I Am Not a Camper: Confessions of an Indigenous Urban Environmental Educator

• In Event: Laugh, and the World Laughs With You? The Comedic Turn in Environmental Education Research

Abstract

My earliest memory of camping is a pastiche of experiential moments, most of which remain memorable for their unpleasantness. I was probably about three years old, tenting in the woods in what seemed like northern Saskatchewan, but was probably near Prince Albert. I recall waking up in the morning unable to open my eyes, which had crusted over in the night from conjunctivitis. My mother gently wiped my eyes with water warmed over the fire until I was slowly able to peel them apart, which was when it became apparent that the drama of blindness had at least been a temporary relief from the underlying condition of being freezing cold. I learned years later that the purpose of this excursion was to harvest the …uh…herbs… planted several months earlier by her then-boyfriend and several of his intrepid buddies. Which makes me feel slightly better about both my permanent-aversion-to-camping default, and my life-long obsession with hand hygiene. So, what business does a Métis-Irish urbanite have calling herself an environmental and sustainability educator if her first question whenever anyone suggests a camping trip is, “But …, when do we get to the hotel”? How can a person who has publicly vowed never to hike Vancouver’s Grouse Grind possibly claim any relationship to outdoor or ecological education? In this paper, I share with the reader my journey into environmental and sustainability education, and how I learned that being a non-camper is not as big of an impediment as it may seem. I look to the work of Adese (2014), Ormond et al. (2015), Michell (2019), and Wildcat et al. (2014) to frame the ways in which Indigenous pedagogies, combined with environmental, place-based, and land-based pedagogies, form a matrix of criticality that reveals layer upon layer of colonial stratigraphy and shines a light on the tensions between Western and Indigenous ontologies when it comes to how we think about the land. This work has the power to disrupt Western cognitive imperialism through bringing students into relationship with the lands upon which they live, and with the people whose traditional territory that land is. To illustrate my points, I describe three pedagogical experiences (community mapping through field trips, site-specific art-making, and a video essay project) that describe what this work looks like in practice. Each discussion, rooted in supporting literature (Cajete, 1994; Donald, 2008; Graham, 2007; Michele, 2018; Seawright, 2014; Simpson, 2014), offers key strategies for engaging in environmental, ecological, and sustainability education in urban settings, and in consideration of urban sensibilities. More importantly, however, it offers insight into the importance of humour in dealing with vomiting children, navigating teenage angst over snow-white “kicks,” and the surprising benefits of accidentally ruining someone’s childhood memories.

Author

• Shannon Leddy, University of British Columbia