Our class this week was outdoors again. At Cottonwood Island Park we did some curriculum exploring and lesson planning. The primary focus was to plan a place-based learning activity that centres the land as a teacher which ties in to our assigned reading Decolonization is not a metaphor. This article focuses on the need to do more than just say the right things. The point of decolonizing isn’t to wipe away guilt but to value, prioritize, and protect the autochthonous was of knowing and being.

There is much to be said for the authors’ point that “decolonization is not accountable to settlers, or settler futurity,” but I also think that there room for pragmatic thinking which would consider the settlers as having a voice in how this moves forward. The authors suggest that reconciliation is not their goal. They differentiate reconciliation from decolonization which, to me, is a difficult separation to make. I get that there is a need for uncomfortable feelings for the colonizers, and I also think that they will not be willing to go there if they do not also have conversations about what the result of decolonization will look like for them. So, while I really appreciate the sentiment of the futility of symbolic gestures and our responsibility to do more, I also think that there is a need to approach this with a genuine effort of equal dialogue on both sides which means recognizing the futures of all parties.

The aspect that I appreciated from the article was around the metaphorical usage of reconciliation/decolonization words and phrases which are used to pacify the settler community without leading to changes in actions or treatments of the Indigenous people. This has been a big theme of our program so far. We can say that we are teaching about Indigenous people to satisfy curricular requirements and shoehorn Indigenous principles into our already fully-formed western lessons, and when we do that we may satisfy our own settler-guilt without actually changing our practices. That isn’t reconciling in good faith. To decolonize our education system is to create lessons that centre the Indigenous ways of knowing, and to build teaching practices that centre land-based, experiential, and relational learning as well as teaching the history and cultural knowledge, when granted permission.

So, the lesson planning the happened this week was informed by these ideas of good-faith reconciliation. My group created a grade 1 math lesson on patterns where the students would collect leaves and sort them based on things they noticed about the leaves. They would learn from the land concepts of similarities and differences among living things, and they would be able to experience their learning with hands-on math. Our goal wasn’t to satisfy our teacher-guilt; rather, we sought to focus on Indigenous principles of learning to create a land-based lesson.