Shirley Fontaine is manager of educational development for the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs.
Beardy, Fontaine and eight other "senior" aboriginal educators took part in a groundbreaking trip to Israel July 28 to August 7: a B'nai Brith Canada League for Human Rights Holocaust and Hope mission to the Jewish state.
B'nai Brith Canada officials organized the trip in response to widely-reported anti-Semitic comments David Ahenakew, a past Canadian aboriginal leader, made last December.
The mission was intended to help participants understand, more fully, what the Jews went through during the Holocaust. Other goals included giving them a better understanding of Jewish history and Jews' historical connection to the land of Israel.
"I was responsible for finding the aboriginal educators," Alan Yusim, Winnipeg-based executive director of that organization's Midwest Region, said last week of the mission, the first of its kind in the 15-year history of those trips.
Eight were from Manitoba, Yusim's home turf.
The group visited Yad Vashem, Israel's main Holocaust museum complex, Massada, other museums focusing on the Nazi genocide and Jewish history, and several Jewish, Christian and Muslim religious sites.
"It really opened my eyes," Beardy, also a longtime educator, said of the trip. "I always heard about the Holocaust but I never understood what it was. Now I have a better understanding."
Like others on the mission, he also saw parallels between persecution of the Jews and of Canadian aboriginals.
"The thing that really blew my mind was what happened during the Holocaust," Beardy added.
A resident of the reserve at Split Lake, Manitoba, northeast of Thompson, he plans to develop a slide-show-like "Power Point" presentation, sharing his experiences on the mission with "my family, friends, and parishioners".
Fontaine, a senior educational administrator for the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, said "a lot" of mission participants could "really relate to the experience of the Jewish people."
"A lot of our people are concerned about the fact that we have very little land in Canada," she said. "We heard about the Jewish struggle to keep the land base they have."
Seeing Yad Vashem and other museums memorializing the Holocaust also inspired Fontaine and others on the trip to push for development of a "similar museum for our people."
She plans to invite speakers on the Holocaust to address other Manitoba First Nations teachers, among other projects.
Sharon McKay, director of education and training for the Keewatin Tribal Council in Thompson, agreed that Israelis and Jews have done an impressive job, documenting and showcasing their history, and unearthing it through archeological digs. 
"Their history is right in front of them, rather than just learning about it through stories."
The friendliness Israelis showed them also impressed McKay and other participants.
"Sometimes we bumped into kids," she said. "They were very curious about us."
Matthew Garrick, a longtime school administrator, now a computer and languages arts teacher at Cross Lake, west of Thompson, chuckled that in one place, merchants mistook the visiting aboriginals for "Mexicans or Spanish. They started speaking to us in Spanish."
He plans to use pictures he took and knowledge he gained to have his students do research about the Holocaust and Jewish history on the Internet, storywriting and other projects.
Ruth Klein, national director of B'nai Brith Canada's League for Human Rights, said the mission's "main accomplishment" was "establishing ties" between Canadian aboriginals and Jews that will continue.
"They'll be looking for ways, with our help, to include material on the Holocaust in their curriculums."
B'nai Brith Canada officials are overseeing the making of a documentary about the trip. They also plan to visit reserves, to see and hear about the conditions aboriginal people live in.
"It's something we've wanted to do for a long time," Klein said. "There may be some followup in Manitoba in the not-too-distant future."
As for Ahenakew's public statements last December, when he praised Hitler for killing 6 million Jews, Klein said many of the mission participants came to her "separately", and told her Ahenakew "doesn't speak for us".
Edwin Jebb, director of education for the Opaskwayak Educational Authority, near The Pas, summed up the attitudes of the aborginals on the trip.
"We need friends like the Jewish people," he told The Jewish Post & News. "We don't need enemies."
Other participants jokingly agreed "it will be my job to take our Israeli tour guide icefishing up here, in 30 below weather," Jebb added.
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