0:00 Alot of it is just coming from broken families that are impacted by intergenerational trauma and systemic barriers like underfunding by the government for like centuries, right? So 0:15 people that come to school are like me, they're in their 30s, early 30s, late 20s, trying to find themselves, because there's nothing in our public system, or there wasn't any when I was growing up, that properly educates society about being indigenous, or what happened to our families, or why everything is the way it is. And so that's left a whole generation of indigenous people who are taken by the 60's scoop, millennial scoop, all these kind of scoops or Indigenous kids are taken out of their family or lose their families. They have no idea who they are. So they try to go back to school 0:55 to figure that out, they go to university to try and get their, 0:59 the cultural teachings that they yearn for. And, you know, so they have this, like, long history, like me, I come from the jail system, I come from homelessness, I come from hardcore addictions. And I'm just one person like this, you know, there's a whole there's thousandss and thousands, I'm not unique, you know, most of our families have this, you know, and so there's that those barriers, and there's the financial barrier of just not having any money to get to school. Some of us don't have enough quote, unquote, Indian in us to get to qualify for six, one or six, two status. Like my mom's a six, two, I can't get it because my dad wasn't. And so I don't have that avenue of funding. 1:45 So there's that financial, then there's the psychological barriers that indigenous people face. 1:53 We're not from this world, right? This is for middle class people, urban people, usually, white people, I'll say it. 2:03 And so when we get to this world, we're older, we're from a different demographic graphic. And, truthfully, a lot of us were never meant to make it this far. Right. And the system was never designed for us to make it this far. So we get there. And we're like aliens, right? We're like aliens coming in our Red River cards, you know, like landing or, like our like, powwow drum, you know, and do we land in. 2:29 We're in this weird environment where everybody's like, they're oblivious, or they care too much. You know, and they're there. It's just weird to be in that environment, like, you know, that it's not where you're supposed to be. But with enough effort in time, you become acclimatized. And you start to get used to it. And then you find a community of like minded, Indigenous people like you within universities, like for me, it was at Cass, the Center for Aboriginal Student Services at York, or I learned to fit in and find my stride. But without that, like, it's not my world, right. Another one is 3:08 literacy levels coming from places where education is just not 3:14 invested in on par with the rest of Canadians. You know, a lot of people come from reserves in the north, where they've had a series of teachers that just come and go, that don't take the time, because they can't, with students. So there's no relationship building with students. And a lot of like, kids that graduate are functionally illiterate. Like me, I went through university, I went through high school and even though it was in the city, I just didn't really learn to read properly until I got back to university in my 30s. So that's kind of crazy, you know, as you think about that. And so it's even worse for people from Northern reserves right. where with me, I guess it was just I didn't take the time to do it. But for them, it's a it's a structural issue of the way that the government is just not funding Indigenous communities in their education system. A lot of these kids that have to travel 1000s of kilometers to get to high school and live apart from their family, where they're facing culture shock and you see things like what happened in Thunder Bay where these kids, they just end up in the wrong crowds, and then, you know, they die, you know, they're exposed and so 4:33 those are just a few of the barriers off off the top of my head. Transcribed by https://otter.ai