 The program is a cultural resource coordinator. We set up a program mostly in collaboration to try and enhance other programs. I would also do some of my own initiatives. We go from children, youth, families, trying to raise cultural awareness, different approaches, help foster a stronger sense of well-being and positive indigenous identity. We have drum nights. I do hand drum making. Workshops have created initiatives with outside agencies to raise their awareness about our issues, both within governmental, societal levels, individual levels, trying to answer questions to those outside agencies to help them get a better understanding about who we are and help them understand more about our concerns and focuses through the organization as a service provider to hopefully help gain some outsources or gain some new allies in our community. I've done some work with a local church group. I've done the blanket exercise with them, which went really well in bringing to light a lot of things of history that they never knew existed before. I gave them a deeper understanding of how long we've been actually colonized and how aggressive the government has been at passing legislation to keep us under thumb, I guess, so to speak. And I've also had them watch films, one of them being a real engine to show them how media has played a role in the societal level of racist and prejudiced attitudes towards us. And a lot of them identified with how much that actually did occur even within their own families and their own words is that they really raised a bar for them to know where a lot of this stuff actually started and came from. Yes, drumboops are weekly and we get families. We work with other coordinators. They bring different proponents of their client base and we have a lot of referrals from our Justice Diversion program, which is also an active part of some of my duties and responsibilities and that's helping the ones who are within the justice system get back reconnected to us so hopefully we can get them started on their own good path for themselves and make our own community a lot stronger. Myself personally, I measure it on an individual level. Which is always more about how that person has started back onto the path of rediscovery for themselves, whether they have knowledge of who they are or not. Knowing that somebody is out there and has come back to the community who has knowledge is keen for myself because I'll engage them with helping to help educate the others at the same time so it creates some peer mentoring opportunities as much as possible so I'm not the only person sitting in the circle who has knowledge and I want to make sure that everybody is inclusive, that everybody carries a knowledge base with them and for the ones that don't know it's hopefully to light a fire with them and to start doing their research for themselves being on a program. You can only be there for a couple of hours. You can only start getting so much knowledge but if you're keen on finding out for yourself you can just go out and do it for yourself and it's a beautiful thing to watch somebody go out and start rediscovering their life on their own. The other programs that are available within the federation level services that are provided, whatever it is that they're trying to look for, they need more literacy, they need some life skills. Do they need to go for some therapy? Do they feel that's the best thing for them? Do they want to hook up with some different craftspeople? Get to know some artists, get to know some other fellow musicians or drums or even hooking them up with going to other events, taking them to other events, even just directing them online to just look and see how wide the variety of things are that are available for people to do, for the elements they're keen on trying to do that for themselves, first and foremost. And if there's something that we can't or for whatever reason the individual doesn't seem like it's a fit, then of course just hope so or somewhere or help them to just gain confidence for themselves anywhere possible, doesn't matter where that is. Well sometimes it's hard to get an individual to enroll but just to keep on encouraging, just come back, come back, come back and let them know that the door's always open and it's actually worked a couple of times. Some of them that are struggling within themselves, they have a hard time, seems to be at the trust level, but they keep coming back. So that says something right there. So don't discourage that part at all. The education has to come from our peoples too. We have to be careful about who is out there. Sourcing out information at a cost to whomever without having any affiliation with any of our peoples across the land. There's been a lot of that that's gone on in the past too. So for us to be diligent about who it is that's offering what to our children is massive. And it should be specific to the child's needs, not to the needs of the grant or the proposal or the organization's mission and vision statements. It needs to be simply about the children and what are the children's needs and we have the knowledge now to figure that out. My experience so far is a short path. Steaming back to what I guess most of my life has been able to learn about who you are as an individual or you come from, who your peoples are, ties in greatly to the question that we all have as to why we're here. That'll help in your own personal journey to discern what it is you would like to do moving forward in your life. Having a root base of knowledge that is innate within each individual makes for, I would just say, sort of balanced individuals. We know where we belong and it pertains to the land base here as the old initially peoples. Learning about that for myself created so much pride and confidence within myself as an individual and gave me the strength to move forward and pursue my own educational roles and my own cultural or own ways of life and we're more affiliated and we're more recognizing more understanding of how our peoples have done things for each other. As individuals and families and nations for thousands of years, that to me is very keen moving forward again with your life. With the confidence level, I was able to go back to high school, go to university, sit on board of directors geared towards Aboriginal education and all for the same reasons that everybody else is doing it to and it is to ensure that our futures is gonna be for us and by us. Passing on knowledge through music is what I'm keen on. Music is something that's lacking big time within our own, we talk about indigenous education. To me, music is one of the most important things that was given to us as human beings across this planet. All of all the things that were kept by our ancestors monitoring all the years of colonization, it was our music bases that persevered and came through strongest all the songs, of course, there's their movies, all the songs were rites of passage. Those are what's are still around more than anything else. And there's a reason for that and I think we're yet to even discover the true meaning of how valuable music was. It is for us, not only as nations of people but as human beings too. Our ancestors were, they were pretty knowledgeable people. They had a lot of things figured out and because of this contemporary setting that we live in today in this 21st century, I think we know everything and yet we still strive to try to find peace in our everyday lives. They were living in thousands of years and just that act alone speaks volumes of the homogenology I always share with other people too that if you look at a medicine person around the world, if somebody asked them to come and have a ceremony done for an individual, the medicine person back then would have known the individual, would have known the individual's families at very least and be able to gain a little bit better understanding the individual who is asking for something and the medicine person would make or think incoctions for them but there was also music, there was also song that was always different. The songs are now for the same. They pertain to each individual. So that knowledge base of music we've dropped or lost or forgotten about along this last 500 plus years. So there's still a lot in there that we're still missing. I'd like the person to see more musical programming instilled within our education. It's so keen we can see from all of our artists that are coming more and more prevalent in today's society and with the songs that talk about who knows, wake up and raise, stand up for yourselves, talk about all of the missing and murder, Aboriginal women, you know, higher haze, a lot of people with higher haze. It was a native man, they don't know the whole story behind higher haze and they was a real person who went through and went through health, just to serve in the United States military, you know. That's the way I like to share knowledge because that's what I'm keen on, is music. Anything that has to do with music is what lights the spark in my eyes and gets my heart ticking because to me it's so important being a singer or being a hard player, a musician, a drummer. You know, that's very, very important to my to my own personal therapy and keeping me in balance mentally, physically, spiritually, emotionally. Just recently at the United Native American Music Awards there was a gentleman there who was his grandfather who had come home singing some traditional songs and then he incorporated into classical music on the spot on his keyboard. You know, he was so, such a beautiful, beautiful piece to watch and to watch him interpret those songs into something equally as beautiful as the song in itself through the classical music. Those doors are starting to become open for us as our kids start to become more keen on music. Today, with the song base that we carry for ourselves and using that as the sort of jumping board into creating new styles of music. You know, again, DJ Shubb, he created his own genre. DJ Shubb from Tribecaulard, they created their own genre of music. You know, just those types of things that see the more education in the music department. New Zealand, they have what they call community musicians and they're encouraged and they're given a role within community to be an important factor because that's a knowledge base in itself that I know from participating that our music called knowledge base is massive, massive, massive, massive. Anyway, it's the one thing we all have, this great amount of knowledge about and we don't ever get to use it anywhere. You know, it's such a, it's such, music has the power and the ability to burn your own paths on our brains. They suggested that if we use, this is from contemporary science that if we use music from our children their young age, that'll be easier for them to learn and absorb information as they grow older because those neuron paths are already there. We can burn the paths with music. All they have to do is just fill in with information after that, but I think that's something that our ancestors knew something about well, because it's such a different world setting back then. I've seen one experiment on Stain done in a MRI and he was jazz improvising, kind of scatting to music and they actually watched his brain and activity as he was doing that to see how many different parts of the brain he was using and how the whole activity, you know, was, it was actually both hemispheres that were being used at the same time. So I think then, you know, we started doing things like that towards the future and understanding our own musics and our music pieces and the power it has on us as individuals.