Online Stories

One of the goals of our project was to have local First Nations community members share oral stories with our classes. We were able to meet that goal and had several rich learning experiences for our students. But we realized that not all of the classes in our schools were able to access the Indigenous voices we were fortunate enough to hear. The next step was to look at books that were written by Indigenous authors. Our hope was to record Indigenous voices reading these books and make them available to everyone in our school communities.  Stolen Words below:

Nicole Gooding, teacher at P.E. McGibbon Public School in LKDSB reads "Stolen Words" by Melanie Florence

Visit from Joanne Robertson

On February 5th the junior students at A.A. Wright were so lucky to have Joanne Robertson visit us.  Joanne is AnishinaabeKwe and a member of Atikameksheng Anishnawbek.  She is the founder of the Empty Glass for Water campaign to bring attention to the drinking water crisis in Indigenous communities across Canada.  Joanne is also the author of the book "The Water Walker".

This is a fantastic true story about an Ojibwe grandmother (nokomis) named Josephine Mandamin and her love for water (nibi) and the need to protect it for our future generations.

Joanne spoke with us about the importance of fresh water and the water walks that she has been on in an effort to raise awareness of this cause.  Our students were so taken by the distance that Joanne, Josephine, and the other Water Walkers walked in an effort to spread their message.  They were also excited to learn that the Water Walker's visited Walpole Island and prayed for the St. Clair River a couple of years ago.  To learn more about the Mother Earth Water Walk you can visit their website HERE.

Not only was Joanne a fantastic presenter with a great message for us she also was gracious enough to help us out with our Words of the Week videos for February.  Our team decided to pull words from Joanne's book to focus on.  To access these videos and PDF word wall cards click HERE.

Also, as we know water is a theme that weaves its way through each grade of the Ontario science curriculum.  To learn more about how to incorporate this learning into your lessons, as well as watch a fantastic book review of "The Water Walker", please check out Gretchen's blog post HERE.

Sarnia Lambton Native Friendship Centre

Jen's Reflection

When we started this project and thought about potential connections, the Sarnia-Lambton Native Friendship Centre was a must. It is only a few blocks away from P.E. McGibbon which makes it easily accessible for our school community and we see it as a valuable resource for ourselves, and our students. Problem, we had no idea who to contact or how we should go about making contact. It was a barrier we made for ourselves that didn’t need to exist. We did what a lot of us do, nothing, because we were unsure. So, we reached out to Gretchen and asked her first. She suggested we connect with Nancy Peters. Nancy is the Cultural Resource Coordinator at the SLNFC. 

Chantima and I decided we would pop over to the SLNFC and see if we could meet Nancy. When we were walking to the doors of the SLNFC, I looked at Chantima and said “Are you nervous?” and thank goodness she said, “Yes”. I was not alone in my nerves and general feeling of discomfort. Why was I feeling this way? I think Chantima and I realized we were entering a space of unknowns. That is a scary place for an A-type teacher. But, I’ve learned throughout this project that I need to push myself to be uncomfortable. If I don’t, I’m not going to take risks, reach out, or learn things that will change how I think. Fast forward, the meet and greet with Nancy was wonderful. She welcomed us, our project, and was willing to support us in our journey. 

Throughout our initial conversation with Nancy, Chantima and I recognized she could be a key person in helping us shape our overall learning theme for this project. We had started Ojibwe Word of the Week with greetings and were using them in our schools but, what next? Where do we go after greetings? We needed another meeting!

We arranged another meeting with Nancy and thankfully Allie was able to attend as well. At this meeting we wanted to brainstorm ideas for where we were going to go with our learning. Our main focus was the Word of the Week because November was fast approaching and we had no clue what to do. We wanted the Word of the Week to be connected to deeper learning so we started brainstorming different ideas. We started with seasons and celebrations. We could do pumpkins, snow, winter, etc. But then, we looked at Nancy and said, “Is this really authentic to learning your culture?” In that moment, we recognized that our conversation about trying to find deeper learning had shifted to fitting Anishinaabe language and culture into our teacher box. This is one of the biggest dangers I see for educators. We take things and warp them into our teaching world. We make them fit our unit plans or timelines and lose authenticity. We needed to do better. 

So, we asked Nancy where would she start with students that were not making connections to Ojibwe Word of the Week and Ojibwe people themselves. Our students were hearing Ojibwe words every day but did not realize Ojibwe was a language spoken in our area, by Ojibwe people, before newcomers arrived. How could support them making these connections? 

As a group, we landed on storytelling. We would start with Turtle Island. Then, the Ojibwe Words of the Week would come from the story. We would choose four animals from the story (loon, turtle, otter, muskrat) and as Allie said “Feed the students breadcrumbs”, so they would build some schema for the Ojibwe story they would hear that month. We had a plan! Each month we would arrange a guest speaker to share a story and pull words from the story to be used for our Ojibwe Words of the Week. It sounds like a daunting task, but the more connections we make, the easier it becomes. 

We left our meeting with Nancy feeling inspired and excited about our new direction. Stay tuned to see how it unfolds.