Monday, December 20, 2021

From farm to community

By Carlos Saavedra. This content originally appeared as a digital exclusive in Waterloo Magazine.

Meghan Snyder (BA ’07) is the owner of Snyder’s Family Farm, a local tourist experience. In this short documentary, she shares an inside look at how they build a great guest experience, the challenges of 2020, and the immense fulfillment she feels in return.

Interview with Leslie Wexler, Senior Educational Developer, Indigenous Knowledges and Anti-racist Pedagogies

This is an excerpt of an article originally published on the Centre for Teaching Excellence website.

To help introduce her to the University of Waterloo community, Trevor Holmes, CTE's Associate Director, recently interviewed Leslie Wexler, our new Senior Educational Developer, Indigenous Knowledges and Anti-racist Pedagogies. 

TH: Welcome Leslie – as you can tell from the number of requests already coming across your desk, our campus has a lot of pent-up demand for support in your new area. What drew you to a role explicitly supporting individual and departmental curriculum and teaching development in Indigenization and anti-racism?  

LW: In a single word: Change. I was very attracted to theories of change that were just coming alive in the culture. When I started to see that the academy was wanting to transform along these lines, I got involved immediately, and the place where it was happening fastest and with the most uptake was in centres for teaching and learning. And so I started doing the work of Indigenizing my own course and then immediately started sharing it with others. As I think about educational development, what draws me to the role is the personal journey I’m on that’s directly connected to Indigenization. I’m a Treaty 6 Métis woman in the Alberta homeland and I, like many students, came into my Indigeneity in higher ed. 

Learning about personal Indigenous cultural history through higher education has been an experience for a lot of students, which means that the higher ed landscape can be very transformational for urban Indigenous students. I was an urban Indigenous student who didn’t actually come into my indigeneity in my Alberta homeland. I came into it at the University of Toronto, and so much that was offered to me came through the Anishinaabe, even though I was Metis. At that time, I was deeply influenced by the work of Chantal Fiola, who wrote a book called Rekindling The Sacred Fire. It was about the experiences of Métis people connecting to Anishinaabe spirituality. This was a research project in the early stages of Indigenization that asked a question I was interested in: how do Métis people connect to spiritual practice? When Fiola did her research in the Métis community around Red River, she found that people were engaging in Anishinaabe spiritual practice, and that just made complete sense to me because in Ontario I was in Anishinaabe culture so it immediately brought me to greater engagement in Anishinaabe teaching. So that's where I have found most of my spirituality inside of Indigeneity, learning the world view from the Anishinaabeg.  

TH: It's great that you made these connections through Fiola’s research exactly in the journey you yourself were going through. 

LW: Yes, and it expanded from there. When I was a PhD student I read a book called Research is Ceremony, by Shawn Wilson, and as I read it I realized that research projects themselves could be a form of cultural healing, a form of reconnecting, and higher ed was actually offering these kinds of projects with scholars that students had access to.

TH: Higher ed is quite different from the K to 12 scene perhaps because of the active research component. Certainly, a lot of work on curriculum and pedagogy is happening at the K-12 level. But this piece where research is a kind of pedagogy and active learning is active research is active teaching and so on really seems appropriate in a higher ed setting. 

LW: The teaching centre at the University of Toronto is called Centre for Teaching Support & Innovation. They were offering all these workshops on active learning, and so as I moved forward as an educator, almost everything that I did inside the classroom was based on active learning principles, which aligned perfectly with my own journey. 

TH: At Waterloo we have a lot of faculty, staff, and teaching assistants who are genuinely eager to move forward with Indigenization, or decolonization, or anti-racist pedagogy. Or all of that. But they often express fears that they're going to get it wrong or do or say the wrong thing. So what would you say to instructors, teaching staff, and teaching assistants who want to get things right but aren't sure how, or maybe even how even to start? 

LW: Yes, many people feel uncomfortable or uncertain about giving a land acknowledgment because they don't want it to seem token – they don't want it to seem like “check the box” and it’s done. But I think: do it nonetheless. What I mean is, don't feel held back by the fear that you're just repeating the same thing over and over again. To illustrate this for you I’m going to say something in Anishinaabemowin:  

Aanii, Boozhoo. Wabigwan baaskaa-gwanni nindigoo Anishinaabemowin. Leslie nindizhinikaaz zhaaganaashiimong. Tkaronto nindaa niin nindoonjibaa besho zaga’igan Ontario. Gaawiin (mashi) ningikenimaasii nindoodem. Miiwii.

Here’s what I just said translated into English: “I’m called Flowers Blooming in Anishinaabemowin. Leslie is my name in English. I live in Toronto by Lake Ontario. I do not know my clan yet. That is all.” 

So what I just said is a greeting but it's specifically a traditional or protocol greeting in Anishinaabemowin. Whenever I say it, I say it in exactly the same way. To me, part of its importance is to simply speak the language, to keep trying and keep doing it. It's about language preservation. It's about following the traditional protocol. It's just important that I do it, and so when people are feeling concern that land acknowledgements are starting to sound trite or mechanical, they need to remember that what they are really doing is something that is more like ritual – something that gains meaning as it repeated.  

So it’s important to try to understand the cultural significance of words and actions. Let me give you another example – it’s the word “Miigwech.” I’d like to tell a little story about that word. First, I have to say, I love languages. I'm an English literature major and because of that the etymology of words is of personal interest to me . And so I was looking at a very particular word in Anishinaabemowin that we use all the time. I think it's a word that even settlers feel comfortable using: Miigwech. Many people think this word means “thank you,” but that’s not what it originally meant. Before contact with Europeans, it meant “it is enough.” 

Imagine this: a group of settlers and a group of Indigenous people are beginning to trade – the Indigenous people offering beaver pelts or otter pelts to settlers in exchange for things like copper kettles and cloth blankets. When that act of trading comes to an end, the settlers would say “thank you,” and they assumed that what the Indigenous people said in their language also meant “thank you.” But when the Indigenous people said “miigwech,” what they were actually saying was “it is enough.” In other words, you don’t need to give me more. But settlers mistakenly assumed it meant “thank you,” and that’s how it continues to be used now.  

But all this also raises another question. If “miigwech” doesn’t mean “thank you” in Anishinaabemowin, then what word does? And the answer is, there isn’t one.  

TH: And what does that say about the Anishinaabe culture? 

LW: Well, I think it means that something can be given without a need for an acknowledgement in return. You just give or share. And when you receive something from someone else, you don’t take more than you need – “miigwech” – “it is enough.” That happened on a much bigger scale, too. When the settlers came it was difficult and the conditions were harsh. They needed food and they needed to know more about the land in order forage and hunt for what was needed. And they encountered people who were willing to give and share what the land offered. They called this “mashkaki,” which means “the strength of the earth.” The strength of the earth belongs to the earth, not to any one person or group of people. It’s not “mine” or “yours.” We share and take only what we need. We stop when it is enough – miigwech.  

So miigwech has a spiritual aspect: you give without expecting anything in return and with no sense of indebtedness or reason to exalt another in any way above you. This is how we can respect the sanctity and the dignity of equal relations: we are peers in life.  So, next time you say this word, “miigwech,” bring back the cultural origin. For me, it brings me back to my own relations, those people from the past. In the time of the first contacts, there was a misunderstanding about a word, about “miigwech,” because the cultures had different assumptions, different values. And now we are being asked whether 400 years after that first contact if we can get a better understanding of one another once again. 

So, to get back to your question about what do I say to people who are eager to do the work of indigenization? I say that we have stuff to share. If you want to hear it. 

Read the rest of the article on the CTE website.

W Store holiday closures and order processing

A message from Print + Retail Solutions.

All W Store and W Print locations will be closed over the holiday break from December 24^th to January 3^rd.

W Store | Gifts + Apparel, W Store | Course Materials and Supplies, W Store Essentials | MC and W Print locations will resume regular hours on January 4.

Any orders placed on or after December 22 will begin to be processed on January 2. You will receive notification by email when your order is ready for pickup or has shipped.

Tips and information for hybrid meetings and augmenting meeting rooms

A message from Information Systems & Technology (IST).

IST's Instructional Technologies and Media Services Presentation Technology Services (ITMS-PTS) group shares technology and equipment tips for supporting hybrid meetings, and options for augmenting existing meeting rooms to support hybrid meetings on campus.

Examples of audio-only and audio and camera solutions, and associated costs, are provided.

View the Hybrid meetings and augmenting meeting rooms support article to learn more.