Pedagogical Encounters with Gardens in Tkaronto: Thinking with Anticolonial Possibilities

• In Event: Refiguring Presences in Garden-Based Education

Abstract

Purpose: Tkaronto, Aterón:to, Chi-Odena, is a place many Indigenous communities have called home for millennia. Some translations attribute the meaning of Tkaronto as “the place of the submerged tree or trees,” “abundance, or a place of plenty in Wendat” and “meeting place” (Loft, 2021, p. 21, as cited in author, 2023a). These are place stories which inform our thinking on the possibilities for urban gardening to be pedagogical places and spaces that disrupt settler colonial and anti-Black land relations. Focusing on the city of Tkaronto, we draw from our embodied experiences with urban farming/gardening and from research dialogues with Black families in Tkaronto. In particular, we are interested in how gardening can be a space to learn with and enact Black, Indigenous and Black-Indigenous food sovereignty while learning Tkaronto as an Indigenous and Black place. Foregrounding more-then-human relationality, we discuss how our pedagogical and research experiences with gardening and farming to growing food and medicines can be important participatory practices for being with the land in anti-colonial ways.

Theoretical Frameworks: We ground our work on the anticolonial potentials of urban gardening by thinking with theoretical concepts from Black ecologies and Indigenous land education. By making visible insurgent, rebellious land knowledges and practices, while attending to past-present histories of land dispossession, Black ecologies offer possibilities to (re)story Black land relations in affirmative ways (Moulton & Salo, 2022, Authors, 2024). Indigenous land education brings attention to practices that center situated Indigenous onto-epistemologies, undoing practices that keep settler colonial relations in place, including those that center neoliberal multiculturalism (Lees, Tropp Laman, & Calderón, 2021; Tuck, McKenzie, & McCoy, 2014).

Modes of Inquiry: Thinking with a methodology of refiguring presences (Authors, 2016a), we (re)story garden place(s) in non-anthropocentric ways; telling and listening for human and more-than-human stories. For instance, we share gardening and garden stories that center seeds, plants, and animals as relations and that disrupt erasures of Black and Indigenous land relations in the city.

Data Sources: Our research intends to disrupt normative understandings of gardens and farms that hold in place colonial ways of relating to land. We do this through disruptive (re)storying approaches where we bring our own Tkaronto gardening visual and narrative stories together with stories of Black urban ecologies from our research with Toronto families. In refiguring what is considered present in Tkaronto gardening with anticolonial intent, we not only diffract these stories through each other, we also diffract them through selected Black and Indigenous Tkaronto geographies.

Substantiated conclusions: Black ecologies and Indigenous land education hold possibilities for gardening research, practices and pedagogies that presence Black, Indigenous and Black-Indigenous land relations and that refuse anti-Black and settler colonial land relations.

Scholarly significance: The significance of this work is discussed in relation to what it offers for possibilities of doing environmental education in gardens in anticolonial ways. We also situate the significance of this work within the urgency of climate change education that disrupts human supremacy and foregrounds more-than-human relationality.

Authors

• Kaitlin Rizarri, University of Toronto - OISE

• Sumia Ali, University of Toronto - OISE

• Fikile Nxumalo, University of Toronto - OISE