Learning from Place

This week we read an article which was written by Jean P. Restoule, Sheila Gruner, and Edmund Metatawabin titled “Learning from Place: A Return to Traditional Mushkegowuk Ways of Knowing” speaks of the processes decolonization and re-inhabitation, especially in the context of land. 

How do people live on land? How did people ever figure out to live on the land for example of Saskatchewan? Beats me, its so cold out there! But people did, but then colonizers took a lot of that knowledge away from the people and so now how did they get back to it and re-inhabitate what was their land and way of life?

One way discussed in this article is to bring people together “bringing generations of community members together on the land led to the reclamation of culture and Indigenous knowledge and built greater community resistance to external forms of economic exploitation and development” (68) By standing together they become a larger body and an empowered body. After generations of being told their way of living is wrong this is a way to have people each other what is right and confirm it with one another and have a stronger voice to be recognized. 

Decolonization cab be seen as an act of resistance rather than a reclamation of culture and integrating it within society today.  “decolonization as an act of resistance must not be limited to rejecting and transforming dominant ideas; it also depends on recovering and renewing traditional, non-commodified cultural patterns such as mentoring and inter-generational relationships” (Restoule et al. 74). To think we need to completely change society today is a bogus idea but yet some people view reclamation as just that.  

When putting the place in teaching I think this needs to be done for not just First Nations and Indigenous peoples but for all people who have been marginalized by the 'west'. The curriculum for grade 10-12, for example, is very outdates with doing the curriculum critique it made it clear to me that there is problem in the curriculum of our school, hidden and null and formally written curriculum in regards to newcomer students.  Immigrant students often have viewed social studies, which often silences the histories of non-European regions and reinforces narrowly-defined national citizenship, as meaningless and irrelevant to their lives. I think we need to talk a lot more about place and think about place when teaching. Recognize who's place is this we are teaching now. What land are we on? Who has lived on this land? Who is now living on this land how did they get here? What was the place this person is from? Place is so relevant. By acknowledging place, in all of these contexts when teaching, students will become empowered and they too will have a better understanding of place, their place and our place. This will allow space for students to be proud and know their place and also everyone's place 

Restoule, Jean-Paul, et al. “Learning from Place: A Return to Traditional Mushkegowuk Ways of Knowing”. Canadian Journal of Education, vol. 36, no. 2, 2013, pp. 68-86.