Thank you very much. So I would like to introduce our next keynote speaker, and it's great with great pleasure that I introduce Kayla Larson. She's of Metis and Ukrainian settler ancestry, and originally hails from Treaty 6 territory, specifically Tofield, Alberta. So she's very familiar with this area. Currently, she resides in the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Slewata nations in British Columbia. In her current capacity, Kayla serves as a program manager librarian for the Indigitization Program and is the Indigenous Programs and Services Librarian at the Wewata Library at the University of British Columbia. She has a very interesting anecdote about the name of that library. Her professional journey and academic background, encompassing a BA in Native Studies and an MLIS degree from the University of Alberta, reflects a deep-rooted dedication to Indigenous librarianship. Central to Kayla's ethos is the concept of Indigenous data sovereignty, affirming the right of Indigenous nations to govern and own data about themselves in harmony with their community protocols and laws. Notably, at the 2021 Indigenous Knowledge and Open Education Symposium at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan, Kayla Larson introduced the SIXRs of Indigenous OER, a profoundly influential framework that guides authors interested in incorporating Indigenous knowledge into openly licensed teaching and learning materials. These SIXRs, encapsulating respect, relationships, responsibility, reverence, relevance, and reciprocity, emphasize critical ethical considerations and practices when integrating Indigenous knowledge into educational resources. Kayla has made a significant contribution to creating an inclusive, culturally-informed academic library landscape at the University of British Columbia. Please join me in extending a warm welcome to Kayla, who will greatly support and enrich our understanding of this year's conference themes. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Tonsay, it's great to be home and back here on Treaty Six territory. I'm just going to figure out if I can use this. There you go. So today I'll be talking a little bit about the SIXRs of Indigenous OERs, but also some of the reflecting that I've been doing and the rethinking of what the SIXRs are and how they interact with an open educational field. So first of all, I always like to start off by positioning myself and locating. We've heard a little bit about that. So when we position and locate ourselves, it connects us to our people, our stories, as powerful forms of cultural resurgence and the basic building blocks of building relationships with one another. Many communities have a way to describe this. We've heard terms like Wukotun, Miowisitun, so the way that we build kin are kin relations and the way that we act in good faith or in good relation with one another. So when I come up here and I locate myself, I ask, who are your kin? Who are your kin that claim you as people? What lands are you connected to? Where are you from? But it goes beyond the lands. The lands are important to me. Being from Treaty 6 territory, a Métis woman from Treaty 6, the North Saskatchewan River runs deeply through me, even though I'm not on my own territory. When I ask you where you're from, I also ask, who is your umbilical cord attached to? So going beyond the lands, thinking, who are your matriarchs? Who are your ancestors that are with you at all times? And have built you to who you are to this day? Additionally, we ask, who are you accountable to? Right now we're all accountable to each other at this conference, but we're also accountable to the people from Treaty 6 territory. We will be accountable next year to the Aboriginal and Tory Strait Islanders that we are coming to their lands. So who are you accountable to? Who are you accountable to when you go home and you're on someone's traditional territory or you're back home on your own traditional territory with your folks?  The lands that you are residing on now. How are you taking a bit of a Miskwache or the Beaver Hills home with you? And so when we do this, it helps us to connect with each other, identify our biases, our positions, and our deep connections that we have that inform us in the moment and in the future. So I want to talk a little bit today. I think the last couple of keynotes that we've had, my new friends Darren who gifted me with tobacco, which I actually have in my pocket right now, I wanted to really thank them for their keynotes and the foundation that they've given me to come up here and talk a little bit more deeply about the impacts of Western knowledge and how us as Indigenous people, we protect our knowledges in different ways. So when we think about what Western knowledge has done to Indigenous knowledges guided by educational systems, so post-secondary, K to 12, Western knowledge has really set up knowledge in a hierarchy and transformed knowledge into hierarchical systems where often we see humans at the top of this system. Other forms of knowledge outside of Western knowledge such as Indigenous knowledges were deemed to be inferior compared to Western traditions of knowledge sharing, knowledge transformation. Western research set out practices and privileges that are bedded within imperial expansion and colonization. These ideas, practices, and privileges later become institutionalized within academic institutions and K to 12 institutions. Additionally, when we think about the colonial influence of intellectual heritage, non-Western thought was devalued and often misinterpreted. So my own stories from my community was devalued and misinterpreted by Western understandings of these knowledges. Researchers were often put into an arbitrary position of power and given authority over the discipline and subject that they specialize in. However, when we're looking at Indigenous knowledges, Indigenous peoples do not focus their knowledges within the same binaries that we see within Western understandings of knowledge. The world is very subjective and often we think about Indigenous knowledges within five different ways of transfer. So often Indigenous knowledges are very personal. They're personal to the person, the personal to their experience. They're orally transmitted with exception. We do have communities that have not necessarily written, but ways of expressing themselves. And now with written text. So we can even see on the OE Global sign right here, the syllabics for a miscucious guy again. It's experiential. So to share a story. I was talking to Robert this morning about Huixua Library, the library that I work at. Huixua is a Squamish-Snitchum word or a Hukminum word, which is the word that's spoken at Musquim or is the language spoken at Musquim. And what it means loosely translated is to echo. But it's not to echo like we think about an echo going throughout a room and that sound. There's an experiential aspect to it that unless you've been there, you don't know what it's like. So I'm going to encourage all of you today to close your eyes and I'm going to try and show you or you can imagine what Huixua is. So if everyone can close their eyes.  So that is Huixua and that's the deep understanding of what our name of our branch means is to echo. But in a different understanding of a Western thought of what echoing is. Additionally, indigenous knowledges are very holistic. They go across what we would think of as academic disciplines and narrative as well. So additionally, we've heard from other speakers, indigenous knowledges are intergenerationally transmitted. We learn from our ancestors. We learn from our cookums, our mushums, our chapeans and then we also teach the future. Often this is done through community and ceremony. So when we're thinking about knowledges and we've been hearing a lot about indigenous knowledges, indigenous knowledges and OERs, what exactly are indigenous knowledges? So when we're thinking about breaking them down, I break them down into three different types of kind of knowledge. So the first type of knowledge that we have is traditional knowledges. So traditional knowledges are knowledges, know-how, skills and practices that are developed, sustained and passed on intergenerationally within a community. And these knowledges form an integral part of the cultural and spiritual identity of their community. However, there is no universally accepted definition of traditional knowledges. So this gets very complicated when we're talking about traditional knowledges. When I think about traditional knowledges, these are often seen additionally as being sacred knowledges, knowledges that we are trying to protect under our laws and follow our governance structures.  So the cultural expression in this photo is going to be this individual with the salish weaving here. So the cultural expression that we can see is the headband and the robe that she's wearing as well. The patterns, the robe, the headband are protected under things like Canadian copyright law as they're more of a tangible item. However, the traditional knowledge into why communities wear those, the spiritual understanding behind this regalia is not necessarily protected under Canadian copyright law. And then we have biocultural and genetic resources. There's a lot of work coming out of Maori folks in Aotearoa around the protection of biocultural resources. So these are things like plant varieties, genetics, things like that, so which are very important to these communities. And there's more of an expanse on what this means for folks here in Canada or what's now known as Canada on how we can begin to follow their lead in protecting our own biocultural and genetic resources. Additionally, these knowledges form data. And so data really is for me a large blanket term for kind of everything that has to do about Indigenous folks. This can be our stories, our very hard demographic data, so legal data, health data, educational data, things about our land, our water. And then also we have data that comes from the community. So again, like stories, traditional cultural data, archives, oral traditions. So really when I talk about blanket, or when I talk about blanket, sorry, it's still early for me. When I talk about data, it is this huge blanket thing of what exactly is data. And data takes on many different forms when it comes to Indigenous data. So Indigenous research and education. So I have very much so a very hard background in academic libraries and working within large academic institutions. However, I see a lot of parallels between research and the formation of education curriculums. Research goes into informing curriculums. So often when I'm thinking about how do I present to folks that are involved more with education than with libraries, with research, research data management, I like to kind of say that they're fairly similar. And we can pull in our own parallels about how these fit into our daily practices when we're talking about research versus education. And it all kind of wraps in because it's part of the larger educational system. So there are lots of barriers to Indigenous education. And so when I'm thinking about Indigenous education within this context, it's within a Canadian context. However, I'm sure if you ask any of my cousins, friends from other Indigenous communities, there's still barriers faced within their communities. So when I'm thinking about Indigenous education in this sense, it's K to 12 and post-secondary education for Indigenous folks. So when we're thinking about this, there's a lack of funding. We all struggle with funding no matter what we're doing. Cultural competency. So is the curriculum correctly identifying Indigenous cultural competencies within it? And then distrust. There's lots of distrust amongst Indigenous peoples when it comes to educational systems. Language barriers. And then for some folks, it's a lack of transportation. There's many children who are living in Northern or rural communities that have to travel large distances to go to school. But when I look at the barriers to Indigenous education, I can see a lot of parallels with Indigenous research and research that I'm working with at the University of British Columbia at Huikwa and beyond. We have a lack of funding when it comes to research or there's barriers for Indigenous scholars to accessing this funding. Grants are hard to get. Granting systems are competitive. It takes a lot of time to write grants, time that you could be spending with your own community in ceremony that now we're having to spend time doing administrative work. There's a lack of sometimes cultural competency within post-secondary education. There's a lack of cultural competency when it comes to researchers coming into communities. There's lots of distrust with Indigenous communities and research still to this day and rightfully so. Language barriers when we are unable for research purposes to get researchers to be able to transcribe into Indigenous languages or translate research projects into Indigenous languages. And then a lack of support. So this could be researcher support for the communities, especially if we're talking about traumatic research. So the continuing problems that we see to this day with Indigenous research is that often the majority of Indigenous focus research projects are being conducted by non-Indigenous people. There's many different reasons for this within Canada. And mostly it's because, as we've heard, we had systems that were enacted that until 1951 people would lose their status as a First Nations person if they went to university. This was under the Enfranchisement Act here in Canada. Indigenous people were not allowed to vote until about the 1970s here in Canada. So there's many reasons why we're just at the residential school system, left a lack of folks who have an interest in going to university to becoming professors, researchers. Researchers tend to select subjects or projects based on their own personal interest. This leads to communities being inundated with research requests that do not benefit the community in any direct way or leads to irrelevant data outputs. Additionally, there's a lack of informed consent, research not being returned to community or disseminated in a language of the community. And additionally, we still find that often there's an utmost disrespect and disregard for Indigenous, sorry, I'm going to restart that. I'm getting my own echo back and it's throwing me off right now. So the continued utmost disrespect and disregard by non-Indigenous researchers that they can have for Indigenous traditional knowledges, stories, ceremonies, and ancestral remains to this day. However, we're seeing this huge shift and especially at this time, we're seeing a huge shift with the influx of Indigenous-led research. So this is whether it's Indigenous researchers leading projects or Indigenous communities leading projects. And so when I say Indigenous in this context, I'm also talking about our three Indigenous groups that we have here in Canada under the Constitution and that's First Nations, Métis, and Inuit folks. So Indigenous-led and Indigenous research in general emerges from the incorporation of Indigenous lived experiences, languages, and worldviews into the research process. It centers Indigenous peoples and communities as the researcher and the primary authority on the subject or the topic. Indigenous research is accountable, reciprocal, and is an integral to the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual aspects of Indigenous knowledge gathering and sharing. As well, Indigenous research methodologies follow the same trajectory as Indigenous research and dismisses the colonial understandings of the research process and incorporates the use of techniques and methods drawn from the traditions and knowledges of those people. So this is slightly what Indigenous research methodologies look like. So Indigenous research methodologies have a recognition of the colonial past of Indigenous peoples on that land. They resist colonial narratives of Indigenous peoples' knowledges. There's a resurgence of Indigenous ways of knowing and being. It rejects the insider-outsider research, prevents research extraction, promotes and embraces self-determination of Indigenous people, and combats the power dynamics that we see within traditional research. And as focused in relationality, we've heard a lot about relationality this week. Relationality is how we connect to our human and more-than-human relationships. And this is an Indigenous worldview and understanding. It's embedded within our laws and our governance systems. Relationality goes beyond just the lands, the waters, the ones that walk on all fours, the ones who fly, and is incorporated also with a spiritual. We think about our ancestors, the ones who are not born yet. These are all of our relations. And relationality is highly important to Indigenous research and even data. I talk about data as a relation when I go into the archives at my work and I'm interacting with archival documents about peoples, about lived experience of peoples. Those pieces of paper are a relation and should be treated with the same respect as I would if that person or if I'm working within that community or on that land. So how does all of this fit into OERs since we're here talking about OERs today? So most of us, we don't need to break down what exactly is an OER. I would hope most people by the end of this conference knows what an OER is. However, I am very much so learning that there's many different definitions of OERs and people have many opinions on this. But the five Rs of OERs. So this is something that I was looking at and looking at very critically when developing the six Rs. So as I was invited to present at the conference, I was thinking to myself, okay, so what are some of the basic principles, tenets of OERs? And then we have the five Rs from David Wiley, which are retain, reuse, revise, remix, redistribute. So the five Rs that we have. But when thinking about Indigenous content and Indigenous knowledges within OERs, the five Rs don't necessarily work. So if we're thinking back to what I've talked about, about extractive research, about traditional knowledges, sacred knowledges, relationality, how does that fit or not fit in into the five Rs? So when thinking about this, knowledge is power. And those who possess that knowledge are in that position of power. So when we're thinking about researchers, researchers are in a position of power. Academics are in a position of power. Even when talking about open education, the word open to communities can put that resource in a position of power if not controlled by the community. So at its foundation, sovereignty is at the utmost importance. And when I talk about sovereignty in this context, it's within a Canadian context and what I know. Other folks from different Indigenous communities work with their own governance and have their own traditional laws and understandings and ways of describing what exactly sovereignty is. So when I talk about sovereignty within the Canadian context, the government of Canada recognizes that Indigenous peoples have the inherent right to self-government and self-determination. And this is guaranteed in section 35 of the Constitution Act of 1982. So I'll give you some context. That's fairly new. I was born in 88. So 82 is fairly new to be ratifying our Constitution. And in the Constitution, not only did it recognize who is Indigenous in Canada, which is problematic in many different senses, but it also gave the recognition of the inherent right of Indigenous peoples to govern themselves in relations to matters that are internal within their own communities. So this is things that are integral to their unique cultures, identities, traditions, and languages. And also to respect their special relationship to the land and to resources. So this can be things like developing business practices on your own land, resource extraction on your own land, which means many different things to Indigenous people. Having the ability to harvest on our own land, harvest our own medicines, and practice educational practices in a way that makes sense. Govern our communities in a way that makes sense to us based on our own governance traditions, practices, and languages. However, when we're thinking about the fact that Indigenous peoples, we live within a colonized country. We follow Western laws here in Canada. And Western laws violate Indigenous sovereignty quite often. So when we do things like compare Canadian laws that dictate ownership and knowledge rights, such as the Canadian Copyright Act, it's clear that Indigenous aspirations of self-governance under these laws directly compete with one another. So the government of Canada is telling us, yes, you have the right to govern your own culture. You have the right to govern your own language and be self-determining. But then when it comes to copyright law, they're saying, no, because this person wrote this thesis, they have the copyright on it, even though your community stories are in it. So it's very complicated. It's very complicated to break these down. So issues, when we're talking about copyright specifically, and I'm not a copyright lawyer, but I hang out with lots of lawyers. Most of the people in my class went on to be lawyers, not librarians. So when we're thinking about the protection of Indigenous knowledges and issues within these protections that arise due to things like traditional knowledges do not necessarily qualify in Canadian copyright law for protection because they're too old and therefore supposedly within the public domain. The author of the material is not always identifiable. Thus, there's no rights holder within the traditional sense of the term of a rights holder. And traditional knowledges are collectively owned, and we'll talk about this word ownership and owned by Indigenous communities for cultural claims. They are integral to our traditions, our culture, and our being. We do not claim them based off of what corporations do. There is no necessarily monetary aspect to me claiming my traditional knowledge. So we do not claim our knowledges based off of economic claims. This might change, who knows? We are sovereign people. We're allowed to exist in this century. We move into the future too, but hopefully not. I like to think of it that we're gonna keep our traditions for our own sovereignty. So the Canadian Copyright Act has allowed in more than one case for the legalized theft of Indigenous knowledges through the guise of Western understandings of ownership and intellectual property. So when I say ownership, it's a very Western understanding of ownership Indigenous people do not think of ownership in this term. When you look at our own languages, they don't translate directly for what ownership is. Ownership can be collective. Ownership can be based off of kin. Ownership can be based for everybody. And additionally, when we're looking at Indigenous knowledges and knowledge transfer, it does not follow our traditional protocols for knowledge transfer under Western academic institutions, Western knowledges do not fill these specific criteria for knowledge transmission and protocol. So Indigenous peoples traditionally, knowledge is not freely given, it's earned. Transmission of knowledge between one another is informed by legal traditions and protocols. These protocols vary from community to community, from treaty to treaty, from North to South, East to West, as all of us are distinct Indigenous peoples. Often these protocols are informed by the following factors. So this can be based off of clans. Clans have the right to keep knowledge within them. Kin systems have the right to transfer knowledge only within them or to other kin systems. Gender specific. There are knowledges that are only for men, only for women and for two-spirit folks. And there's specific protocols that have to be followed for those knowledge transfers. Age specific, geographically, knowledge is tied to the land. Knowledge is tied to the land and the waters that it comes from, bringing in that relational sense. And additionally, seasonally, we are coming into the storytelling times. The winter in my community is when we tell stories. The winter time on the coast is when we tell stories. A lot of our stories don't get told until the snow hits the ground. So Western knowledges do not necessarily follow protocols like this. So when our knowledges are coming into Western circles, it's important that we insert sovereignty so that we can be able to adhere to our own protocols. And so what I like to do as an Indigenous researcher, librarian, advocate, activist, I like to talk to people about data sovereignty and this is something that I've become very passionate about over the last couple years. So data sovereignty is a very new concept. It comes out of the 21st century. The increase or the kind of conception of data sovereignty comes due to the fact that we had this wonderful thing like the internet. Everything, mostly everything, is available online. Even if you think you got rid of it online, it can reappear. So data sovereignty comes out of this. And of course for Indigenous folks, we take this kind of understanding of sovereignty when it comes to data and we make it our own. So Indigenous data sovereignty centers Indigenous people's collective rights to data about people, territories, lifeways, cultural heritage, and natural resources and is supported by Indigenous peoples' inherent right to self-determination and governance. Indigenous data sovereignty puts forward the following principles. Indigenous nations have the right to ownership about governance and data about them, regardless of where it is held and who holds that data. Indigenous nations have the right to govern data in a way that aligns with their own data protocols and laws and Indigenous peoples also have the right to access data that supports nation rebuilding. This often includes government documents, both historic, contemporary documents, and archival documents. And in addition, Indigenous data sovereignty also seeks to protect the cultural sovereignty of communities. Cultural sovereignty is essential to the survival of Indigenous peoples' cultures, languages, oral histories, ceremonies, as well as the land and community, which is the core of those Indigenous identities and ways of life. And this is a quote from Marley. Indigenous sovereignty is threatened when cultural sovereignty is violated through exploitation, theft, and misrepresentation of culture, especially through qualitative data. Okay, so considerations for Indigenous OERs. There are lots of benefits to OERs for Indigenous communities, about Indigenous communities. We have a push under things like truth and reconciliation to for not only supporting Indigenous education on reserve for Indigenous people, but also through supporting the education about what has happened to Indigenous people, how to become better relations with Indigenous communities for settlers. However, in thinking the last couple of days when I've been here, I've been talking to other folks, I don't know if open is the right term. Given what we've been talking about, open might not be the right term for an educational resource. In addition, when we're thinking about open in this context, I looked in the Hiawayan or in the Kree language, we don't have a word for interpreting open in this way. In hankminum, which they speak in Musqueam, they don't have a way to interpret open in this case for education. So maybe open is not the right way for us to be thinking about this. There has to be something else. Another way of describing this, that we can also create these resources, but they work for communities in a way that better aligns with our understandings and worldviews. In addition, when we create these, we have to think about the five Rs of OERs and challenge them. We have to ask ourselves from very critical questions when making these educational resources. Are the educational resources being created by an indigenous community? Is this a First Nation? May it be Inuit creating a language revitalization educational resource? Because those will follow the protocol of that community. They will follow the traditional governance structures of that community, and that community is in the place of power, where they can say, yes, we want this open. We want this open for language revitalization. Or is it an OER or educational resource with indigenous content in it? Because this is very different. With indigenous content, should have more consultation with communities, so that we know what can be shared and not shared within this educational resource. And always should we be compensating indigenous people for their time in a way that they say is appropriate. So who is the audience? Who's driving the creation of the OER? What is the age range? Who is this being created for? The education level. Is this a local, localized context? Are we moving into national, international? And this makes sense for people like our Blackfoot relatives, who also share relatives in Montana. So they do not follow international borders. Same with the Salish relatives. They do not follow international borders either, because they are relatives with one another and international lines are arbitrary. What is the context and the content? This is highly important as well. What kinds of knowledges are being shared? If it's a sacred knowledge, it probably should not be in there. Is there any protocol that needs to be adhered to? Are we telling stories? I can't even say it because I don't think there's any snow on the ground. But are we telling like trickster stories that can only be told in the wintertime? How do we accommodate that within our OER or educational resources infrastructure so that we can have those stories only shared in the wintertime? What does the consent look like? Is this primary or secondary information? Are we interviewing elders? And how can we better support this? How can we better support this in this room? How can we support indigenous peoples? So also we need to let indigenous people take the lead. Consult with community. Build capacity and build relationships. I'm always happy to come to conferences like this because I get to see my friends from Hawaii, from other countries, and we talk about the problems that we're having or how we are fixing those problems. So the six Rs. This is what we're here about today. The six Rs and beyond because there's a beyond part about this now. So the six Rs of indigenous OERs are a combination of two different things. The four Rs of indigenous education by Kirkness and Barnhart, which are respect, relevance, reciprocity, and responsibility. And then we have the four Rs of the Longhouse. I have the privilege to work at Huikwa Library, which is part of the First Nations House of Learning at UBC. The Longhouse is our big sister. We are the little sister. We're the Cakuli, the winter dwelling, which is the place where stories were told in the winter. So that's why we are the steward of stories and the Longhouse is the place where students come together. The UBC Longhouse follows the following four R tenants, which are respect, relationships, responsibility, and reverence. Given that I'm living on Salish territory now, I have a good relationship with Verna Kirkness. I see her occasionally. And I'm in the Longhouse just about every day when I'm at work. I decided to bring these together in a way that I could understand OERs a little bit better. So from this I created the six Rs of indigenous OERs, which are respect, so respect for indigenous cultural identity, communities, and topics within educational resources, relationships. So connecting the concept of all of our relations and relationship building within educational resources, responsibility, responsibility to share only when we are allowed to publish in an ethical way while considering ownership, protocol, and community practices. Reverence, respect for the sacred, not sharing the sacred. Relevance, legitimizing indigenous knowledges, indigenizing the curriculum when it makes sense, holding our knowledges in the same prestige as we hold Western knowledges. And reciprocity, giving back, giving back to community. However, I have some new reflections. I did this in 2021. I've talked a lot about this, but I'm always learning. We are all learners. We are learners in this space. We are on a lifelong learning journey together. So I had a lot to think about. One of the things that I wanted to think more about is how do we incorporate indigenous pedagogies into the development of OER practices? So thinking about things like potluck as pedagogy, heart berry, so strawberries, I have a heart berry on today. Heart berry as a pedagogy when creating indigenous OERs, et cetera. What is the role that education and open education plays within indigenous education? Are there more ours? Should reflection be an R? I've done a lot of reflecting and I think most people in this room have been doing a lot of reflecting this week. So is reflection a big part of this? And then how do we adapt OER technologies to adhere to those very important protocol needs that indigenous communities have? Or are we able to adapt OER technologies to do this? And then how do we advocate better for indigenous controlled OERs and funding? There's a lot of folks in this room that have been doing very critical research to advocate for funding, especially for indigenous folks on a national level, international level, et cetera. However, it's slow. Funding is a slow process. Getting our voices out there is a slow process. And additionally, as indigenous folks with the AFN, the Inuit organizations, Métis organizations, I don't think we've talked to them. We haven't talked to our leaders. We haven't talked to indigenous community members. We are working to doing this, but we're not there yet when it comes to indigenous-based educational resources. Now that we know where OER Global is next year, I'm going to encourage the conference members that maybe we have Indigioe. So Indigioe Open Ed as one of the tenants of this. Or is it something else? Do we call it something else? Indigenous education. And we bring together indigenous minds that are working in this so that we can collaborate with one another to talk about this topic. Additionally, thinking about methods really grounding ourselves. And I learned so much when I come home. I've been away from home, I come back and forth, but I've been away from home for three years. And if anyone was hearing me talk the other day, they heard me talk about how I had the opportunity to go back to the University of Alberta and to visit some friends. There was a big Métis conference going on that day. So I went back and I was able to chat about some of the work that I'm doing, listen to the work that they're doing, and listen to some of the methods that they're doing within their work. So I had the opportunity to sit down with a good friend of mine, Dr. Kesha Supernat. Dr. Kesha Supernat is an archaeologist and has a really important role for indigenous folks here in Canada. She's one of the lead archaeologists for finding bodies at residential schools of missing children that are there. So she runs a lot of the projects to find the unmarked graves of children. This is very, very hard work for her to do. And it's something that she's taken on for our communities. So when she goes to these sites, when she's practicing her work, she has to do so in a way that she's centered within her own protocol and ceremony. And she practices heart-based archaeology. This is her heart-based method. Her method is care, emotion, rigor, and reflection. And she brings these into her work when she's working with communities.  So in talking with Kesha, she also shared a really good teaching with me, which I was telling to a few people the other day. She told me she was traveling up north with an elder and the elder pointed. And I think this is a good teaching moment for everyone here. The elder pointed to a flower that was growing on the side of the road and said, that's what that flower is called. And Kesha being the learner, we're all curious, people said, oh, okay, so what do you use that flower for? And the elder looked at her and said, I am telling you, I'm not teaching you right now. And that shows how the elder is telling her something. Knowledge can take a while. They are not in a place where they can practice protocol to learn about that medicine, to learn about its uses and its importance to the community. She is being told not being taught in that moment. And there's many moments where we're being told by people and we're not being taught by people. And I think we forget that sometimes. So I know I told some people I had something up my sleeve for today, not dancing, singing, I'm not good, I'm not a good storyteller either.  So when I was thinking about the six Rs and how do I represent this in a way that aligns with my own protocols and practices as a Metis woman and fits into my own understanding of the world around me, thought of the wild rose model. Additionally, or the wild rose method, I guess. Additionally, I was doing some research. Roses, wild roses grow almost across Canada, including into the subalpine. So for me, they made sense. They're resilient. They're beautiful. They form part of our culture, our ceremony. And they grow across what in our community we call Turtle Island, but not all communities call this land Turtle Island. They grow across. They are also integral to part of my community. Metis people are known as the flower beadwork people because we are always adorning ourselves with beautiful beadwork patterns that look like the one beside it. So when I was thinking about how do we fit into the six Rs into a flower model? And it could be any flower too. I put reverence at the center. The sacred is the center core. Our ceremony is the center of us. And then we have relationships, respect, reciprocity, responsibility and relevance all around on the petals. If one of those petals falls, I don't like to think of the flower as being broken. It's still there. It just means it's not whole anymore. And that's okay. We shouldn't throw it away. We can always do better. It's still something meaningful to us. So it's resistant. It's a part of our cultural revitalization to be able to take these flowers and practice our ceremonies. So I need to do a little bit more work based on this model and this method, but this is what I've been thinking about. How do I tie my own teachings back to the land? And now every time you see maybe a wild rose when you're out, they're not out right now, but a wild rose bush, you'll think about this. You'll remember at the core of it is our sacred. So I have a couple minutes left, but I wanted to leave everyone with a consideration for the future. And I'm always tying in what I'm learning at Musqueam, what I'm learning here. And at Musqueam compared to on Treaty Six territory, the Coast Salish people are way more guarded in sharing their traditions and their practices. You're very fortunate to be here on Treaty Six where we are very welcoming. We'll tell you about our traditions when appropriate. We'll tell you about our worldviews and beliefs. It's not the same in Musqueam. It's very different. And I'm learning from them when I'm allowed to be involved and when I'm not allowed to be involved. And we need to be okay with that. So this is a sharing and a teaching that has been shared and is allowed to be shared to the public. And it's the hands forward, hands back approach. And this is from Elder Shimlamu, who is Vince Stogan from Musqueam. And he's also one of the folks that helped to develop the Longhouse at UBC. And it's the hands forward, hands back approach. This also makes sense for me because if anyone's seen a round dance or being to a round dance, we hold one hand and one hand. So almost like a hands forward, hands back. So our hands back are thinking towards the past, our ancestors and what they've done for us, our traditions, our culture. The hands forward is thinking about the future, thinking about future generations, thinking about what we will do better in the future, where we are going on our life path. And when we're in a hands forward, hands back, Elder Vince also invites us to join together in a circle so that we're together building relationships in the present with one another, working together as community, building community. So that's for me. What I wanted to say, as we've been saying all week, hi, hi, so thank you in the Hewayan. And because I'm gonna honor my Salish relatives today, also Haichka, which is another one that's thank you in hankminam. So you say hoichka, it's very guttural. It's in your throat. I was saying to people before, it's like getting a popcorn kernel out, hoichka. Or they have a little bit more eloquently, it's river rocks rolling in your throat. So that's what they say, I say popcorn kernel. So they say hoichka, thank you. And also in the tradition of the Salish. And something that you'll see me do if you see me doing it around here today. I also thank you for listening. I raise my hands to all of you in gratitude today. Thank you very much. Hi, hi, hoichka. Yeah, I think we have some time for some questions. I'm not too sure, I thought I brought my cell phone up here and I did not. So I'm like, I don't know what time it is right now. Thank you very much, Kayla. We do have time for some questions if anybody has any. Thank you so much for sharing what you shared today. I appreciated what you shared about situating ourselves and kind of thinking about our own kinship. Did you have any thoughts around how when we're creating OERs in general, even if it's not related to Indigenous knowledge, about perhaps what we might want to share in that regard? Yeah, so even if it's not involving Indigenous knowledges, anything like that, it's important even for the authors, if there's identifiable authors, to acknowledge where they're from, what their biases are, and then also acknowledge the land that the OER is being created on. As we've heard from so many folks, the land ties us together and we all have a connection to the land. Even if you're Indigenous or not, many people have strong connections to the lands that they're on. So identifying yourself, identifying where you're from, and then also the land, that would be my way of locating and tying yourself. I think there might be a session this afternoon that's talking a little bit more about locating, but I could be wrong. I did see something along those lines, but that would be my suggestion for you. Thank you. Yeah. Okay, first I want to say whoever chose the keynotes, wonderful job. That was so powerful and really mind-expanding, and I commend you for being bold and really sharing what you're thinking about, what you're working on. So my question is, I think if we're focused on openness and inclusion, someone view this as a tension. It is. Right? And so I just want to hear you respond to that tension and I'm thinking also of Darian's two-eyed seeing and how do we balance that? Yeah, I think that's one of the things that we've been talking about or kind of being challenged with is how do we balance this? And I definitely think, this is when we need more indigenous voices in the room talking about this, how do we create this balance? Because I don't think it's like not all knowledges are sacred, but there definitely are knowledges that are sacred. And open educational resources, especially for K to 12 curriculum, have a benefit, but we're more talking about those knowledges when indigenous people are not being consulted, not being brought into the conversation. We think we're doing good, but we're sharing things that we're not supposed to be sharing. That's more when we see that tension or when outdated resources are being used to talk about indigenous people, outdated language, terminology, misunderstandings about community culture, even calling things like, as Metis, we are resistant. It was not a rebellion. It might have been a rebellion, but we say it's a resistance, not a rebellion, but that's old terminology when we're talking about folks. So having people in the room asking those questions to indigenous communities, to indigenous leaders, how can resources support your community like this or what should we not be doing with your community? I don't think we should be left out of the conversation and their important critical conversations to have. I just don't know if we're 100% at the place to be having them without more conversation with folks. And I think next year in Australia will be a great place to bring together the meeting of the indigie minds, I always call it, First Nations, Metis, Inuit, our other relatives, Aotearoa, Australia, Hawaii, our folks here that I've got to learn from, almost made me cry in your session yesterday. So yeah, from Taiwan all over the place. Bring us together to have those conversations as kin, as distant cousins from different lands to kind of talk about this and come up with solutions. Let us lead the way. Let's talk. I don't know who's next. So. Yeah. Okay. I really enjoyed very much the presentation and I have learned a lot. I wonder if you consider learning and education based on these principles, a form of critical pedagogy. Yeah. And also if we should consider these as a type of critical pedagogy to learn from because many of us work in critical pedagogy and we look at these principles and we think about the principles that inform our teaching and our education. And there are a lot of concepts and words there that do not really match with what we do. Right. Reverence and what do we mean by reverence in critical pedagogy in the UK or in Spain and what do we mean by reverence in other contexts? What structures are we rebelling against and being critical about? I think it's always important to be critical about what we're teaching, what we're understanding. And I think that's why the organizers got me to come up here today and to talk to you because it's important to have that critical lens. If we aren't critical about what we're doing at some point, are we ever gonna move forward? If we continue to practice, problematic practices, we will never move forward in our disciplines. So I think having a critical lens, a critical understanding is really important to moving our, you know, to moving OE forward, to moving education forward, to moving research forward. If we don't do that, we're at a standstill. So even with the 6Rs are having pedagogies like these, we can incorporate them. The 6Rs also translate for other communities, not just indigenous communities. The 6Rs work for queer communities, for other religious minorities, for sex workers, for unhoused people. We have to treat people in an ethical way. And many communities have their own protocols for sharing knowledge and different understandings of the world. So I think the 6Rs, yes, they are a critical pedagogy and that they can be adapted in many ways. And I'm always adapting them. They're one of those things where they transform as my worldview and my understandings transform as well. And that's why I've been trying to shape them more into something that means a little bit more to me, like the land. They're not just the Rs and not just this solid English thing. They are the wild rose. It's a flower to me. It's resilience. It's resurgence. And it is, flowers bloom. They change. Roses change. They become rose hips. So it's always transforming. That's kind of what I was in the moment thinking about when I was doing that. Hi, thank you so much, Kayla. I really appreciated the distinctions you started to make in the in-between spaces between open and Indigenous OER. And I can appreciate that there are many people in the room who are very much immersed in the original versions of the 4Rs to be quite confronted by this type of challenge to our epistemology. It is a big evolution of ideas that is necessary to continue growing the open practices and more knowledge sovereignty for people that we have an opportunity to learn from and to adjust. What would you say or how might you describe that in-between place and how might that be something that we can embrace as a community here? So like the in-between place of like Indigenous knowledges and open and kind of how they can mold or don't? Mold? Sorry. Yeah, I wanna lean into that kind of encouraging space of understanding how we can keep evolving our understanding of what open can look like in this community because it's a wonderful group of people and we wanna bring everyone along. Well, I think what folks also need to do is when we're talking about critical pedagogies changing and criticizing what we've done before, a lot of that and a lot of the learning that we do comes from the heart in those moments and I encourage everyone to read up on heart learning or practices and so heart learning happens in a very emotional state and I know, because I've heard stories of people having a heart learning moment while they've been at this conference, a moment where something just clicks for you in your brain and your whole life can be transformed by it.  It transforms your understanding and your worldview in a different way and for us to be able to understand that kind of middle ground and how open fits or doesn't fit with other communities, we need to kind of transform ourselves. We need to practice that heart learning and to open ourselves up to other people, to other people's ideas, to other people's communities and to just change ourselves foundationally and I get that all the time. We have heart learning moments even if we don't know that we're having a heart learning moment. So I think that's what we need to do is even think not necessarily as the organization at a whole sometimes, but at the self and how we transform our self in the moment to be able to better the future of education. One more. One more. Okay, perfect. Thank you. So I am putting together a linguistics OER and one of the tensions I'm experiencing in this work and in others is that on the one hand I wanna do your six Rs which involves relationship and reciprocity and reverence but on the other hand I want to get as much diversity of examples as possible from different peoples, language families from all over the world. And so there's this tension where it would be great if I had 100 languages represented but I can't do 100 relationships with reverence and reciprocity. So do you have any thoughts about how to do that tension between diversity and the six Rs? Yeah, so I mean one of my big tenants is always think local and move out which isn't always able for people to do. Like I completely understand that and I think when it comes to contacting everybody, yeah, that's definitely a thing. We can't talk to everybody. We can't build relationships with everybody but there are tools that sometimes that we can have. So for example, they're not here today and I didn't fully talk about them because I don't represent that organization. We have organizations like local context which has created traditional knowledge labels which communities can use kind of like a Creative Commons license or label and then they also have now items like CI notices which are cultural institution notices. So it's something that you could use on your OER if you don't have the capacity to contact communities. It's something that you can use on your OER to say, hey, I wasn't able to contact all the communities in this but if you're from this community and you're reading about this and you want to contact me and work together this is how you do that. It's an acknowledgement of the fact that you're using someone else's language and knowledges but also it's that extension, it's that hands forward. I would like to talk to you eventually one day. I just don't have the capacity right now to do it. What was that called again? So it's part of local context and it's the cultural institution labels or notices that they have. So the TK labels are for communities to use and then the CI notices are for organizations, cultural institutions, things like that. So local context. They also are along the lines with Mercadoo which is a digital repository that they use as well. Yeah. Thank you so much. You're welcome. Thank you. Thank you so much for enlightening us today. Much appreciated. Your knowledge has been transformative for me and on behalf of Northwest College and OE Global I'd like to present you with this gift for sharing your knowledge. Oh hi, hi, thank you. Thank you.


The International Press Center IPC in Nigeria has joined the global community to raise concerns about press freedom violations, stressing the need for stakeholders' collaboration to serve God its freedom. The IPC, which made the call in a statement by its communications officer, Oluhtoyi Ayode, to mark the 2022 World Press Freedom Day, urged the federal government to respect its commitment and uphold the right to freedom of expression, as enshrined in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the African Chatter on Peoples and Human Rights. The organization stated that, since 2020, it had identified over 100 journalists and other media professionals who had been victims of surveillance, spying, harassment, threats, violence, assaults, battery, unlawful arrests, jailing, kidnappings, and suspected murder. We are now being joined by NUJ Chairman Lagos Chapter Adelaya Ajayi. Glad to have you, Mr Ajayi. Good evening. Good evening. Thank you. Now, let's evaluate press freedom, especially here in Nigeria. Can we say that we are there yet? Well, the press freedom in Nigeria is not totally free, and we are not yet there. It's not yet to be heard when we talk about press freedom in Nigeria. The function of the press is to inform, entertain, and educate, but there are some factors impeding the activities of the media in Nigeria, and these factors are addressed by both the government and even the private sector owners of media establishments. It is not yet to be heard. What are these factors? What what? What are these factors you said have not yet been addressed? Well, this has to do with the hazards of the job. The owners must ensure that journalists are well protected. Safety of journalists in the face, very, very paramount. And then there is this ability to allow journalists free hand, to give them free hand in line with the code of ethics. The ownership influence is also one of the factors affecting the performance of journalists. And apart from that, harassment, as you mentioned in this report, harassment, assassinations, and so on and so forth are some of the factors also impeding the activities of the press. And you know, a lot of impunities, there are impunities against the press. A lot of media men have been, in the last 10 years or 15 years, have been either transmitted, maimed, or harassed. And the perpetrators of all these dust attacks should be brought to, almost be brought to book. So until all these issues are addressed, we cannot say there is total press freedom in Nigeria. Okay, when you say ownership interest, hinders press freedom, what do you mean by that? You know, what I mean is the ownership, you will pay the piper in journalism, or in every parlance, you will pay the piper to change the tune. The owners, every media establishment has its own style book, its own style. And it is what the owner wants you to write. That's subjectivity in journalism. You know, it should be allowed, it should be given free hand to operate. Whether you are a editor or a reporter, it should be given free hand to operate. It should not be subjective, it should be objective in your report. Factual, factual reporting. But this is what you now want you to write, that you write. Whether government is having a private sector. So all these ways of gargling the press, the press should be given free hand to operate. What do you think the government can do? Yeah, what can the government do to defend the media from first of all this... How can the government make things better? Well, it's just to give the press free hand and then to protect the safety in defence. You are talking about kidnapping, harassment, you know. You discovered that, for instance, recently or in the last year, there was a battle between the MPO that is Nigerian... Nigerian... Nigerian... And Nigerian... Against two bills, two bills that's fed into the non-assembly for amendment, the Nigerian press should be and the National Broadcasting Commission be. Those two bills have been suspended, amendment bills have been suspended for now. But until government listens to the media, government allows the media free hand to operate, then we can say we have total press freedom in Nigeria. But the right journalists have lost their lives in the exercise of their profession. How best can they be immortalised? You will recall that Chris Modibé, the late Chris Modibé, Tyre Autosie were victims of the Liberian War. And when champion was vibrant, they named the library after Tyre Autosie. They named it Tyre Autosie Library. And I think the champion is... I don't know, champion is trying to recuperate again. But I think other media houses should do so. Apart from media houses, we on our part as NUJ, we will follow... Because this is just a pointer now that we need to immortalise our heroes. Those who lost their lives in the course of duties. We have a number of them. If I start mentioning them, we won't live here today. So I think we should immortalise them. Because these are heroes. They were highly assassinated. They were highly harassed. Both those harassed, those assassinated. We will immortalise them, as you have said. And that is a very good initiative that we have to work upon. Work upon. And at the NUJ level. In CPT, as I said, all this is our own. Well, thank you. Well, thank you so much, Mr. Adelaia Jai, NUJ Chairman Lagos Chapter. Thank you for your time.


The Constituency Development Program, CDP, has received an EC-18.5 million dollar injection from the Republic of China on Taiwan. On April 11th, His Excellency Peter Chai Chen presented to the Cabinet of Ministers and invited guests the fruits of St. Lucia's labour from the Table of Diplomacy with an important development partner and enduring ally, the government and people of Taiwan. And we are honoured to be part of this vital development project with the St. Lucia government. Two weeks ago, a Taiwan technical mission collaborated with the Ministry of Agriculture to hold the first farmers market this year in an arcade of Miku Village. Joined by Honourable Deputy Speaker Jeremiah Norburn, and a newly built arcade founded by the Constituency Development Program, provided farmers with a well-functioning shelter to display their products, offering vendors and buyers a more comfortable place to support local produce. Carefully managed diplomatic relations with Taiwan by the government of St. Lucia and the Ministry of External Affairs continue to yield mutually appreciated benefits that redound to the socio-economic development of St. Lucia's citizens and also contribute to the development of the island's 17 constituencies. And I want you to acknowledge the work of the Ministry of External Affairs in this regard, because I really pushed him, anything he came with I said to him go and get some more. Prime Minister Honourable Philip J. Pierre continues to epitomise bipartisanship where state resources are concerned. The government leader has given assurances all 17 members of parliament will receive an equitable share of the CDP funds. And not because they voted for another party, our democracy mandates us to allow them to survive. That will continue and allocations will be given to these constituencies so that the parliamentary reps can use it as they deem necessary. That also is important, as they deem necessary. I have once have given the allocations to the permanent secretary. I never asked how it was used, who got what, who gave what contract and they can bet testimony to that. Officials from the Office of the Accountant General collected the Taiwanese tranche on behalf of the government of St. Lucia. The constituency development program empowers constituents and local government officials with the necessary resources to undertake community level development programs, which, among many other benefits, also create employment opportunities as well as ensure community infrastructure is regularly maintained. From the Office of the Prime Minister, Rihanna Izudo.


When this event hit the headlines, I was around 5-6 years old. Although I didn't really grasp what it was, I could tell from my parents' faces that it wasn't a good thing. All the beef burgers and the freezer were thrown in the bin, and we were only allowed to eat fillet of fish whenever we went to McDonald's. Subconsciously, this must have influenced my becoming a vegetarian in my early teens. Nowadays, there are hundreds of veggie-friendly options. Mmm, tofu. But back in 2001 and 2002, it was a little bit more difficult. Well, that's enough talking about my dietary choices. Let's get started with the video. Piles of bodies are burning in fields, all throughout the British countryside. It is the 1990s, and this hellish scene is scarring the British pride in their farming products. The mass culling is understandably no-one's first choice, but it seems the only way to stamp out an animal-born disease that has made the leap to humans. The cattle farming industry makes up roughly 38% of the UK's entire agricultural product, and the last thing the country needs is piles of dead, unsellable cows. The disease is always fatal, with a prognosis of roughly 13 months after onset of symptoms. It is officially known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, which, if consumed, infected meat can cause variant crutsveiled jacob disease. More casually known as mad cow disease. Welcome to Scandal, a plainly difficult documentary series. It is the 1940s, and the United Kingdom, as well as the rest of the world, is collecting itself after nearly six years of devastation. War has bludgeoned the UK economy, industry has been stripped of resources and manpower, and a victorious, yet now poor nation, seeks some way to move forward. The country is in debt, and has been operating under rationing for many of the essentials for the average British person's diet, sugar, meat, fats and cheese. At the start of the war, Britain was importing half of its meat, 80% of its fruit, and 70% of its cereals and fats from abroad. As such, this became the wake-up call for the UK to become more food independent, as well as build thriving rural communities and economies. Successive governments fostered this economic development. The growth continued in the 1970s, with the UK joining the EEC. Now there was an even bigger reason to farm more. Tariff free trading. The UK by the 1980s had achieved over 100% domestic milk demand, and 97% meat demand. Quite a turnaround of importing 50%, some 40 years before. This market was worth £5 billion to the UK economy. But how was this turnaround achieved? Well, glad you asked, as this would prove to be a vital cog in the wheel of disaster. The UK had made use of a scheme of selective breeding to create cattle, with the ability to produce more milk, coupled with a high protein diet. The industry found that soy based feed was good, but not good enough. Instead, they discovered that meat and bone meal yielded as good, if not better, milk produced than the more natural alternative. And what was better was that it was made of animal waste, and was as such a hell of a lot cheaper than soy. You may ask what those waste products are. Well, I don't think you're going to like it. Imagine every bit of livestock that you think you would normally throw in the bin. You know, the bones, blood and pretty much everything else left over, but vitally also the brain as well. It was all mashed together to make feed. Much of the livestock products used were from cows. So basically, the industry was feeding cows, cows. The high protein feed was mainly for increasing milk production, and as such, dairy cows were the most unknowingly cannibalistic population in the farming industry. But these dairy cows would eventually find themselves in the slaughterhouse, as around two-thirds were eventually used for beef production. The cattle to enter the human food chain, they had to be killed in a licensed slaughterhouse in the UK. But the numbers in the country had dwindled to around a thousand registered premises, by the 1980s. The side effect was that cattle had to travel longer distances. Now, I'm not going to describe the slaughterhouse process, but it should be said that the waste products that made up meat and bone feed came as a byproduct from the rendering process, part of the whole meat production line. Rendering is a process of recovering any waste products from livestock, and vitally for our story, in the 1980s, was completely unregulated in the UK. And thus, diseased animals quite often found themselves being turned into feed. 1983 An Unknown Illness It is October 1983, veterinarian Mr Ray Williams is attending a cow that has been exhibiting some strange behaviour. He is at Coleman Farm in Wiltshire, and over the next year, Williams would see at least five more cows exhibiting very similar symptoms. The animals are showing signs of distress, shaking, poor coordination and trembling of the head. The cows, although showing normal hunger, were also losing weight. The animals were destroyed and thus no autopsy was made, but these few victims would prove to be just the start of a mysterious condition. In January 1985, Mr Williams discovered another cow from the same farm, but a different unit exhibiting the same strange symptoms. Not wanting to miss out on finding out what the cause was, he sent this cow, which would now be named Cow 36, to a veterinary school in Langford. The animal was slaughtered and given a partial post-mortem. In the report, the cow was stated to have progressive nervous signs, hyperanesia, tremors, mania and hind leg ataxia. But whilst Williams was dealing with this strange illness, little did he know that another farm called Pitcham, over a hundred miles away in Sussex, had an animal showing the very same strange symptoms. Cow 133, as it was officially known, was observed in December 1984 to have lost all of its coordination and was experiencing severe shaking. Six weeks later, it died, much to the confusion of local veterinarian Mr David B. B, like Williams, at the same time would see several more cows showing the same symptoms. Almost like it was spreading amongst the farm's population. B coined the new illness, Stent Farm Syndrome, after the owner of the farm, Peter Stent, and sent a number of tissue samples to the Central Veterinary Laboratory. The first officially diagnosed case of BSE was from Cow 142. Pathologist Carol Richardson examined the cow and saw similarities with the samples that B had sent in previously. She diagnosed the illness as a bovine scrapie, which was confirmed by the Consultant Pathology Unit. As a side note, scrapie is a known condition, even known as early as 1732. It is fatal and is a degenerative disease affecting the nervous systems of sheep and goats, but it is not known to be transmissible to humans and as such, infected meat can be consumed. The name comes from the behaviour of the infected individuals scraping their bodies against rocks. Cow 142's autopsy results will be reviewed a number of times. One such was in June 1987, when it confirmed the illness was a form of transmissible spongiform encephalopathy or the less of a mouthful BSE. A couple of months later, the UK government would accept the new disease, but although the cause of the strange symptoms was discovered, an unknown number of cattle had been infected. Although the early signs were there from 1983, it is now thought to have occurred in cows as early as the 1970s. It's very likely it was spread through the meat and bone meal that was fed to cattle and in the late 1980s, the numbers of infected animals would soar as more and more unknowingly infected cattle were slaughtered and rendered. However, when the causal link was suggested, in 1988 meat bone meal was banned for feeding to cattle, but by now hundreds of thousands of cattle were potentially infected with mad cow disease. The British Ministry of Agriculture accepted that it had a new disease, but it was very slow to act, only banning awful for human consumption in 1989, which was suggested by the Southwood report. The Thatcher government, sorry I said that wrong didn't I, the Thatcher government, were adamant that British beef was safe among the concerns over BSE, saying the illness couldn't jump species. But experiments at Oxford University had already shown the disease could infect other species, when in 1988 mice were infected with BSE by brain to brain injection. The Southwood report also advised that the government should slaughter and dispose of any cow that was suspected to have transmitted the disease. The government complied, but only offered a 50% compensation to farmers, which seemed like a bit of a half-ass measure, especially when BSE can take several years to manifest any symptoms after infection. The lack of financial incentive led to many turning a blind eye to potentially infected animals, with some farmers later being accused of selling cattle off the books. However, this was too little, too late, as the USA in 1989 banned British beef from its shores. The government by 1990 was assuring the British public and the wider world market that British beef was safe to eat. The Conservative government said there was no evidence of catching the disease through the consumption of meat. Well, until there was. Hello, John here. Have you ever wondered who made the racket in the background to this video, or the other scandal episodes, or even the outro songs on pretty much every recent Plain Difficult episode? Well, wonder no more, as it was made by me, John. And you can now listen to the songs in full on my new YouTube channel made by John, stream them on Spotify, or even if you fancy, buy them to keep forever on Beatport and iTunes. I enjoy making my personal mix of Acid House, Breakbeat and Ambient, and I hope you'll enjoy listening to it as much as I did making it. Max the Cat and the Jump to Humans Enter Siamese Cat, Max. The feline had for most of its life been given a diet of British beef. Not so strange, however, what made Max unique was that he began exhibiting symptoms congruent with a feline form of BSc. Max was confused, losing weight, had trouble keeping balance, and the signature of the illness, uncontrolled quivering. The cat became the first known case outside of a laboratory of BSc jumping species. Scientists knew it was possible. In the same year they had shown mice could develop a condition through eating infected food. BSc had now officially jumped species. Max and a number of other cats including a tiger became infected, showing the risk of transmitting the disease through consumption of infected meat. Despite the ever-growing storm clouds of thousands of cows developing BSc, a 100% compensation scheme to farmers and tons of meat being destroyed, the UK government doubled down with the line that British beef was still safe. The Agriculture Minister John Gummer today enrolled his daughter Cordelia in his campaign to persuade people that eating beef is safe. It was a little hot for her, but later he munched it himself to prove to the world that he at least is confident there's nothing to worry about. Secretary of State for the Environment John Gummer appeared on TV virtually forcing his daughter to eat a beef burger. Nothing like dragging your children into politics at a young age. And guess what happened to him? He eventually got made a member of the House of Lords. Anyways, no matter how much head and the sand stances the government made, by 1992 an estimated 100,000 cattle had become infected with BSc. This amounted to roughly three in every 1,000 cows having the potential to be infected. Between 1992 and 1993 some 4.4 million cattle had been slaughtered and disposed of, mainly by burning the corpses in the fields of the British countryside. This proved to be financially decimating for the British farming sector and as such the government continued to claim the safety of British beef with the chief medical officer reaffirming the safe to eat party line. Even though the numbers of the infected reached the peak of the outbreak, the human tragedy was yet to unfold. In late 1994 a few people in Britain were showing symptoms of a rare illness. Brutsfeldt, Jakob disease. So rare is Cij that between 50 and 60 people get the disease per year in the UK. Well what's so strange you might think? Rare illnesses exist. What is odd is that traditionally the condition rarely affects anyone under the age of 55 and the new victims were nearly 30 years younger. During the late 1980s and early 1990s there were at least four cases of farm workers all over the age of 55 being taken ill as CJD which proved to be a very strange coincidence. It was kind of looking like there was a vocational link to cattle and CJD. A 19 year old man named Stephen Churchill would die in May 1995 apparently linked to this rare illness. A younger 16 year old girl had been identified around the same time but Stephen was the first of the under 55 cases to succumb to the illness. Needless to say the unusual deaths in young people often warrant thorough autopsies. James Ironside a pathologist at the National CJD Surveillance Unit saw the brains of the patients and showed unusual spongiform symptoms. He named this new condition variant CJD or VCJD. In total in 1995 four people would die from VCJD but in September the government stated that there was insufficient evidence to link BSE and VCJD. But eventually on the 20th of March 1996 the government would begrudgingly capitulate and Stephen Dorrell the Secretary of State for Health said there was actually a link between VCJD and infected beef. Seven days later the EU would enact a ban on British beef. But why did children get so much of the issues? Well the FATCHER government in the 1980s had removed the requirement for school dinners to have any nutritional value as such schools were using mechanically recovered meat which was not much better than meat bone meal. In response to the EU ban on British beef the UK sought to legally challenge the export ban and introduced a scheme to slaughter and destroy all cattle over the age of 30 months. This rift between the UK and EU during this period which heavily affected the UK farming economy has been argued to be one of the sparks that started off the Brexit movement of which a large number of farmers voted for in the EU referendum. Millions of cattle burned in the fields of the UK countryside as the UK government attempted to get a handle on the outbreak. However British beef was still on the menu in British switches albeit not allowing to be sold on the bone but there was still rest of people. In 1997 local councils stopped serving beef in roughly 2000 schools across the country. Over the next 20 years 178 people would go on to contract and die of the disease. But let's quickly pause here to discuss the CJD and how it affects the human body. The CJD. The contraction of the CJD has appeared to be a bit of a lottery of genetics as millions of people ate infected meat but there are under 200 known death. Clearly the odds are low although you'd never like to know your chances when you're taking the spin on the roulette wheel of death. The CJD is caused by things called prions officially called protonaceous infectious particles. They are misfolded proteins that have the ability to transmit their misfolded shape onto normal variants of the same protein. In an uninfected person prions begin as a string of amino acids that then fold themselves into three dimensional shapes. Sometimes during protein folding issues can happen and the prion protein can't be used by the body. These are usually recycled but can cause issues if large enough quantities build up. After eating infected meat the malicious prions infect healthy brain proteins in the body. They then build up on the brain and cause more misfolded prions. In doing so this kills off brain cells. Naturally the dying of brain cells creates reduced cognitive and physical functions. What is scary is that these dangerous prions can survive in the nerve tissue such as brain or spinal cord for a long time after death which if eaten spreads the disease. Potentially the CJD can lie dormant in your body for many years. As such some countries have banned on British citizens donating blood if they live during the crisis. But was there any accountability for the continued sale and denial of infected meat? The Inquiry At the height of the disaster an inquiry was announced in December 1997. The new Labour government under the premiership of Tony Blair had been in power since May the same year. In its executive summary published in October by Nick Brown the secretary for agriculture at the time stated the public was repeatedly reassured that it was safe to eat beef. Some statements failed to explain that the views expressed were subject to proper observance of the precautionary measures which had been introduced to protect human health against the possibility that VSE might be transmissible. These statements conveyed the messages not merely that beef was safe but that VSE was not transmissible. The inquiry also slated the government for its lack of consideration for the amount of infected material needed to be eradicated from the meat. More serious was a failure to give rigorous consideration to the amount of infected material that was proving capable of transmitting the disease. The false assumption was made that any cross-contamination of cattle feed in feed mills from pig or poultry feed containing ruminant protein would be onto a small scale matter. As the 90s came to a close the numbers of infected cattle were reduced as the population of cows were essentially eradicated from the UK. The restrictions on beef were slowly raised. Meat on the bone and offal were still restricted well into the mid-2000s even for UK markets and the EU would lift its ban in 2006 after a 10-year embargo on British beef although France continued to impose a ban on British beef illegally long after. Plainly summary Personally it seemed like the government at the time was during the reigns of two Conservative Prime Ministers, Batcha and John Major were more willing to play down and in some cases outright ignore the warning signs to the risk of millions of British citizens. All of this was to try and prop up a significant portion of the UK economy. Incompetence, profits over safety or a bit of both will be up to you to decide. Regardless, many hundreds would pay the price and maybe still will. This is a plain difficult production. All videos on the channel are creative commons attribution share alike licensed. Playing difficult videos are produced by me John in a currently nice corner of southern London UK. Help the channel grow by liking commenting and subscribing. I'd like to thank my Patreons and YouTube members for your support and also if you enjoyed any of the music in this video you can listen to it on my second channel made by John stream it on Spotify or even if you feel like buy it on iTunes. As such all of the links are in the description below. And all that's left to say is Mr Music, play us out please.


I should say that this talk and the one immediately following by my good friend Eugene Sledge, a former United States Marine, I think you'll find illuminating about what actually happens in war, which is by no means an abstraction. Now my friends and I sometimes play a game that you might enjoy too. We call it oxymoron. The object is to come up with phrases which, while superficially plausible, prove on skeptical examination to involve intellectually comical contradictions in terms, like, for example, creation science. How about journalistic ethics? That's right up there with the Maoist concept of a cultural revolution. How about the phrase scholar-athlete? We're looking toward the university faculty instead of the students, the phrase scholar-activist. That's actually a phrase the Washington Post saw no contradiction in when it recently designated that way the newly appointed president of the University of the District of Columbia. And speaking of that sort of thing, some deeply cynical players of this game, oxymoron, contemplating the compromised, uncertain, and sentimental scene of much of the higher learning today, might go so far as to propose as the winning oxymoron the phrase college education. Now I start this way because my title, The Culture of War, might be regarded as that kind of flagrant oxymoron. And so it would be if I were invoking the term culture in any artistic or intellectual sense, implying within the armed forces a considerable amount of viola playing, classical acting, liberal drawing and painting and modeling, poetry and fiction writing, and difficult reading. But actually, it's not things like that I'm trying to suggest by the word culture. I'm using it in a quasi-anthropological sense, the way T.S. Eliot used it when he wrote a book called Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, a book in which he considered the possibility of a healthy and interesting society based on something like religious principles. In that book, Eliot understands how much, as he puts it, how much is embraced by the term culture. A term designating not merely artistic or ennobling activities, but the general forms and usages and techniques of a given society, including military society. To Eliot, culture includes, as he says, all the characteristic activities and interests of a people. And using the British people and their culture as his examples, he goes on to instance, as components of British culture, these things.  Nineteenth-century Gothic churches and the music of Sir Edward Elgar. And he adds, the reader can make his own list. Well, in the same way probably any one of us could make a list of things comprising the culture of war. But at the outset, I should warn you that the items I'll mention are collected not by any military strategist or theoretician or historian or scholar. They're the views, some of them doubtless embittered, of a superannuated, badly wounded former infantry lieutenant, a one-time rifle platoon leader who fought the Second World War in Europe, commanding 40 terrified young Americans, many of whom were killed or cruelly wounded. Thus, if the word culture presents some problems, the word war will present even more. The truth is that very few people know anything about war. In an infantry division, for example, fewer than half the troops actually fight. That is, with the rifles, mortars, machine guns, grenades, and trench knives. The others, thousands on thousands of them, are occupied with truck driving, mimeographed machine operating, cooking and baking, ammunition and ration supplying, and similar housekeeping tasks. Now, those things are no doubt necessary, but they're hardly bellicose. And they hardly provide the sort of experience which can issue as trustworthy testimony about what the word war might mean. This is a reason why most combat veterans tend to smile cynically and sardonically at veterans' reunions when those reunions are attended by very large numbers. Very few of those attending the real veterans know deserve to be there. For most soldiers participating in the Second World War, the war meant inconvenience rising sometimes to hardship, enforced travel and residence broad, unappetizing food, absence of tablecloths, and often bedsheets. But for those unlucky enough to be in the forward combat units, the war meant death or maiming, and in extraordinarily dirty and undignified circumstances. At the very least, for most, it meant a rapid and shocking metamorphosis from boyhood innocence to adult cynicism and bitterness. It is experience remembered vividly even at this distance that has inducted me into my understanding of the culture of war. It is a culture hard for civilians to understand, and it's not their fault that they can't, because civilians occupy a world, thank God, which is in large part rational and predictable, a world which makes sense in an old-fashioned way. Now let me illustrate what I mean. A while ago, I was telephoned by a lawyer in New York City. He indicated that he was conducting a course for cadets at West Point, a course in the relation between language and violence. This course focused on the deformations of language required for the registration of non-rational violent behavior. He asked me to take part in a class on this topic, and I agreed cheerfully. He then specified the subject further. He was going to focus, he said, on after-action reports from combat units. And he wanted me to indicate what problems I had had in writing my after-action reports, what problems I had had adapting normal language to this special use. For example, what euphemisms, if any, were employed in these after-action reports. What were the temptations that I felt to provide rational motives for violent or inexplicable events? Well, as this phone call went on, I confessed to an outburst of extreme, angry discurricy, the sort of thing that's common among infantrymen reinstalled in an optimistic and unimaginative civilian culture. I asked with some passion. I asked this lawyer, have you ever been in combat? The answer, no. I then explained with elaborate sarcasm that I never heard of such things as after-action reports from small assault units. Perhaps they had some existence at battalion or regimental level, but not down where the fighting was. How, after all, could one pull oneself together to compose an after-action report with pencil and paper when you had the following after-action features to attend to? First, the question of what to do when the six German prisoners, the assault, has just yielded. How can one keep a very angry private who had seen his buddy's eye shot out from doing what he very much wanted to do to kill all the prisoners? Second, after-action, you had to clean up the mess. This meant taking care of the wounded, some of whom were in intense pain, and the morphine is already exhausted. Three, after-action, you had to reposition your soldiers to repel a German counter-attack. And you had to jolly them up to make them want to continue fighting the war in the prescribed manner. Fighting the war after-action is going to be very difficult because your sergeant is over there crying forth. How could a junior officer like me write an after-action report when his hand was covered with the blood of one of his men who was wound in the back I had ineffectively tried to bandage while the bullets and shell fragments were flying around? Given all this, and this is item five, given all this, how could such a person have waited a day or so to file his after-action report in a calmer mood when a third of the men whose testimony would be required were gone, killed, or wounded? And where would he find the quiet to write it? By that time, he'd be engaged in further violence himself. The point is that producing after-action reports is the privilege of leaders who are non-combatants. And the usefulness and authenticity of such reports can already be sensed to be adjacent to the usefulness of works of fiction. My point is less that than the instructive naivete of the lawyer, a very representative human being. What would expect a lawyer in New York City, especially to be quite sophisticated about the facts of life? But here was one who imagined that the conduct of combat was rational. He was a victim of what I call inappropriate rationalism with a bit of inappropriate optimism as well.  The culture of war in short is not like the culture of ordinary peacetime life. It's a culture dominated by fear and blood and sadism, by irrational actions and preposterous and usually ironic results. It has more relation to science fiction or to ironic theater than to actual life. And that makes it hard to describe it.   It's especially unfortunate because it simply underlines the unpleasant facts of the military class system. On the one hand, remote and privileged staffs and administrators. On the other, the troops, mostly sad conscripts, we must remember, the troops who must do the dangerous work. The distance between serious survivors of World War II fighting and optimistic onlookers can be measured by a current controversy in Britain. This controversy is between veterans of the Second World War and the government. The veterans want D-Day commemorated with solemnity and sorrow. After all, it marked the beginning of a battle in which 37,000 people, most of them pathetically young, were killed. The government, avid for tourist dollars, takes a different approach. It proposes not a commemoration, but a celebration involving street parties, dances, cute reenactments, band concerts, Glenn Miller impersonators, and the like. Well, the quarrel is between those who know the culture of war and those who think they know it or who are prepared to profit from a misrepresentation of it. And between these two groups, a reconciliation is hardly possible. A spokesman for the veterans in this quarrel has said, the event is being trivialized. Those who actually took part feel it was just a battle, albeit a successful one. Many of their comrades lost their lives in the process, and many ladies were widowed. That the Allies won the Second World War doesn't oblige us to be cheerful about it. Wars are won by distinction in the techniques of mass murder. And that's hardly something for people pretending to civilization to be proud of. Tolstoy's words are worth recalling. War, he said, is not a polite recreation, but the vilest thing in life. And we ought to understand that and not play at war. It will be years, perhaps decades, before it becomes clear whether the Cold War was really necessary, or it was a gratifying and profitable playing at war, whose beneficiaries were not the people of the earth, but the makers of armaments designed to become rapidly obsolete and quickly replaceable. In focusing the economy on armaments bankrupted the Soviet Union, think what it did to the United States. Thus, if the culture of war solidifies those who fight and alienates them from those who do not, it has other regrettable aspects. One of them is censorship. War kills people, obviously, and the culture of war does not. But the culture of war kills something precious and indispensable in a civilized society. That is freedom of utterance, freedom of curiosity, freedom of knowledge. Recently, and I think you're going to like this, recently an official of the Pentagon explained why the military had censored some TV footage depicting Iraqi soldiers cut in half by automatic fire from US helicopters. He explained, these are his words, if we let people see that kind of thing, there would never again be any war. Now I got that quotation from a comical gift book titled, The 776 Stupidest Things Ever Said.  It is very shrewd, and its implications spread very far. It's obvious that tight censorship is a necessity in any modern war. It's usually rationalized by the need to keep the enemy in the dark about our plans, but it's also valuable to conceal military blunders and fatalities and war crimes from a public that in the absence of censorship might learn to be critical. And my point is this, if you are trained to be uncritical of the military, you can easily go just a little bit further and learn to be uncritical of government and of authority and of all established and received institutions. The result is, of course, the death of the mind, the transformation of the higher learning and independent scholarship into a cheering section for whatever popular notions and superstitions prevail at the moment. During wartime and during the cold wartime, we've all had to pretend that the military is a force for some kind of social good. I wonder if it is. Is the habit of unthinking obedience a good one to instill in young Americans? For one thing clear about the culture of war is that it's necessarily an obedience culture. And as one critic has noticed of armies in general, in organizations where there must be unquestioning obedience, there must be passive injustice. And not just that, the obedience culture is certain over the long run to shrivel originality and constrict thought to encourage witless adaptation and social dishonesty. The culture of war is the only culture for the concept of morale is crucial. And that's a significant point morale is crucial in the culture of war because at all times the troops are engaging in activities sure to undermine cheerfulness and hope. They're either being bored picking up cigarette butts or they're being dehumanized by killing their fellow creatures who like them are for the most part helpless conscripts who have done nothing for which they deserve to be blown to bits. In wartime culture censorship has the assistance of general euphemism and programmatically inaccurate language. And before long we are calling war making peacekeeping and believing it. What used to be designated aerial bombing has been euphemized into air strikes and even surgical air strikes dishonestly implying a degree of accuracy which will make combat veterans laugh out loud. Originally artillery or mortar shells fired by mistake at our own troops were called terrible mistakes or tragic errors. Then euphemism was devised incontinent ordinance and finally some Pentagon genius hit upon the warmer and cozier term friendly fire. During the Gulf War friendly fire caused over one-third of the American casualties. Twenty-three percent of the American dead died from friendly fire. Fifteen percent of the American wounded were wounded by friendly fire. Now of course blunders are the very essence of war. This is why the culture of war so far removed from the culture of predictability and rationality. Soldiers know that blunders are the very essence of war because they know what's likely to happen when you arm a lot of frightened boys with deadly weapons. But the public must not be told lest their simple faith in military authority and rationality be shaken. Transforming the ugly and shocking into the noble and bright is the business of the most popular illustrated history of the Second World War. I'm referring to the time life volumes with titles like the Italian War or across the Rhine. Most of us know those I think. In those volumes clear and noble purposes clear and noble cause and purpose are assigned systematically to events which are really accidental or which are embarrassingly demeaning. Readers of those books are insulted by being presumed to be incapable of confronting the truth. Everything must be transformed in the fairy tales of heroism, success and nobility. That series of books is thus conveyed to the credulous a satisfying, orderly, wholesome and optimistic view of catastrophic occurrences. Like for example the shooting down of hundreds of American paratroopers during the invasion of Sicily by frightened and undisciplined sailors convinced that the large airplane flying overhead held enemy troops. The presentation of war by such dishonest means is a fine way actually to encourage a moralistic, nationalistic and bellicose international politics. Now it's customary to maintain that American wars are all fought on behalf of freedom. But do you notice that for the sake of freedom millions of young men are enslaved for years shanghired by conscription into a life whose every dimension is at odds with the idea of freedom. Flags, uniforms, bugle calls, band music, all the trappings of military glory, hardly suffice to persuade the hapless conscript that he's involved in the defense of freedom especially when his weekend pass has just been canceled at the last minute in payment for a heartfelt satiric remark which his sergeant has just overheard. Indeed the culture of war now brace yourselves. The culture of war is hardly separable from the culture of chicken shit to invoke a rude term which I hope will offend no one here all of whom I take to be expert in the facts of life in addition to the facts of economics. During the Second World War an Australian poet John Manifold wrote a poem titled Ration Party. It dramatizes the irony of slaves in uniform defending freedom and it adds the irony by being a sonnet a poetic kind normally associated with delicate or beautiful sentiments. Here's his poem, Ration Party. Across the mud the lion drags on and on tread slithers, footholds fails, all ardors vanish rain falls, the barking NCOs admonish the universe more than the lagging men. Something like an infinity of men plods up the slope the file will never finish for all their toil serves only to replenish stores for tomorrow's labors to begin. Absurd to think that liberty the splendid nude of our dreams the intercessory saint for us to judgment needs to be defended by sick fatigued men brimming with complaint and misery who bear till all is ended every imaginable pattern of restraint. Now the final thing I want to point out about the culture of war is that it is necessarily and resolutely only adversarial only dualistic. We are here the enemy is over there at a no man's land either literal or figurative as in ideology divides us. The divisiveness at home occasioned by the vietnam war is an example and that divisiveness as you're aware almost ruined this country. You remember how it went if you opposed the war you were dishonoring the flag and were practically a traitor. If you favored the war you were a true American you had thus to be either a dove or a hawk. Take your choice no room for compromise conciliation or even very subtle discussion if you were not for the war you must be for communism. It was that attitude that finally brought down the Nixon White House. If earlier invasion or physical pressure against American territory would lead to war now the US became kissing her eyes. Now threats to American quote national interest were a sufficient reason for sending the troops into bloody action. National interest is constitutionally an interesting term because it is legally meaningless and constitutionally undefinable hence popular. The evanescent phrase the national interest is the best gift ever awarded those Americans who are neurotically bellicose but who like Henry Kissinger always seem to avoid being on the front line. Preferring to serve their country by getting others to drop bombs on people and the people they drop bombs on and this is notable are always more primitive and unfortunate than themselves. They're always smaller in stature and they always have or usually have darker skins. That is what the current culture of war seems to amount to and I think we should and for it. Thank you.