Aoksisowaato’p: Place and Story as Organic Curriculum

• In Event: Canadian Association for the Study of Indigenous Education (CASIE): Responding to the Challenge of Teaching, Learning, and Researching From Indigenous Standpoints

Abstract

Over the past few years, I have been exploring the ways in which Cree and Blackfoot peoples ‘map’ places in their territories through a particular form of topographical storywork. As a teacher educator, I have been sharing these places and stories with students in the hope of inspiring an organic experience with curriculum that will help them understand Indigenous presence more meaningfully. In this session, I will share insights gained from such work and the possibilities it holds for imagining curricular and pedagogical renewal inspired by Indigenous philosophies and ways of knowing.

For most Aboriginal peoples indigenous to the Prairies, this organic curriculum arises from deep relationships with significant places in the cultural landscape that are mapped through oral histories. The people come to know the land and identify with significant places through the stories. The place-stories, as mnemonic triggers, locate and narrate the events of the land called home.

Such Indigenous place-stories have the potential to provoke an important question: What does it mean to live on the land that is now called Canada? A place-story, as oral tradition, “anchors history to place, but it also challenges our notion of what a place actually is” (Cruikshank, 1994, p. 413, italics original). Stories that Indigenous people tell about significant public places in Canada can trouble historic myths and prompt Canadians to question the depth of their understanding of the familiar places that they call home. Borrows (2000) argues that Aboriginal people have unique relationships to their traditional lands and “[m]any Aboriginal groups have well-developed notions in their philosophies and practices about how to recognize the land as citizen” (p. 332). He calls for an Aboriginal form of citizenship to be articulated, one that is attentive to the land and the stories associated with it. Aboriginal citizenship, rather than being isolated as a concern exclusive to Aboriginal people, “must be extended to encompass other people from around the world who have come to live on our land” (p. 329). Aboriginal people have a responsibility to teach others the place-stories as a way to reclaim citizenship and repatriate the land. Little Bear (2000) notes that this affiliation with place-stories among Aboriginal people stems from ways of knowing focused on the relationship to the Earth as the place “where the continuous and/or repetitive process of creation occurs. It is on the Earth that cycles, phases, patterns—in other words, the constant motion or flux—can be observed” (p. 78).

In the context of mainstream Canadian education, place-stories can help people reread and reframe their understandings of Canadian history. When they come to comprehend ongoing Indigenous presence through place-stories, the story of the nation becomes layered and relational, and the perceived colonial divides are brought into question. Thus, consciousness of places is fundamental to deep social and historical understanding. As such, such consciousness can also deeply inform curricular and pedagogical explorations that strive to take seriously Indigenous philosophies and ways of knowing.

Author

• Dwayne Donald, University of Alberta