 I'm Philip Brass. I've sort of stumbled into the work that I do. It's not something I went to school for or took any specific training necessarily, for, but I guess in 2014 I started a job with my band here, our health center as the community wellness coordinator. And at that time we were having a lot of issues with some of the youth in the community with gang activity and there was a lot of violence and vandalism in the school and that sort of thing. So our hopes was to try to reach out and connect with some of these kids. And so my background, I grew up as always a hunter in a fisherman. My late father talked me a lot of those skills growing up. And then also up and involved with the ceremony, with some of our traditional lodges here in this region. Since about the age of 14. And so I went through a lot of different rites of passage as a young boy and as a young man. And so I've always been close to ceremony. And so here we conduct, I have sweats here in this little sweat house here. And often do that with community members and with youth. Back in 2014-15 I started to reach out to some of the youth in the community and I just offered them to go hunting. I needed an in with some of these youth who were pretty tough to reach and teachers were having a hard time to connect with them. So it was really informal and often on weekends it wasn't actually on school time. I started taking some of these boys out hunting and fishing and that sort of thing. And so that was really my way to connect with them and then eventually introducing them to ceremony. And in some instances I adopted some of those boys. Five of them I actually adopted as both my wife and I adopted them as our sons. And there I was able to sort of cultivate leaders out of them and then that was able to have ripple effects throughout the community and the youth in the community. So it was a really unconventional way of going about it. And then that grew on to working with the Powell Hills Police Service as well and then working in the schools. Other schools not just our own reserve school but local towns. And as I continued to do land-based activities my name just seems to be becoming sort of synonymous with learning from the land programs. So also the Prairie Valley School Division and the Treaty Poor Education Alliance have connected with me. And so now I find myself doing these land-based activities on a regular basis and working in the schools. You know sometimes they're doing in-class teachings and activities and then sometimes doing these land-based activities which are really a lot of fun. I do a lot of fishing with kids and take them out and even setting net. We'll do fish-filtering workshops teaching them how to process wild game as fish and everything else. Hunting big game, small game, having talking circles, sweats and even going to other ceremonies in the communities and serving as helpers being a scapegoat. And then teachers will ask me to come in to speak specifically on different issues whether it's talking about reconciliation, the history of colonialism and ongoing struggles with Canada and the province. So mostly it's being a resource for teachers in navigating some of those really difficult conversations that I think a lot of them are struggling with. So we met Burke Fox, students grade 10 and that's their learning from the land program. So that group is together for this semester as a group and they're covering a lot of different stuff. I mean land-based skills, winter survival but also First Nations history, treaty history and Métis history. So it's pretty comprehensive in not just land-based activities but just understanding who they are as Indigenous young people. So today we went out to the west side of Papygsy's First Nation at my late uncle's land and it's a place that I grew up hunting rabbits and deer and moose even. So I knew kind of where to go and I guess that's really what I'm able to do as offers is because my knowledge of the land in the region and knowing where to go fishing and knowing where to go hunting. So yeah, I think we had a successful day. I think there was 19 of us or 19 kids or more plus the teachers and so we set snares up and I don't know how many snares we had at least, well I guess about the same number and then just yeah, we had a bush whacking through the bush and getting the rabbits moving and we managed to chase a few into the snares and then able to give the kids that hands-on experience and being there and seeing that whole process and learning how to skin rabbits and get rabbits and getting them out of their element. And I think that's the power of that land-based learning is when you see the kids in the school institutions that are so restrictive, I think that really is reflective of a lot of their behavior issues that we're seeing and attention spans that start there but when you see their behavior shift after an hour or two and they become a little more cooperative, they become more engaged in the here and now and I think it's a powerful tool. I'm not always necessarily the teacher. I'm part of the equation but really it's the land itself because it's being out there. I think that that is such a memorable experience for them. All senses are engaged in those activities and sometimes it plants a seed. It might not make a huge significant difference today or the next year in their life but I think it's something that as they become young adults they might remember or they might say hey, I remember doing that. It's something they might engage in again later in life. They might plant a seed so that they have something to come back to. I think that in general in life we get carried away in a big society but as Indigenous people having a connection and an intimate relationship with the places that we're from with the landscape and the ecosystem that we're from. It's important. What I'm saying is that education is our new buffalo. I struggle with that one though. I would still argue the buffalo is our education. It always was, it always is. Meaning that the land is really our education. I think that it's important to be educated in a Western model but at the same time we can very easily lose ourselves and I think we lose something very significant when we remove ourselves from that land-based lifestyle. So I think that it's critical and it's imperative that we reconnect our youth with these land-based activities and to meld that with language. I think that it's really important. We want to hold on to our languages. We have to reconnect them with those activities because our languages are emergent from that life and it gives it relevance. So yeah, it's difficult. The conventional model of education is often really restrictive especially in the elementary and high school grades. So I think we're in early stages. A lot of growing pains going through trying to implement land-based education but I think it can be done in some communities it's more successful than others. But I mean too, I think it has to include our traditional institutes like the Sweptology and others. Those are our educational institutes and giving our youth an opportunity to be a part of that is really imperative in a well-rounded education.