scholarly journals AN ARTS-BASED CURRICULUM ENCOUNTER: WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO LIVE ON THIS LAND?

2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Diane Conrad ◽  
Patricia Jagger ◽  
Victoria Bleeks ◽  
Sarah Auger

Our arts-based curriculum encounter occurred in a graduate course on arts-based research methods. For a class project we engaged in an inquiry on the question: “What does it mean to live on this land?” which we explored through various arts-based activities. The question challenged us to think deeply about our relationship with and responsibilities to the land we occupy. The inquiry raised for us and, in various ways, implicated us in issues around geographical settings, historical contexts, colonization and nationhood, relations as/with Indigenous peoples, Indigenous ways of knowing, relations with the natural environment, exploitation of the land, the environmental crisis, and our own family histories and personal journeys. In this paper, we share the reflective writings of four inquiry participants interspersed with some images from our work together.

Author(s):  
Mavis Reimer ◽  
Clare Bradford ◽  
Heather Snell

This chapter focuses on the juvenile fiction of the British settler colonies to 1950, and considers how writers both take up forms familiar to them from British literature and revise these forms in the attempt to account for the specific geography, politics, and cultures of their places. It is during this time that the heroics associated with building the empire had taken hold of British cultural and literary imaginations. Repeatedly, the juvenile fiction of settler colonies returns to the question of the relations between settlers and Indigenous inhabitants—sometimes respecting the power of Indigenous knowledge and traditions; often expressing the conviction of natural British superiority to Indigenous ways of knowing and living; always revealing, whether overtly or covertly, the haunting of the stories of settler cultures by the displacement of Indigenous peoples on whose land those cultures are founded.


FACETS ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 839-869
Author(s):  
◽  
Albert Marshall ◽  
Karen F. Beazley ◽  
Jessica Hum ◽  
shalan joudry ◽  
...  

Precipitous declines in biodiversity threaten planetary boundaries, requiring transformative changes to conservation. Colonial systems have decimated species and ecosystems and dispossessed Indigenous Peoples of their rights, territories, and livelihoods. Despite these challenges, Indigenous-governed lands retain a large proportion of biodiversity-rich landscapes. Indigenous Peoples have stewarded the land in ways that support people and nature in respectful relationship. Biodiversity conservation and resurgence of Indigenous autonomies are mutually compatible aims. To work towards these aims requires significant transformation in conservation and re-Indigenization. Key to both are systems that value people and nature in all their diversity and relationships. This paper introduces Indigenous principles for re-Indigenizing conservation: ( i) embracing Indigenous worldviews of ecologies and M’sɨt No’kmaq, ( ii) learning from Indigenous languages of the land, ( iii) Natural laws and Netukulimk, ( iv) correct relationships, ( v) total reflection and truth, ( vi) Etuaptmumk—“two-eyed seeing,” and “strong like two people”, and ( vii) “story-telling/story-listening”. Although the principles derive primarily from a Mi’kmaw worldview, many are common to diverse Indigenous ways of knowing. Achieving the massive effort required for biodiversity conservation in Canada will entail transformations in worldviews and ways of thinking and bold, proactive actions, not solely as means but as ongoing imperatives.


2013 ◽  
Vol 103 (12) ◽  
pp. 2185-2192 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vanessa W. Simonds ◽  
Suzanne Christopher

2018 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 241-273
Author(s):  
Paige Raibmon

AbstractThis paper interrogates the specific workings and stakes of slow violence on Indigenous ground. It argues that despite similarities with other environmental justice struggles, Indigenous ones are fundamentally distinct because of Indigenous peoples' unique relationship to the polluted or damaged entity, to the state, and to capital. It draws from Indigenous studies, history, anthropology, geography, sensory studies, and STS, to present results from research with the Mowachaht Muchalaht First Nation, an Indigenous people on the west coast of British Columbia. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, this community used successive strategies to try to render its knowledge about health, environment, and authority visible to the settler state. Each strategy entailed particular configurations of risk, perceptibility, and uncertainty; each involved translation between epistemologies; and each implicated a distinct subject position for Indigenous peoples vis-à-vis the state. The community's initial anti-colonial, environmental justice campaign attempted to translate local, Indigenous ways of knowing into the epistemologies of environmental science and public health. After this strategy failed, community leaders launched another that leveraged the state's legal epistemology. This second strategy shifted the balance of risk and uncertainty such that state actors felt compelled to act. The community achieved victory, but at a price. Where the first strategy positioned the community as a self-determined, sovereign actor; the second positioned it as a ward of the state. This outcome illustrates the costs that modern states extract from Indigenous peoples who seek remedial action, and more generally, the mechanisms through which the colonial present is (re)produced.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurence Butet-Roch

Stories shape how we understand ourselves and the world around us. They inform our sense of belonging, and connect us to our past. Stories are our lives. And we are our stories. Given their undeniable weight, we ought to question what their form and content teaches us. Increasingly, stories are shared as interactive digital experiences; a reshaping that impacts their configuration, their reach and their outcome. For Indigenous peoples, who continue to resist the colonial paradigm, digital storytelling can represent a weapon of subtle yet pervasive colonialism or be a tool to talk back. Virtual Aamjiwnaang is an interactive platform that integrates Indigenous storytelling practices in recounting the lived realities of the Aamjiwnaang First Nation online. Inspired by the Two-Eyed Seeing approach, which encourages embracing multiple perspectives, and building on previous digital experiences, Virtual Aamjiwnaang proposes methods for creating digital territories that honour Indigenous ways of knowing.


2022 ◽  
pp. 107780042110668
Author(s):  
Ranjan Datta

Indigenous trans-systemic approach is a lifelong unlearning and relearning process, with no endpoint. Indigenous peoples have long called for decolonizing minds so as to support self-determination, challenge colonial practices, and value Indigenous cultural identity and pride in being Indigenous peoples. Indigenous trans-systemic approach is also a political standpoint toward valuing and revitalizing Indigenous knowledge and methodologies while weeding out colonizer biases or assumptions that have impacted Indigenous ways of knowing, doing, and being. Drawing from Indigenous Participatory Action Research (IPAR), I explained how I learned the meanings of trans-systematic knowledge from Indigenous Elders and Knowledge-keepers.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Lindsay Day ◽  
Ashlee Cunsolo ◽  
Heather Castleden ◽  
Alex Sawatzky ◽  
Debbie Martin ◽  
...  

Current challenges relating to water governance in Canada are motivating calls for approaches that implement Indigenous and Western knowledge systems together, as well as calls to form equitable partnerships with Indigenous Peoples grounded in respectful Nation-to-Nation relationships. By foregrounding the perspectives of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples, this study explores the nature and dimensions of Indigenous ways of knowing around water and examines what the inclusion of Indigenous voices, lived experience, and knowledge mean for water policy and research. Data were collected during a National Water Gathering that brought together 32 Indigenous and non-Indigenous water experts, researchers, and knowledge holders from across Canada. Data were analyzed thematically through a collaborative podcasting methodology, which also contributed to an audio-documentary podcast (www.WaterDialogues.ca).


Author(s):  
LeAnne Howe

This chapter introduces the reader to some of the Indigenous ways of knowing that inform the methodology of Native South studies. It illustrates how Choctaws and other Southeastern nations have turned to “core narratives as a survival strategy over millennia” of challenges posed both by the natural environment and by the “tired, hungry foreigners” who have sought refuge in Native homelands. Turning to the subject of weather prediction, Howe cites a range of writings—from Bienville’s correspondence of the early 1700s to Choctaw chief Ben Dwight’s inquiries among leaders of other tribal nations in the 1950s—as evidence not only that the tribes possessed a diversity of Indigenous knowledge “about long-term weather processes” but that they shared this knowledge intertribally, helping each other weather the threat of ecodisaster. The chapter faults Faulkner for Native characterizations that trade on stereotype, but also also, finds his imagination to be “driven” and “enlivened” by Native stories. His own ways of knowing were in some respects compatible with the story-centered epistemologies that are explored.


2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-47
Author(s):  
Amy Shawanda

  Baawaajige: my ideas for research are often revealed while sleeping. We as Anishinaabe People are able to connect to the spiritual realm through dreams. I will explore how Anishinaabe People utilize dreams and validate Indigenous ways of knowing without feeling shy and to be proud of where we obtain our knowledge. We need to normalize our dreams and visions within our writing. My conference presentation explores the use of dreams in academic writing as validated research. I want to privilege Indigenous research method and methodology that appears within our dreams, visions, and through fasting. How do we reference these in our academic writing? How do we provide context to such intimate moments between us and the Spirit World? How do we honour that knowledge in colonial academic papers? I will explore these questions while contributing to Indigenous research methods, and methodologies.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurence Butet-Roch

Stories shape how we understand ourselves and the world around us. They inform our sense of belonging, and connect us to our past. Stories are our lives. And we are our stories. Given their undeniable weight, we ought to question what their form and content teaches us. Increasingly, stories are shared as interactive digital experiences; a reshaping that impacts their configuration, their reach and their outcome. For Indigenous peoples, who continue to resist the colonial paradigm, digital storytelling can represent a weapon of subtle yet pervasive colonialism or be a tool to talk back. Virtual Aamjiwnaang is an interactive platform that integrates Indigenous storytelling practices in recounting the lived realities of the Aamjiwnaang First Nation online. Inspired by the Two-Eyed Seeing approach, which encourages embracing multiple perspectives, and building on previous digital experiences, Virtual Aamjiwnaang proposes methods for creating digital territories that honour Indigenous ways of knowing.


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