Author: tomhoyerwood (Page 2 of 3)

For this week’s inquiry I wanted to learn more about what sort of food is grown locally in Victoria, and where I can buy it. It’s a goal of mine to buy more locally produced food to help support local farmers and cut down on carbon emissions from transporting food.

I found a great Victoria-specific website that I wanted to share with everyone. I tried screencastify for the first time and made a video of me walking through it – hope you enjoy!

I’ve been thinking a lot about land acknowledgements over the last few weeks as most of my classes begin with a slide acknowledging the land. My first post on here was about understanding UVIC’s land acknowledgement, so I thought I would bring this full circle and research and interrogate the idea of land acknowledgements a bit further.

In the Lekwungen Tung’exw: Learning from the Land webinar by SD61, they note that we do land acknowledgements for the following reasons:

• Opportunity to recognize our connections and responsibilities to one another
• Provides the foundation to rebuild trusting relationships
• Welcomes are meant to greet visitors with a good mind, heart and feeling

I think these are great reasons, and am impressed with how widespread land acknowledgements are these days, compared to when I was in school. In Toronto, where I was last living, each day began with a land acknowledgement in all of the public schools over the PA system. At the same time, I am wary of how easy it has become to not think about the words that we’re saying or hearing in a land acknowledgement. So often it can feel like a box to tick, another housekeeping item following “the bathrooms are behind you on the left.” Worse still, it can feel as though land acknowledgements aren’t exactly accomplishing all that much. At best they’re a reminder of something we should already know. At worst, they’re making us feel as though we’ve done something when we really haven’t done anything at all.

There is a fantastic article on the New Yorker entitled “Canada’s Impossible Land Acknowledgement.” In it, the author writes:

“The hypocrisy of the country can be so startling exactly because we repeat our good intentions so insistently. We say, over and over, that we want desperately to atone for a crime while we’re still in the middle of committing it.”

This is the challenge with being a settler and reading a standard land acknowledgement; without action it can feel like hypocrisy. I am grateful to have been in circles before where people are strongly encouraged to take land acknowledgements a step further, and it was fantastic to experience that.

Shana Dion, the Associate Dean of First Nations, Metis, and Inuit Students at the UofA notes that  land acknowledgements are “…not meant to be set language. It’s built to be fluid enough so it resonates within yourself when your saying it, so that its not just words you’re reading from a script, but that it comes more from the heart.”

This is what I believe is the next step of land acknowledgements. They have successfully made their way at the beginning of most gatherings, but now it’s time to find ways to push the envelope. In classrooms, I don’t imagine it’s realistic to do an in-depth land acknowledgement every class, but it is something that I imagine you can integrate regularly. Perhaps weekly, and on particular occasions, such as Orange Shirt Day / Week.

So how might we “level up” our land acknowledgements as educators with our students? The below information has been pulled from what I learned from a good friend and Metis artist and activist Talitha Tolles, as well as from an Anti-Oppression workshop I did with Rania El Mugammar, as well a some of my own research and thinking since.

THE FIVE STEPS

Step 1: Reflection

The first step before doing a land acknowledgement that is so often skipped is reflection. Ask yourself why you’re doing it? What is the context? What is the history of the land you’re on and you’re territory?

Step 2: Acknowledgement

Once you’ve done the thinking you need to, your land acknowledgement may include something similar to the traditional acknowledgement that you’ve seen (e.g. “we’re on the traditional territory of the Lekwungen speaking peoples.”) But rather than the last step, this is merely a component.

Step 3: Self-Location / Relationship

Land Acknowledgements should be personalized. How do you come to this land? What is your history / background? For instance I may identify myself as a settler who was unaware of the Indigenous history of the place I grew up, and the Indigenous people that lived on it. Doing this not only forces you to reflect and locate yourself in relation to the issues you’re about to speak to, but it encourages your students to do the same. 

Step 4: Context / Connection to Today’s Issues

Acknowledging a historical relationship to the land, and perhaps a historical wrong-doing can numb the feeling that anything needs to happen today. There are tons of Indigenous movements, struggles, and things to celebrate, so take this opportunity to highlight them to contextualize the land acknowledgement, and highlight the present day realities.

Step 5: Call to Action

Perhaps the most challenging, but maybe the most meaningful, is rooting our land acknowledgements in a call to action. What is something that your students can do (either now, or later), to advance reconciliation in their community? So often people feel paralyzed or unclear about how to actually advance reconciliation, so why not support them in this? By pointing people to solutions, a land acknowledgement can move beyond the theoretical or symbolic, and help people feel that they are taking tangible steps in the right direction. This could look a thousand ways including:

1. Pointing them to a petition to sign or an upcoming protest or march
2. Facilitating the learning of a word in a local Indigenous language
3. Teaching them something about Indigenous history, culture, or issues that they may not have known before
4. Facilitating their own critical reflection to the Land and Indigenous nations
5. Watch a video or listen to a podcast clip of an Indigenous person to center Indigenous voices

That might seem like a whole lot of work compared to the more traditional land acknowledgement, and in many ways it is. At the same time, the final product still might not be more than 4 or 5 sentences, and the steps can of course be tailored, combined, and reimagined to best suit your context.

SOME EXAMPLES / OTHER IDEAS

One of my favourite land acknowledgements was at my wedding. My good friend Holly, who was officiating, called upon people to close their eyes, and use their senses to connect to the Land around them and the people who had cared for that land throughout history. It didn’t have all of the above 5 steps, but it did have most of them, and many people were talking about the impact it had on them afterwards.

In a class I had at UofT, Professor Hilary Inwood would take the first 10 minutes to do a land acknowledgement by centering an Indigenous person’s voice and facilitating a reflection or discussion. For instance, we saw a land acknowledgement done by an Indigenous person, a poem, and an interview with a young Indigenous water activist Autumn Peltier.

In a workshop I did over the course of many weekends, the facilitators built on previous land acknowledgements each time. For instance we wrote a poem interrogating our own positionality in week one, which we would return to and use as a launching point in future weeks. In the final week, we were challenged to commit to and share a tangible action that we would take in our lives. In this way, we were able to grapple with the complexities of the topic in more depth,  which I think could work fantastically in a classroom setting.

If you’re looking to experience a few more ideas, there’s a few ones where you can actually hear the facilitator, Nadia Chaney give the acknowledgement here. Her examples include a Meditation on Land, a history of colonization as a lived reality, and a group poem. Nadia is a fantastic facilitator who uses the creative arts to help enrich reflection and facilitate empowerment.

Having spent the last four weeks investigating the Indigenous sides of Victoria that I knew very little about, I decided to spend this week reflecting and researching more intentionally on how to incorporate these learnings into the classroom.

To start, I watched a webinar put on by SD61 entitled Lekwungen Tung’exw: Learning from the Land. In it, I learned more about land acknowledgements, Land-based learning, and the importance of centering these perspectives in the classroom. Land-based learning is an Indigenous principle of education that holds that learning should happen on the Land. More than that though, it brings attention to the ways we can learn from the land (note that Land here refers to the entire natural world). The idea that we can learn from the land reflects the humility of traditional Indigenous value systems, and points to a way forward in which we understand ourselves as part of a complex whole, rather than as separate. I hope to incorporate this idea of humility and Land-based learning in my classroom by getting my students out of the classroom, observing the world around them, and reflecting on their relationships to what is around them. I think modeling humility and curiosity is a critical first step, so it is something I know I must commit to in my life; you can’t just step into the classroom and think you can fake it.

I also think an important aspect of decolonization and reconciliation in education is reframing the widely told victim narrative around Indigenous issues. There’s a tension here of course; we should acknowledge the past and current injustices that are occurring, yet we must also center and incorporate Indigenous resilience and strength. Taking this approach helps to acknowledge the agency and actions that Indigenous nations like the Lekwungen and WSANEC have been taking for centuries against colonial encroachment. For this, I will draw on some of the examples in my last post of Indigenous resurgence, as well as look for historical examples of resistance. For instance, I know that many Indigenous families resisted sending their children to residential schools, and continued to practice Potlaches even after they were banned.

Another part of this is centering Indigenous culture, values, and communities in the classroom. It was powerful for me to begin to understand the ways Indigenous values such as collectivity, humility, and relationship to the land, reframes world views and provide an alternative to the extractive western models that much of our world operates on. By introducing students to alternative ways of thinking, we can advance more sustainable and compassionate practices. In a previous University class on Indigenous Knowledge for instance, my teacher, Professor Wemwigwans would devote time at the beginning of the class for each of us to share how we were doing; this action helped affirm our value as whole people and not just learners, and developed a shared empathy and responsibility in that class. A challenging component of this for me as a settler however, is to not romanticize or stereotype Indigenous cultures; the differences with Western worldviews may be noticeable on the whole, but there is of course plenty of diversity, especially in today’s world. I wouldn’t want to alienate any Indigenous students who didn’t feel that they related to these ideas I was sharing.

A final tension I have been grappling with is the idea of grouping all Indigenous cultures together under a single umbrella to highlight the similarities vs. focusing specifically on individual nations to acknowledge the diversities and differences. In my previous posts, I was specific about the Lekwungen and WSANEC nations that I was researching, because I wanted to better understand the place-specific culture and history of Victoria and Saanich. At the same time, there may be times when it is appropriate to use the umbrella term “Indigenous” in the classroom. This is something I would like to research and reflect on more.

If anyone wants resources for integrating Indigenous principles of learning in the classroom, first check out the “First Peoples Principles of Learning” document from the FNESC. Then I’d recommend reading htrough this great resources called “Weaving Ways of Knowing,” that provides more details and examples for how this could actually look in the classroom. They even have some example videos for inspiration, like the one below.

And for a Victoria-specific example, check out this unit outline by a teacher for Victoria High School, Anne Tenning. Let me know if you have any recommendations that I should check out!