Yes. Thank you very much for your question.
What I was trying to allude to in what I was saying was that in the work with the research offices, for example, or when I'm teaching my students in all these programs, whether it be health or environmental or indigenous education, what I'm encountering is young people who, from children, have been discontent with the world view of how we are attending to medicine, how we are attending to education and how we're attending to environmental issues. What they tell me is that they are grateful to encounter indigenous understandings. They're grateful for the world view, for another way of looking at the world and how that implicates or transforms the way they look at the field they have chosen to work in, whether that's health or education or land use or whatever their issue is. They're grateful. One of my students said this to me: “You asked us what kind of ancestor we want to be and how we are carrying on the legacy. My 15-year-old son asked me the same question.”
How do we help in creating this capacity so that we all have a greater understanding of those understandings in our daily lives? They implicate how we act in relation to that which we're working with. It happens in medicine. I worked in hospitals in Europe, and as was already presented by one of your other witnesses, they went from homeopathic to allopathic. That was all on the table when we were looking at well-being and healing.
It's the same in education. What's a holistic, inclusive way of understanding the world that then implicates education? The deficit model, respectfully, based on our scientific understandings, is causing great harm to children.