A pedagogy of the land: Dreams of respectful relations

McGill Journal of Education, Fall 2002 by Celia Haig-Brown, Kaaren Dannenmann

ABSTRACT. This article arises out of a partnership between an aboriginal community member and a university faculty member whose relational focus is the development of a pedagogy of the land within the Indigenous Knowledge Instructors Program. (Re)creating traditional knowledge with others in contemporary contexts, as their birthright, is the goal of the program. We struggle to communicate and locate this work within an appropriate `community.' Dreaming of respectful relations, we are committed to thinking through the complexity of such a quest.

UNE PEDAGOGIE DE LA TERRE : RAVES DE RELATIONS RESPECTUEUSES

RESUME. Cet article est le fruit d'un partenariat Etabli entre le membre d'une communaute autochtone et une universitaire dont l'axe relationnel est l'elaboration d'une pedagogie de la terre dans le cadre du Programme de charges de cours sur le savoir autochtone. L'objectif de ce programme est de (re)creer des connaissances traditionnelles avec d'autres dans un contexte contemporain comme leur droit de naissance. Nous nous efforcons de transmettre et de situer ces travaux dans une communaute qui s'y prete. Revant de relations respectueuses, nous avons pris l'engagement de reflechir a la complexite d'une telle quete.

... my aim [is] to struggle with the Thing itself which is at stake, namely, the (im)possibilities of radical political thought and practice today. (Slavoj Zizek, p. 90)

In terms of current Afro-American popular music and the sources from which it has progressed - jazz, ragtime, swing, blues, boogie-woogie, and be-bop - this poem on contemporary Harlem, like be-bop, is marked by conflicting changes, sudden nuances, sharp and impudent interjections, broken rhythms, and passages sometime in the manner of the jam session, sometimes in the popular song, punctuated by the riffs, runs, breaks, and disc-tortions [sic] of the music of a community in transition. (Hughes, 1951)

"We must wait, acting: The dreaming begins. . .

The Indigenous Knowledge Instructors' Program is a central focus of our dream of respectful relations. It consists of a three part offering. Participants spend two weeks in each of two summers living on the land in the bush, located on Kaaren's traditional territory, practising an indigenous pedagogy of the land, learning through watching and doing. In the intervening seasons, students/instructors participate in a practicum, in any of a range of contexts from public schools to recreation or adult education programs, with other students who have less connection to traditional knowledge than they do. The purpose of the summer sessions is to gather together, in a very small group, people who have some traditional knowledge. In living on the land, they literally re-member - in the sense of putting it back together in the place that sustains it - the knowledge that is based in living on and with that land. There they work in relation to that knowledge, building on one another's teachings as well as considering variations in language and customary use of the knowledge in the contexts from which they come. The practicum is the opportunity to further explore knowledge indigenous to this spiritual place by re-creating understandings of it with students in other contexts. As well as the primary purpose of providing an opportunity to review existing knowledge and pass it on to others through working and living with it, the outcome of the program is a joint certificate issued by York University and the Assembly of First Nations.

While a dream is one way for people to start (and to continue) plans for passing on teachings, there is much to be done so that others may come to share and live the dreams. Out of the 'community' of Namekosiipink came a dream, a vision, a plan. As time passed, this notion of "unity" within community was called into question, pushing us to see community-making as a problem based in a need for education of ourselves and others as part of the way to accomplish the dream of a pedagogy of the land.

It all began this way: in 1996, Kaaen Dannenmann knocked on the door of the Centre for Feminist Research at York University with a plan in her hand, a plan developed with some of the other members of the community including a supportive forester. There she encountered Celia Haig-Brown, a recent white immigrant to Central Canada who had spent all her life in the West and who was looking to serve new dreams as a way into this new place, a land with which she had no history and little familiarity (although of course, all of this was happening within the nation-state called Canada).

From that moment on, the two women worked closely together on Kaaren's dream, which resonated with dreams that Celia had brought with her from earlier work in the west: to create an education program which would allow the indigenous knowledge of Namekosiipink to be passed on to others, especially the children, in ways which would keep the knowledge alive and well. As Kaaren's mother said at a community meeting, this is knowledge which must be used to be honoured and preserved. It is not knowledge which can simply be passed into a brain where it stagnates. It has more value than that. It is disrespectful to have it and not use it. As Paulo Freire said in a course Celia attended at the University of British Columbia c1984, knowledge is created and recreated in social interaction. Only as it is manifested can it be considered knowledge in any real sense.