Taught by the land: Canadian Roots Exchange shares how land-based education empowers Indigenous youth across Canada
Why It Matters
High transportation costs and urbanization are just a few barriers that keep Indigenous youth from connecting to the land. Land-based education plays a huge role in not only lowering these barriers for youth, but also teaching them how to build a relationship with the environment and protect it.
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Before the pandemic, Canadian Roots Exchange hosted land-based programs that rooted Indigenous youth in a landscape, surrounding them with its sights, sounds, and stories. In these programs, land is the educator that imbues youth with a sense of culture, history, and identity.
During a sweat lodge ceremony (a purification ceremony) which was hosted at a communal space, the youth experienced everything from beginning to end; they built the sweat lodges themselves, gathered together with the community, made the food, picked the medicines, laughed together, felt the kinship, and packed things up.
Melissa Compton, the manager of culture and wellness at Canadian Roots Exchange (CRE) explains that “land-based education is utilizing the lessons, principles, and teachings that come from nature. The philosophy in connection to teachings from the land reminds me of following the seasons. Each season there are specific tasks and responsibilities that are done that help prepare you for the next cycle.”
Some of these land-based activities include ceremonies, medicine gathering, seed saving or harvesting, rights of passage ceremonies, celebrations, and learning plant knowledges — many of which Compton organizes through CRE.
CRE is a national Indigenous youth-led organization that provides educational programs for Indigenous youth, many of which are grounded in land-based learning principles. They also have a funding program, CREation, that supports other Indigenous youth-led grassroots projects.
However, COVID-19 has made land less accessible for many, particularly in constricting land-based programs by shifting them onto online formats.
Brooke Rice, culture and wellness weaver at CRE, explains many Indigenous youth from coast-to-coast-to-coast face challenges when it comes to accessing land. Barries like high transportation costs, gentrification, and limited access to ancestral lands make it difficult for Indigenous youth to connect with the land.
Not to mention colonial barriers. “Most of our traditional homelands and hunting grounds have been taken or utilized for natural resource extractions. Most of these lands have been contaminated with hydro towers, railroads, pesticides, and highways which impacts the health of the original ecosystems,” says Rice.
Through land-based programs at CRE, the organization aims to strengthen Indigneous youth’s confidence in their cultural identity through teaching them traditional knowledge and practices that are rooted in the land.
A research paper from 2014 titled ‘Learning from the land’ reads, “if colonization is fundamentally about dispossessing Indigenous peoples from land, decolonization must involve forms of education that reconnect Indigenous peoples to land and the social relations, knowledges and languages that arise from the land.”
Future of Good sat down with Melissa Compton, the manager of culture and wellness at CRE to chat about the importance of land-based education for Indigenous youth and how their programs have been forced to adapt over the pandemic.
This conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Neha: How did COVID-19 impact the way CRE offered land-based programs?
Melissa: Everything had to be switched virtually, so that changed access, but it also changed the way that we could provide on-the-land programming. It shifted more to cultural programming versus on the land. So what it ended up turning into was more or less mailing out supplies to do crafting. We try to use as many natural materials as possible. We did sweetgrass bookmarks and that gave youth the basics of basket weaving but also [taught them] how to work with sweetgrass, what to do with it, how to treat it, and how to prepare it. So we sort of switch [the format] around but try to really be as hands on with the materials as we can.
Neha: What kind of challenges did you face in the process of adapting to this remote land-based programming?
Melissia: There are challenges with accessing natural materials. Normally when you go up to somebody’s ceremonial space, those materials are already there, or the community is able to provide them. So it shifts things around a little bit when you’re having to mail those things out. The other thing is that it’s not necessarily good protocol to be mailing sacred medicines, so there was a lot of research put into how to do these things, what was appropriate and what wasn’t.
Neha: How do you still promote youth’s personal connection to the land through virtual sessions?
Melissa: We got to be a little bit more creative with how we send the packages. When you’re in person, it’s almost like, ‘Here’s a box of swag, go through it or take what you want’, and it kind of presents itself as a chore. Whereas I think when we’re putting together a package, we’re putting in so much good intention and so much good energy into that package and I think they pick up on that. We just did a material package and there’s rabbit fur, sinew, beading needles, clover needles, (which are really hard to find), chunks of hide and vinyl, and also handwritten notes and welcome notes. So there’s still a lot of emphasis on working with sacred material.
Neha: As a national organization, how does your program adapt to a range of cultural knowledge and learnings across Canada?
Melissa: We often provide a sharing circle space instead of us coming in and being like, ‘Hey this is what Cree people do’, because we can’t speak to that. For example, the primary facilitators of the 2-Spirit regalia program were both Mi’kmaq from the east coast, so that’s very different from somebody who may be from the west coast — there are a lot of differences. We open up the space and facilitate a dialogue where youth teach, because they are the experts in their own identity.
Neha: How can land-based learning help Indigenous youth in terms of building their sense of identity?
Melissa: We want to be able to inspire, motivate, teach, and share knowledge in those spaces, so that when [youth] come out of our programs, they have a level of skill development that maybe they never had before. They have the confidence to identify in the way that makes sense for them; that they feel empowered, whether it’s by learning a skill, or learning a language. For instance, we had a youth who came out of our regalia program who learned a new technique in beading and then was able to do that in their work, sell their work to self sustain.
It’s sort of creating that bridge or that pathway to a space and when they move out of young adulthood into being an adult, that they don’t forget where they’ve come from. They can be grounded in who they are, feel rooted in these teachings, and feel empowered by the gifts they have.
Neha: What can non-Indigenous environmental leaders learn from land-based education and better support it?
Melissa: Just step back and listen and observe. We have two eyes, we have two ears, and two nostrils for a reason. All of those senses are meant to work twice as hard as your one mouth — speak when you need to speak but utilize the other senses twice as much as you use your voice.
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