The Principal understands a firm grounding in tradition and culture is important to the development of a healthy school community and a key to student success.
TARGET 1: Culture-Based Education Program 
Culture-based Education has been one of the key priorities that the school has been working on for many years. Students have opportunities to go out on the land numerous times during the year – Fall and Spring Community Hunts, setting nets and harvesting and cleaning fish, plant identification, setting snares and preparing furs, spring canoe trip and trapping, berry picking, preparing traditional foods like beery jams, dry fish and dry meat, marrow, scraping and tanning caribou hides…..
We work closely with the community to plan and fund on the land activities. Community members are pleased with this aspect of our programming. What needs to happen is for local staff to take more initiative to ensure the school reflects the local culture. To ensure the actual functioning of the school reflects the culture, several things need to be in place:
1. Staff need to be aware of and model the Dene Laws at all times in their work and interactions with students.
2. The school building needs to reflect more of the language and craft, the history and traditions of the Dene people.
3. More classrooms need to welcome local resource people and elders to speak to students, tell stories, discuss history and traditional ways, and share their knowledge of current community issues which would link to many aspects of the ELA, Northern Studies, Social Studies and Experiential Science curriculum. This would support relevant project-based learning and more authentic assessment.
Authentic assessment of students is an integral part of our on the land projects, and we ensure that they are aware of the learning objectives of the trip. Students are asked to document their experiences in a variety of ways including writing journals, digital photography and video, gathering information on specific subjects, and interviewing participants to share this information through stories, photo essays or projects with other students and community members. We also ask students to evaluate how well the traditional Instructors and Hunters worked with them and taught them; and ask the community resource people to evaluate the students that they worked with – how well did they master their skills, did they work hard, were they respectful. I attach several of the rubrics that have been used:
Artillery Lake student Eval RUBRIC March 2013 
ARtillery Lake Trad Instr Eval Rubric Mar 2013
We generated a Culture Year Plan for the school that helps everyone plan seasonal activities and use the resources and ideas in the Dene Kede. We look at this as an evolving project which eventually will have many unit plans, resources and lesson ideas linked to it that integrate culture, language and the core curriculum in an engaging and challenging way.
CULTURE Year Plan Aboriginal Language & Culture Lutsel K 2012-13
There is great potential to use the technology that we have at the school to preserve and teach the culture and language. The students used some of their video interviews and photographs from their trip to Artillery Lake this year for the Heritage Fair Projects. This is an excellent way for students to learn technology skills and presentation skills, and have ownership and pride in the cultural information they are sharing.
There is an excellent project underway at Wildlife to digitize all the archive photos held there, there are so many language resources available from the Board and online, there are so many excellent, authentic projects that the students could do that involve recording and preserving the language and culture in the community using technology – that it is a shame to see it not being used. Elder interviews on digital recorders or videos, recording traditional skills, exploring the many environmental and community issues that are currently before the LKDFN could really make the curriculum more relevant.