Where is here?

topos logosethosgeos

pathosmythos

Who am I that I am here?Who are you that you are here?Who are we that we are here?

Where are you from?

Otsito’totsahpiwa

…places possess a marked capacity for triggering acts of self-reflection, inspiring thoughts about who one presently is, or memories of who one used to be, or musings on who one might become. And that is not all. Place-based thoughts about the self lead commonly to thoughts of other things - other places, other people, other times, whole networks of associations that ramify unaccountably within the expanding spheres of awareness that they themselves engender. The experience of sensing places, then, is thus both roundly reciprocal and incorrigibly dynamic… When places are actively sensed, the physical landscape becomes wedded to the landscape of the mind, to the roving imagination, and where the mind may lead is anybody's guess.

Basso, p. 55

Wisdom sits in places. It's like water that never dries up. You need to drink water to stay alive, don't you? Well, you also need to drink from places. You must remember everything about them. You must learn their names. You must remember what happened at them long ago. You must think about it and keep on thinking about it. Then your mind will become smoother and smoother. Then you will see danger before it happens. You will walk a long way and live a long time. You will be wise. People will respect you.

Dudley Patterson, quoted in Basso, p. 70

Edmonton Pentimento

‘Straightening’ the Prairies

Colonial Frontier LogicsThe symbolic power of the single straight story

Colonial Frontier LogicsThe symbolic power of the single straight story

The utopia of open spaces…hides ingenously a brutal form of subordination. The North American terrain can be imagined as empty only by willfully ignoring the existence of the Native Americans—or really conceiving as a different order of human being, as subhuman, part of the natural environment…the Native Americans could not be integrated into the expansive movement of the frontier as part of the constitutional tendency; rather, they had to be excluded from the terrain to open its spaces and make expansion possible.

Hardt and Negri, p. 169-70

The white Canadian looks at the Indian. The Indian is Other and therefore alien. But the Indian is indigenous and cannot be alien. So the Canadian must be alien. But how can the Canadian be alien within Canada?

There are only two possible answers. The white culture can attempt to incorporate the other, specifically through beaded moccasins and names like Mohawk Motors, or with more sophistication, through the novels of Rudy Wiebe. Conversely, the white culture may reject the indigene: ‘This country really began with the arrival of the whites.’

Goldie, p. 234

Placelessness as Curriculum and Pedagogy

It is inconceivable to me that an ethical relationship to land can exist without love, respect, and admiration for the land, and a high regard for its value. . . . The most serious obstacle impeding the evolution of a land ethic is the fact that our educational and economic system is headed away from, rather than toward, an intense consciousness of land. Leopold, p. 223

In place of actual experience with the phenomenal world, educators are handed, and largely accept, the mandates of a standardized, “placeless” curriculum and settle for the abstractions and simulations of classroom learning. Though it is true that much significant and beneficial learning can happen here, what is most striking about the classroom as a learning technology is how much it limits, devalues, and distorts local geographical experience. Gruenewald, p. 8

Resident or Inhabitant?

A resident is a temporary occupant, putting down few roots and investing little, knowing little, and perhaps caring little for the immediate locale beyond its ability to gratify. As both a cause and effect of displacement, the resident lives in an indoor world of office building and shopping mall, automobile, apartment, and suburban house and watches as much as four hours of television each day. The inhabitant, in contrast, “dwells” . . . in an intimate, organic, and mutually nurturing relationship with a place. Good inhabitance is an art requiring detailed knowledge of a place, the capacity for observation, and a sense of care and rootedness…

A resident can reside almost anywhere that provides an income. Inhabitants bear the marks of their places…

Orr, p. 130

Braiding Indigenous MétissageAu

tobi

ogra

phic

al Te

xts • Aoksisowaato’p

• Sacred sites and place-stories

Offi

cial

Can

adia

n Hi

stor

ies • Nation and

Nationality• Civilization

Indi

geno

us H

istor

ies • Papamihaw

asiniy

‘Communication is gonna get out of place.’

paskwaw mostos-awasis

John McDougall

Victoria College

ReferencesBasso, K. (1996). Wisdom sits in places: Landscape and language among the Western Apache. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Chambers, C. (1998). A topography for Canadian curriculum theory. Canadian journal of education, 24(2), 137-150.

Goldie, T. (1995). The representation of the indigene. In B. Ashcroft, G. Griffiths & H. Tiffin (Eds.). The post-colonial studies reader. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 232-236.

Gruenewald, D. A. (2003). The best of both worlds: A critical pedagogy of place. Educational researcher, 32(4), 3-12.

Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2009). Empire. Harvard University Press.

Leopold, A. (1968). A sand county almanac. Oxford, UK: Oxford UniversityPress. (Original work published 1949)

Orr, D. (1992). Ecological literacy. Albany: State University of New York Press.