Abstract
We listened around imagery of our shared natural world after a summer of raging wildfires that burned through land of the T’it’q’et First Nation. I stood with my university pre-service teachers in Vancouver, British Columbia (B.C.), Turtle Island, or Canada, Autumn, 2021, and we re-watched generations of memory like ceremonial regalia rejoin the past in T’it’q’et ashes and missing children earthed around Residential Schools under x-ray revelations. My students could not feel memories buried throughout indigenous lands in the smoke and shock of hundreds of children’s graves found and announced by Chief Kukpi7 Rosanne Casimir. We absorbed earthed silence and leaned into lamentations un-silencing past and present with words, prayers, and ceremony of Tk̓emlúps te Secwépemcwe peoples. We held strongly to words from spokespersons in governments and religions, presentations of trauma and hope through artists, musicians, dancers, writers, and teachings of social justice that shared history’s truths with educators and researchers. I witnessed and participated in collaborative aesthetic redesign of summer 2021 in multimodal collage of sound imagery draped by found, blank, and spoken word poetry of inquiry. My students began individual inquiry through history and poetry lessons as pathways to the conciliate silent present, to missing or murdered, for inclusive teachings as contribution to voicing B.C.’s invisible memories, colonization of First Nations people, and Every Child Matters.
Presenters
Lorna RamsayFaculty Instructor, Language and Literacy, University of BC, British Columbia, Canada
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
The Arts in Social, Political, and Community Life
KEYWORDS
Poetic Inquiry, Social Justice Pedagogy, First Nations, Reconciliation, Multi-modal Action
