Writing as Teachers: The Power of Place

The Forks is a meeting place. Strategically situated at the convergence of the Red and the Assiniboine Rivers, the traditional lands of the Anishinaabe, Metis, Cree, Dakota, and Oji-Cree Nations, the Forks has-for centuries-been a place where people have gathered to meet, camp, hunt, fish, and trade. Its location was coveted as a fort in the fur trade, and later, as a railway and transportation hub. Claims to the land are still disputed. Today, the national historic site continues to be a vibrant gathering place: a venue for outdoor concerts, Canada Day celebrations, and festivals; a destination for school field trips and tourists; and a hub for families, ice skaters, artists, cyclists, and shoppers. The Children's Museum and the Manitoba Theatre for Young People are located at the Forks, as is Canada's newest national museum, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights.The Forks also continues to be a convening place for Indigenous gatherings and ceremonies, as well as public demonstrations and art installations. Here, the first commemorative monument honouring missing and murdered Aboriginal women and girls was unveiled. And here, just days later, international attention turned to the issue when the body of 15-year- old Tina Fontaine, a girl from Sagkeeng First Nation, was found in the Red River (Jolly, 2015). Then, too, people gathered at the Forks, coming together from many places to mourn, remember, and call for justice.It was a Friday, and I was meeting at the Forks with English language arts teachers from some of the province's most remote schools, many of whom had travelled a long way to be there for two days of professional inservice on writing and social justice. Despite the distance they had traversed, several shared with me that they had strong connections to the area-personal and collective histories going back years, or even generations. For some, those memories had been evoked during the writing marathon at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights the day before. A tradition in the National Project (Louth, 2002), the concept of the writing marathon was easily adapted for this of ideas. With a list of writing prompts, a writing notebook, and a digital camera/smartphone, teachers dispersed after the museum tour to spend time on their own in the galleries, writing for increasing intervals as they interacted with an artifact, story, exhibit, or space. Every hour they met with their writing groups to share selections of their writing, but with the stipulation that there would be no response or critique. As writers, they simply were to speak their words into existence, and as listeners, to create a respectful space to hear and receive them.On this cool, but sunny April morning, I had planned a Writing in Place activity using the Forks as a catalyst for writing. Drawing on Pahl and Rowsell's (2011) theory of critical artifactual literacies, I hoped to draw teachers' attention to the cultural, material, and place-based artefacts of the Forks and the stories they tell. Situating this place-based writing experience at the Forks was also inspired by Indigenous Metissage (Donald, 2009), a decolonizing approach to curriculum that seeks to better understand our relationships and responsibilities to one another and the world we live in. Ultimately, this activity was designed to be an experience in life writing and literary metissage (Hasebe-Ludt, Chambers, & Leggo, 2009), inviting teachers to explore the stories of their own lives and locations in relationship to the Forks, and to weave those stories together to create a new text, stronger for its different genres, perspectives, and voices. Thus, it was important to provide time for both individual and collective writing, culminating in co-creating a multimodal composition. In the process, I hoped we might see place-and our identities within and to that place-differently, sparking new critical and creative inquiries. I provided the teachers with a series of prompts, inviting them to respond to as many or as few as they wished in a freewrite (Goldberg, 1986):* Role: Why do people come here? …

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