\u00a0<\/p>\n
We had a chance to visit the beautiful Kootenays on May 22-25.\u00a0 Overall, a really productive trip! Went into it thinking we weren\u2019t organized enough and hadn\u2019t planned enough meetings.\u00a0 But as it turned out we got more accomplished than we imagined.\u00a0 The main purpose of our trip was to meet with members of Akisq\u2019nuk First Nation near Invermere, BC.\u00a0 Akisq\u2019nuk is one of four communities within the Ktunaxa (teh-NUH-hah) Nation within Canada.\u00a0 Their traditional territory extends down into the States. Akisq\u2019nuk Chief and council were very supportive and agreed to go forward with the program.\u00a0 That same day, we held a community info session and had a pretty good turnout: about 20 parents, kids, and community members in total.\u00a0 We asked the kids what their least favourite and most favourite subject was in school and who was their role model.\u00a0 For many kids we had to explain what \u201crole model\u201d meant, which made us think we should change the questions to \u201cwho do you look up to?\u201d<\/p>\n
The next day had lots of surprises. \u00a0At first we thought we\u2019d have a lot of time to kill before our flight in the evening as we only scheduled two meetings.\u00a0 One of these meetings was with a wonderful Aboriginal Support Workers at David Thompson Secondary School in Invermere.\u00a0 She was very excited about the program and suggested her students be able to take it for credit.\u00a0 She had some good suggestions too, such as making a virtual caf\u00e9 for mentees to talk to each other and identifying which students would really need an Aboriginal mentor versus those that would be ok with a non-Aboriginal mentor.<\/p>\n
After that we drove to Cranbrook to wait for our flight.\u00a0 Little did we know that we\u2019d be chatting in Aq\u2019am (St. Mary\u2019s Band in Cranbrook) for most of the day and getting the Aq\u2019am Education Director on board too.\u00a0 It all started with a drop-in visit to Nigel (our co-worker on another project).\u00a0 We were reminiscing about the music workshop we planned a few years ago and he asked us to follow him to the basement of the band office, where he gave us a copy of a totally AWESOME CD called \u201cKtunaxa Pop\u201d \u2013 a collection of techno kids songs sung in in Ktunaxa<\/em> that they\u2019ve been using in the daycare.\u00a0 Anyways, I digress, but digression is how we got things done this trip!\u00a0 That\u2019s when we met the education director who we chatted with about first the CD, then eMentoring.\u00a0 Next thing we know, she\u2019s inviting us into her office and figuring out how to bring eMentoring to their school.\u00a0 Couldn\u2019t have planned that!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0 We had a chance to visit the beautiful Kootenays on May 22-25.\u00a0 Overall, a really productive trip! Went into it thinking we weren\u2019t organized enough and hadn\u2019t planned enough meetings.\u00a0 But as it turned out we got more accomplished than we imagined.\u00a0 The main purpose of our trip was to meet with members of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5988,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-268","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ementoring\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ementoring\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ementoring\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ementoring\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5988"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ementoring\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=268"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ementoring\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":468,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ementoring\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268\/revisions\/468"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ementoring\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ementoring\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=268"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ementoring\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}