Relationality and Ojibwemowin^†in Forest Walks: Learning from Multimodal Interaction about Land and Language

Abstract

Indigenous language reclamation efforts are pushing academic ideas of what language is to be accountable to Indigenous epistemologies. Simultaneously, as our Indigenous languages grow, we (academics) are pushed to grow beyond the boundaries of disciplines. Categories of "language" and "land" have been segregated by this colonial structure. In this study, as we bring them together, we seek to describe what the ontology in play looks like. We argue that as reclamation efforts successfully grow more young speakers, we are able to push against colonial constructs of learning when we witness learning in the context of movement, land and intergenerational interactions. In this article, we closely examine episodes from three walks taken from a broader corpus of walks ( 14), to describe how one Elder walking with groups of two children constructed knowledge and joint meaning making in the Ojibwe language while walking on Ojibwe lands. We take seriously the idea that there is an Indigenous epistemology at work in these cultural ecologies, one that sees humans as a part of the natural world, at play on the walks. Here we describe specifically what this looks like in the moment to moment interactions, and how we read these constellations of cultural practices as an apprenticeship into sustaining relationships with land.

Origin Theories of Learning: A River With Many Sources

“…Geographic and cultural regeneration and removal are always at play and are at stake in the everyday affective, political, and ethical possibilities of learning. Foregrounding Land in our studies of human development makes visible how violent histories and contemporary practices of Indigenous land dispossession, ongoing forced removals and enslavements of peoples from their original homelands, severely threaten the regeneration of distinct land-based knowledges and languages (Henne-Ochoa et al, 2020; Hermes et al, 2022). The intimate connection between the politics of land and learning has been severely underexamined (for exceptions, see Bang et al, 2022; Lees et al, 2021; Silova, 2021).…”