I think it's integral. I really appreciate your comments about on-the-land learning and cultural learning—there are lots of descriptors. In Yukon, as indigenous people, we say it's our way. It's how we do things. It's integral to our world view.
I think the most important thing—and I've heard from some of the other presenters, even in that streamlining—is when our students know they have a sense of place, which is so important to us, and that sense of place comes from the land. It is all within our own world view. That sense of place has to be built in the education system as well. Currently the sense of place in the education system for an indigenous student is very fragile. It is built on an industrial model of moving children through by grades to attain this thing called a graduation certificate and move on into the world. It has benchmarks.
In the ones that I as an indigenous person have had to meet, in terms of graduating, being one of 12 in my family who made it through the system, then moving on into university and getting a bachelor's degree, then a bachelor of education and a master's degree, and then moving on further into a Ph.D., I look at my indigenous elders, as I would call my colleagues, because those are our Ph.D.s. When we build that equity and demonstrate to our children that a Ph.D. is the same as an elder sitting there, and we give them the ability to have that sense of place and not have the feeling that they are less than but that they are equitable to, this will then lead to success.
It can't be just the pictures on the wall. I often as an educator would hear about cultural inclusion, which really alludes to that you're going to fit us into a model. Inclusion is when we partner, and I think the school board agreement that we've implemented here in the Yukon is a model of that, a beginning, a start to it. When we partner to say we're both coming in at an equal stance and we have to learn, the duality that comes with that is where we will find success.