we always learn about other people famous people in art history and we don't focus teaching the kids about the original art forms from where they live and I feel like a lot of our families that didn't get to grow up with culture whether it's because of residential schools or not the strength and identity annoying those things can be very powerful I was gonna give you an example so this one time I did a art project and had some non first nation kids just kind of looking and watching for them to be curious about what I was doing with our first nation 18 in U.S. students I felt like what can they share that parallels with that for the first nation kids we have that relationship to the land to this land here and for that non first nation person what is that for them that's something that they're looking for too when I think of the whole art in education I like to promote ours as a tool to take care of our health and well being it's about the journey you go on not about what your art looks like and when I think of the school projects that they have to learn about art all the projects look the same and it's because of something that already exists it's about copying somebody's style whereas in our history it was your own storyteller these we didn't have logos labels universal symbols because all of our decorating came from us as an individual using the arts to promote people to be still an individual instead of being lumped together copying somebody or doing a project that everybody's doing the same thing it's important to be I guess separate one of the things that I recognize is that we're all not taught a method in organizing cultural content we learn of other cultures and we do it by element by element instead of saying these elements are the same so I feel I would love to see that all people would learn how to organize cultural information so for example when we teach other people we can say oh this is a ceremony, this is a ceremony, this is a ceremony so instead of them having to remember all of those ceremonies they could just kind of put it in a ceremony category and then learn something new right so even in our own people I feel like we're overwhelmed with culture coming back and we have to learn all these things but we need to sort it out and have a look back take a step back and see if we can see how it all fits together but nobody really teaches us how it all fits together they just say this is kind of what happens here this is how this happens this is how you do this just the process and being able to step back to look at it to deconstruct it a little bit to see how you could see that it fits it in culture so a process like that would be really neat the other thing that I would love if I see down the road is I was taught that when you are learning your mind, your body and your spirit have to be present and so in Alberta we show this resource it's a little video clip and it's about this guy he tells a story of how a young boy ran away from residential school and when he got home the elders asked him why did you run away because school is supposed to be good for you and he told them they're only teaching me with my mind so when I do my cultural arts like the PD stuff I ask the teachers when you look at your lesson plans when you look at your opportunities for students, how many of them actually consider the body the mind and the spirit of the children and when I think of how I like to get people excited before I actually do things that's almost like you're inviting the spirit to be there so in our spirituality we call on our ancestors we call for people to be there we're not always all present when we go to something like I know I've been to meetings where all my mind and my body want to be at home sleeping and when I'm in the classroom sometimes kids they might be tired or hungry so their spirit isn't there they're maybe waiting for lunchtime or they want to go back to the game at recess so not all elements are present when we are learning so to have our educators learn on how to do that for each class or maybe down the road our education system will change maybe we won't have subjects like is it Finland they think doesn't have subjects anymore but that learning to acknowledge and recognize when your students body, mind and spirit are present that a lot of things will stick but right now our classrooms these are the outcomes we have to reach and we're going to try to get that I find that when you recognize maybe in the favorite subjects like gym and art the kids are excited that means their spirit is present their mind is ready and it's fun the setup is usually different they're not in a desk they're not behind there's no barrier in between the lesson and the learning so those are probably the two most important things that I would like to see would be the ability to deconstruct culture to take a step back and kind of make it into categories so that it makes sense and then to make sure that our children's body, mind and spirit are present in learning we're just all people I guess because when I think of when I used to go to school here there's a lot of people that we're looking for strengthen identity they're like I didn't grow up with culture and I came to learn using the elements of the university they have a lot of opportunities for your spirit to grow we should have that all along in our lifetime and I know a lot of our own people our indigenous people need that but for all Canadians to recognize that would be kind of awesome that becomes common common part of education that we teach others to be compassionate have empathy I already see a difference in kids just from the work that I do when I do presentations to different groups talking to the older people who didn't grow up with cultural information or weren't aware of just history of indigenous people in general to high school kids that have a lot of experience and they're learning more about it so I can see the change in understanding history so I think the same could happen for understanding culture which I feel is a huge element of education because it groups us together as a people having the same values so one of the things I always tell people about is when George Erasmus talked about how where common memory is lacking there can be no community so when I think of what we need to create all these common awesome memories so that a lot of people can be part of a greater community and I think that starts with education it starts with educating people with the same experiences and powerful powerful opportunities I guess then those powerful opportunities become the common common memories of everyone