Quills Subject Area: History
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
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
Culminating Task: Spreading the Word about Invasives
Students pick an invasive species to research and report on. Research must touch on the impact the species has on Indigenous land-based practices and how management practices are informed by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous ways of knowing.
- 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
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
Ohèn:ton Karihwatéhkwen (The Words That Come Before All Else)
Students learn the The Ohen:ton Kariwatehkwen (The Words that Come Before all Else or the Thanksgiving Address) and reflect on how it positions humans in a rich, interdependent web of relationships with elements in the natural that must be related to with reciprocity. As an extension students journal in an outdoor sit spot about what they are grateful for in nature.
- Bundle: Food
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
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
Sit Spot
Students engage in a sit spot activity reflecting on how they can live in reciprocity with the land. Following this, the 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