Thank you for this question.
What I would like to see and what is present and available now are not in sync. That's why I keep saying that we need to have a better fit between those.
What we're aspiring for is self-determining, flourishing communities that have, want and are retaining all of the foundations of their knowledge through their languages and through the kinds of learning processes that I talk about as holistic, lifelong, experiential and community activated, in working through language and culture and working with the spiritual world views and so on, but what they are getting right now is an education in our communities.
You've heard already about the various communities that are doing wonderful things in the work they're doing in their communities and in schools and so on, but what's happening is that as these children move on to university or into public schools, those institutions are creating the dissonance, in that they don't then have the decolonized.... Those institutions haven't brought in languages and have dropped indigenous content into a few content areas, but it's all structured in a modern four-walled school. That dissonance creates the ongoing dissonance that students have of coming in and trying to develop new skills in another language system, and struggling with that in English and trying to struggle with the kinds of expectations that those create.
What I'm trying to assert is that we need to find a way to bring these structures and ways of learning together. In the public school systems and also in universities, there's this notion of indigenization and reconciliation, and those kinds of things need to have a tie-in with what is in our first nation community schools and how that fits.
I think land-based learning is one of the important elements. That is what we find in all of these. They do fit well with learning. We do have a university master's program in land-based learning at the University of Saskatchewan, but this is only in pockets of places—Nunavut and the University of Saskatchewan. We can't seem to get all of them on board to do these kinds of things to create this necessary fit, which is why I think we need to have some kind of other structure that will help us to build those promising practices and build new theories around indigenous knowledge traditions and braiding them with contemporary modern systems.