Huston – Rising Indigenous Voices

In 2019, I founded Rising Indigenous Voices in early learning. The background to this mentorship group was my 15 years work with Oshki-Pimache-O-Win in Thunder Bay supporting early childhood educators coming from remote communities and obtaining their early childhood diplomas at a First Nation college. And as I was transitioning into a Master’s program and leaving my role as a coordinator and faculty, we talked about how we could carry on our work and to how many of the educators were still in contact with me as the coordinator long after they graduated for different resources and supports. So, our relationships had been building over ten years, plus. And so, we decided as a group through an Indigenous ECE leadership program that we also co-developed later on to leave with a mentorship program. We weren’t sure what that would look like, so we decided it would sit in a social media platform, Facebook, and we would be able to continue to share and support each other with upcoming funding, policy initiatives, community visions that the educators may be having, and so that we could all weigh-in and still continue our conversations. And so, this has been really successful. We have over 100 Indigenous Anishinaabe Early Childhood Educators within that group. Not all of the educators are in relation to each other, but they all are in relation to me as their coordinator at one point. And they have used this space in a really creative way. Sometimes we’ll prompt each other through sharing some of the language, the sayings in our languages, even know that they’re all Anishinaabe Early Childhood Educators in Northwestern Ontario, there’s 3 to 4 dialects that are spoken amongst us. So, we’ll share our dialect. We’ll bring in upcoming professional development to share with each other. I will also invite them to participate in work that I’ve been doing. They co-author a lot of publications with me. We’re still working on a lot of that. I will invite who is interested to maybe co-present at a conference. All of my teachings, a lot of my teachings, have come from those educators in supporting me, in knowing how to navigate mainstream Western EC curriculum and Indigenizing and bringing forward some of their teachings while supporting them as a coordinator in field practicum. That was really informative to me, and it’s a way of giving back to the educators, ensuring that their opportunities are still always available to them. And I like to ensure that nobody is left behind. And we’re a close-knit community and we like to share our successes and support each other in that way.