Content Type: Activity
Ceremony Ensures Right Relations with the Land -Indigenous Knowledge
Students learn about Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee ceremonies and land-based practices that enter community members into reciprocal relationships with the natural world. Students reflect on their own cultural traditions that encourage reciprocity with the natural world.
- Bundle: Food
Culminating Activity: Becoming a Change Maker
After communicating with local Indigenous and non-Indigenous leadership, students propose a plan for how to deal with a local climate change issue. Students are provided with different options for how they will demonstrate their understanding.
- Bundle: Food
Living in Reciprocity
Depending on the time of the year this Learning Bundle is taught, students can engage in seed starting, planting, tending to, harvesting, or seed saving. If the class or school does not have its own garden, the class can arrange to visit the garden at Elbow Lake or another community garden in the region.
- Bundle: Food
Engaging in Reciprocity to Mitigate the Impact of Climate Change
Students discuss environmental threats to Manoomin including climate change and infer how these environmental affects impact the cultural practices associated with harvesting Manoomin. Students research and present on an individual or community organization fighting to preserve and protect Manoomin.
- Bundle: Food
Aquatic Monitoring
This activity takes place at the Elbow Lake Environmental Education Centre. After making inferences regarding the impact of climate change on local fish populations students engage in an aquatic monitoring project and compare results to required standards. As an extension students catch a fish and prepare it using local Indigenous preparation methods.
- Bundle: Food
Utilizing Different Ways of Knowing to Understand & Counteract Climate Change
Students familiarize themselves with a STEM study examining the impact of a 1999 storm surge on the outer Mackenzie Delta utilizing both the knowledge of Inuvialuit hunters, passed down through generations, and data gathered by Western scientists. Students reflect on how Indigenous land-based knowledge and Western Science can be utilized together to better understand and counteract the impacts of climate change.
- Bundle: Food
Lakes and Oceans as Sentinels of Climate Change
Students learn about the potential of lakes to act as sentinels of climate change by examining a STEM study that uses lake cores to understand the impact of climate change on a local aquatic ecosystem. Students can engage in an optional math extension activity in which they graph diatom sediment data and compare patterns present in the data.
- Bundle: Food
Western STEM Connection-Engaging with Reciprocity and Interdependence
Students learn about a STEM study, conducted locally, in which scientists by controlling variables such as soil moisture and nutrients, studied the impact of a changing climate on local plant growth. Students mimic this experiment in the classroom using bean seeds in order to learn about what plants need to thrive in the face unpredictable weather conditions caused by climate change.
- Bundle: Food
Ceremony Ensures Right Relations with the Land
Students learn about Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee ceremonies and land-based practices that enter community members into reciprocal relationships with the natural world. Students reflect on their own cultural traditions that encourage reciprocity with the natural world.
- Bundle: Food
Western STEM Connection -Tree Migration
Students learn about how the changing climate is affecting expansion and population dynamics of trees and shrubs, learn to identify local tree species, and use tree cookies to make predictions regarding the impact of climate change on local tree species. Students can also engage in an optional math extension project in which they use graphing and patterning principles to make predictions regarding tree growth.
- Bundle: Food
Interacting with Reciprocity with our Plant Relatives
Students discover how while both Western scientists and local Indigenous groups view plants as alive (or biotic), local Indigenous groups view plants as spirited relatives which is generative of the development of more reciprocal relationships between plants and community members.
- Bundle: Tools
Community Efforts to Curb the Spread of Invasives
Students learn about how Haudenosaunee community members in Akwesasne are utilizing a variety of strategies, including planting trees, to manage the impact of the emerald ash borer on black ash tree stands. After learning about the value of planting native tree species students practice saving and planting native tree seeds.
- Bundle: Tools
Factors Enabling Invasive Species to Establish and to Thrive
Students learn about transportation methods that transmit and those that can be utilized to reduce the spread of invasive species. Students also discuss the factors that enable species to thrive when introduced into a new area and, therefore, to become invasive as opposed to native or naturalized.
- Bundle: Tools
Dutch Elm Disease: A Threat to Longhouses and other Building Materials
Students learn about Dutch Elm disease and its impact on Elm trees and Haudenosaunee tools. Through a communicable disease lab students recognize the parallels between the transmission of Dutch elm disease and human diseases such as tuberculosis.
- Bundle: Tools
Tracking Invasives
Students learn about the locally pervasive invasive species, garlic mustard, and use a website developed by local scientist, Rob Colautti, to track its presence. As an extension students identify other flowers and plants found nearby and both identify whether they are native, naturalized or invasive and question the implications of this.
- Bundle: Tools
Transportation – Snowshoes
Students learn about snowshoe designs utilized by local Indigenous groups. Next, students can engage in an optional extension activity in which they examine how traditional snowshoe designs reduced pressure upon the snow by dispersing weight over a larger area. Students learn how to calculate pressure by converting metric units into international system of units (SI).
- Bundle: Tools
Shelter – Wigwams
Students learn about the cultural significance of wigwams to the Anishinaabe and engage in an interactive hands-on math activity where they calculate the diameter, area, and circumference of where a wigwam would be constructed using number of steps and other body parts to approximate distance. As an extension students can examine how harvesting materials at different times of the year impacts tree growth and forest health.
- Bundle: Tools
Rope Making
Students learn what rope is made from by local Indigenous groups, make their own rope, and practice knot tying. Teachers leads a discussion with students regarding the impact of invasive species such as purple loosestrife on Indigenous land-based practices such as cattail mat weaving, basket making and rope making.
- Bundle: Tools
Broken Promises and Access to Clean Drinking Water in Indigenous Communities across Canada
With a focus on Constance Lake First Nation students learn about the lack of access to clean drinking water in Indigenous communities across Canada. Students also learn about how technology can be used monitor water health and other changes in the natural world.
- Bundle: Water
Drawing on Two-Eyed Seeing to Seek Solutions to Real World Issues
Students explore Indigenous and Western perspectives on forests. Examining logging protests that occurred in Fairy Creek, BC as a case study, students consider how drawing on two-eyed seeing can help to generate meaningful solutions to complex global issues.
- Bundle: Indigenous Knowledge
A Spirited Epistemology
Through discussion with the teacher, students discover that while Western scientists categorize elements of an ecosystem as either biotic or abiotic local Indigenous community members view all elements in the natural world as spirited and, therefore, biotic and alive.
- Bundle: Tools
Indigenous Land-Based Knowledge
Through discussion and plant identification activity, students learn about Indigenous Land-Based Knowledge. Students also examine a case study community members monitor, understand, and raise awareness about how climate change is impacting the whitefish population.
- Bundle: Food
Taking Responsibility to Reduce the Effects of Climate Change
Students learn to distinguish between the natural vs. human-caused greenhouse effect and discuss how colonization disrupted relationships characterized by reciprocity with the natural world and in so doing has contributed to the greenhouse effect.
- Bundle: Food
Land Acknowledgement Workshop
Students learn how to construct a meaningful, personalized, land acknowledgement in which they articulate the ways in which they are actively working towards reconciliation and striving to live in reciprocity with the land in a manner that will protect it for the next 7 generations.
- Bundle: Indigenous Knowledge
Land-Based Meditation
Students engage in a land-based meditation reflecting on how they can live in reciprocity with the land. Following this, teacher leads a discussion with students regarding the nature of the Original Instructions that are transmitted through the land to Indigenous peoples.
- Bundle: Indigenous Knowledge
Creation Stories and Language
Students listen to the Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee creation stories and reflect on how these stories have shaped Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee culture. Students learn about how Indigenous ways of knowing and being are contained in Indigenous languages and the impact of colonization on language loss.
- Bundle: Indigenous Knowledge
Living in Reciprocity with All Our Relations
Students explore the meaning of All Our Relations and interdependence by creating a community web that demonstrates these important concepts. Students will also explore how many of the things they depend on in their everyday lives come from the natural world.
- Bundle: Gifts of the Earth
Biodiversity and Invasive Species: A Garlic Mustard Case Study
Students will explore the impact of invasive species on biodiversity specifically by looking at garlic mustard. Students will draw a scientific drawing of the plant, play a game to understand how it moves through ecosystems, discover plans on how to eradicate it, and contribute to citizen science.
- Bundle: Gifts of the Earth