Carrying Places: How Elementary Students Contest Historical Asymmetries and Grow Relational Knowledge About Land/land Through Origin Stories

This practitioner research study explored how grade three students understood their relationships to the histories, places, and peoples of where they live. Specifically, I examined how students experienced settlerhood and what happened when they travelled outside of official curriculum and into the flow of treatyhood. My theoretical framework drew on important tenets from within Indigenous worldviews, the operational structure of settler ontologies, and how the body of knowledge for both of these is articulated through origin stories. I demonstrated how the Ontario social studies/ history curriculum embodies a settler grammar that structures how students understand the world. Instead of reproducing settler-normative experiences and creating settler subjects by habituating students into settler traditions, I went outside of settler ontology in order to interrupt the process of settler-making by teaching through Indigenous histographies. My empirical study was grounded in the methods and perspectives of practitioner research, which centers, illuminates, and troubles the interlaced relationships in classrooms and mobilizes knowledge production from the viewpoints of teachers and students. As their teacher, I paid attention to the overlapping layers of their subjectivities through stories of themselves with each other. My intention was to help develop explicitly relational forms of interacting with others in the world. Because students’ own storied presences were on contested lands, I invited students to share their life stories and intermesh them with etiological Indigenous stories. Students also learned about settler origin stories of the nation. They developed awareness of Land and places, learned from their own repertoires of cultural knowledge, and utilized their relationalities in-place to learn from the confluence of story. Students incorporated treaty teachings that folded Indigenous sensibilities into their repertoire of understanding—despite the ongoing erasure of these worldviews by machination of the settler state. I troubled the issues I encountered in my research, illuminating the contradictions and tensions that resulted when I taught about Indigenous sensibilities to Land. In conclusion I highlight the incommensurable conundrum of representation of Indigeneity within settler colonial structures and pose further questions about how to devise relational lenses through which students might view the world.

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