Tied to the Land: An Introduction to the North
As an ECPN pedagogist in northern British Columbia, I have the unique privilege of supporting four small early childhood centres in remote and rural communities west of Prince George. My focus as a pedagogist is shaped by the local contexts. Because of the remote, rural settings of the small communities I work in and my own histories in the north, the work I engage in with early childhood educators, children and families is always tied closely to the land.
Northern British Columbia is rich in resources, and extractive industrial projects past and present have altered the landscape. Many communities are sustained by industrial projects or formed and re-formed alongside economic development initiatives. These connections extend beyond human communities to animals such as caribou, wolves and bears, whose lives also shift in response to industry. Even after an industry moves on from a place, the criss-crossing web of “bush” roads left by excavation equipment creates new networks of movement for humans and more-than-humans alike. Some shifts to the landscape have been more dramatic than others since colonization, with entire swathes of land and lifeways buried under water to power industrial projects and clearcuts large enough to be seen from space. Rural communities dot the roads and highways of the plundered landscape and are closely linked to the altered land and waters.
Northern landscapes, though altered by human activity, are incredibly diverse and vivaciously full of life. Mountain ranges, low-lying river valleys of cottonwood trees, rolling fields, sandy cutbank cliffs and boggy spruce marshes are just some of the topographies that children, their educators and I encounter. One of the most achingly beautiful experiences every spring and autumn are the flight lines of geese responding to seasonal shifts to fly south or return north to their nesting grounds. The powerful sound of their calls fills the air with such force that we cannot help but stop and listen, pausing whatever we are doing to gaze upwards. I have been wakened from a dead sleep in my hotel room by the power of their calls mixed with the mournful whistle of a freight train echoing down the valley. This is how the land asks us to mark the passage of seasons, hearkening to the call of the wild geese.
In this two-part blog post, I will share the pedagogies I am crafting in the north and how my commitments to educational thinking come to life. In this first post, I share my pedagogical orientations – how and why I enter educational practices of storytelling, anti-extraction and intimacy to propose alternative educational futures amid extraction. In the second post, I will offer traces of how these practices are coming to life within communities. The stories of early childhood educators who live and work in small communities will be shared through audio, video and photo traces, illustrating rich possibilities for educational experimentation in relationship with the land.
Anthropocene Stories: Education Alternatives Matter
Smoke blankets the horizon, casting a dark silhouette against the sky. The smell of burning forests and charred remnants of trees, animals and structures permeates the air. Summer days unfold in a troubled atmosphere of distress, fear and constant vigilance. Amid the ashes, the distant prospect of future growth is overshadowed by the orange glow of flames reaching into the sky. Mountainsides are engulfed by fire, and the lives of children, educators, bears, deer and pedagogist are entwined in altered landscapes held together by asphalt highways beneath the flames.
Working in northern communities one encounters stark manifestations of the Anthropocene—geologists’ name for the span of time in which human actions have profoundly reshaped the climate and environment through extractive industrial growth that has extended globally (Bonneuil & Fressoz, 2017). These global changes have also impacted the field of education, shaping how, where, and why we learn (Common Worlds Research Collective, 2023). Many current educational systems focus on preparing children to become citizens with marketable skills to support economic growth and empower humans as consumers. The idea of shaping a “good student” or a “good citizen” who can contribute to the market is one story of education’s purpose.
In early childhood education, a focus on developmental stages demarcates children who are able to achieve desired skills from children who are not “producing” at an acceptable level or pace through established standards for the development of school-readiness skills. Further, the ongoing discussions in British Columbia and beyond about early childhood education as a service provided to families in support of economic growth, not as an intrinsic human right in a democratic society (Moss, 2014), further entrench early childhood education within the Anthropocene’s systems of industrial economics.
As a pedagogist, I am curious about alternative stories of education, as Peter Moss calls them, that disrupt the narrative of markets, production, economic growth and service provision. To craft otherwise narratives, I ask these questions: What happens when education is an endeavour to become closely attuned to the place where we live? What alternatives become possible when we attune to place?
In my practice, I engage with storytelling practices situated in a place, nested in the intimate relations that are necessary to create alternative ways of doing education in rural and remote communities. In communities situated close to second- and third-growth forests and open pit mines, or bordering water reservoirs that, due to industrial expansion, cover Indigenous Nations’ traditional territories, humans entangle with others in complex ways. There are no simple stories of heroes and villains here. Rather, “there is relationship. Kinship, estrangement, and entanglement with one another, with water and its absence, with the earth turned tinder and smoke rising from the air” (Naccaranto, 2022, p. 10). Life in this place is complex, and the stories I am obliged to tell are also complex. My pedagogical commitment to storytelling as part of education is never entered into lightly. In telling one story, another is set aside. The stories we tell in education matter, because through stories, we inherit the world and all its future possibilities.
“Turning Towards the Fire”: Sites of Intimacy
Offering storytelling as a way to create and inherit the world, essayist and podcaster Alessandra Naccaranto (2022) writes with a fierce urgency of the need to “turn towards the fire” in acts of intimacy that bring us into close relationship with place and implicate our bodies as part of the stories being formed. Researcher Tom Griffiths(2007, as cited in van Dooren et al., 2014) posits storytelling as a means to enter the complexity of place, because stories “allow us to hold open simultaneously a range of points of view, interpretations, temporalities, and possibilities” (p. 8). Field philosopher and writer Thom van Dooren offers narratives of Anthropocene more-than-human lives to “weave tales that add flesh to the bones” (2014, p. 8). Telling stories of a place is an act of intimacy, a way of adding flesh to the statistical, of becoming intricately acquainted with a place and its inhabitants.
These storytelling practices invite us (educators, children, pedagogists) to become subjects who are closely acquainted with our place and able to enact possibilities that gesture towards futures where alternatives might flourish. As an educator shared with me in 2021, “people see this community as a place where no one stays. But I am here, and the children are here. We are part of this place.” Early childhood educators who work in small communities recognize that they are implicated in the lives of the children, no matter the transience of other bodies who enter and exit the community within the constant cycle of economic feast or famine, and educational responses must be specific to the current concerns of place. Through coming to know it, a place becomes more than the name of its human community, more than a definable point on a map.
As I work in relationship with children and educators to tell the innermost stories of a place, I am developing pedagogies of intimacy and anti-extraction. I am reminded that “how one does one’s pedagogy in a field impacts what can and is done in that field” (Loveless, 2019, p. 13, emphasis in the original). Northern communities experience extraction through industrial and research and development initiatives that migrate into the landscape often without consideration of the complex stories that thrive within the place. These outside bodies are explicitly interested in economic growth and the monetary value of the land’s resources for human benefit. However, not all humans benefit from economic moves, as can be seen in the displacement of Indigenous nations from their traditional territories and the removal of Indigenous children from their families into residential schools in the name of education.
Just as Indigenous communities feel the effects of industry and development movements, small settler communities expand and contract in response to conditions. Families may need to pull up their roots and move away, or they may stay and reshape their lives as necessary. Holding the knowledge that communities are deeply affected by outside forces, I am always conscious that delicate (and particular) movements are required to work with careful intention in early childhood education. I enter into relation with each community knowing that I am an outsider. I work to nourish relationships where my presence becomes part of the community. This is what intimacy means to me: becoming part of a place, entrusted with its stories, bearing witness to life as it unfolds, and working together to create liveable futures.
This invitation to intimacy requires that I lean into the works of many writers, artists and scholars, paying close attention to individuals who address the complexity of human-extraction relations. Canadian artist Edward Burtynsky brings attention to extractive industries across the globe and the ways in which human activity in the industrial sphere alters landscapes. More locally, the late Brian Fawcett, in his book Virtual Clearcut, Or How Things Are in My Hometown, grappled with the complex ways in which industrial activity has altered the landscape surrounding Prince George while also creating worlds that sustain life. Alongside settler voices like these, engaging with the realities and resiliencies of Indigenous women experiencing the violence of extraction is also critical. Because of where I live and work in Prince George and the surrounding communities, I have chosen to engage closely with the work of Indigenous women who are also situated in the north. Helen Knott, northern BC writer and activist, alludes to the connection between land and Indigenous women’s bodies through her memoirs and public talks, and the earlier work of Elders such as Mary John, whose story is told in the books Stoney Creek Woman and Judgement at Stoney Creek written by social worker and activist Bridget Moran, reminds me of the forced removal of Indigenous bodies from traditional territories and the consequences of residential schools. Even though residential schools no longer operate in Canada, their sites continue to be entangled with extraction stories in the northern BC landscape.
One such site is located along my route between communities on Highway 16 West, also known as The Highway of Tears. At Lejac, on the shores of Fraser Lake, transient energy project construction workers live in barracks erected on the grounds of a former residential school. This is just one example of the complicated presence of the Anthropocene on colonized, unceded lands. I am confronted by this stark reality every month as I drive past Lejac on the way to more distant communities. I think about the children who ran away from Lejac and died trying to get home to their families. I also pay attention to the trumpeter swans continually returning to the shores of Fraser Lake, every spring a new generation as I drive through Lejac. None of us, human or otherwise, are outside of the history and presence of this place, as the landscape enfolds more histories into its surface. Science philosopher Isabelle Stengers (2015) addresses our implication in extractive practices by reminding us there is no easy way to be outside of these concerns or to remove ourselves from the practices that have become part of our daily lives. However, she calls for us to resist through finding alternative ways of educating ourselves within the current systems. The stories of a place are not innocent, washed clean, just because we wish it would be so. Nor can we expect that through education, children will inherit a future where they will be saved from the difficulties of our current times. But we can work towards hopeful futures where small transformations might be possible if we choose to engage in storytelling that invites children to pay attention to the land as more than a resource for human consumption.
Bears and Reeling: Speculative Movements
Speculative fiction also plays a role in shaping my pedagogies of intimacy and anti-extraction. Speculative fiction is a genre that uses imaginative or futuristic elements to set a story in a place other than the current reality. Scholars have experimented with speculative fiction to imagine futures other than hopelessness when looking at the trajectory of extraction in the Anthropocene (e.g., Wolf-Meyer, 2019). In my work as a pedagogist, leaning into the work of fiction writers has supported possibilities for imagining worlds as other than the current situation. Andrew Krivak’s The Bear (2020) is a novel I have read with a group of educators for the past two years in our monthly curriculum gatherings. We also are engaging in an invitation to relisten to the story through recorded audio clips during the winter months. Alongside this listening invitation, one classroom is deeply engaged in watching a hibernation den using a tablet and projector and thinking about bears in their classroom. While we watch the bears in the den, children are drawing their questions and ideas about both the bears that we can see on the screen and bears we cannot engage with as closely in our community. Krivak’s work invites us to notice education practices in the classroom differently as we linger with the narratives of a post-apocalyptic world holding stories reaching beyond human dominance and communication with the lives of bears. These stories open conversations of the multiple histories that exist within communities, and the intimate dispositions necessary to hear the stories of others. This practice of listening to a story of human-bear communication in a futuristic reality impacts how we invite children to think about and draw the bears that are hibernating in our world.
That night, they built the fire up as high as it would go and sat around it, the bear this time telling the girl the stories that not only his mother, but other bears with which he had crossed paths had told him, stories when others like the girl lived in every corner of the earth, and stories from long, long ago, when there was only a few. And of the beginning, when there was no one, and the forests and oceans and all the earth was new. (Krivak, 2020, p. 209)
Resisting extraction can also be found in a work of short fiction by Karen Russell. In “Reeling for the Empire,” women imprisoned in a silkworm factory become silkworms and feed The Machine, a central contraption that pulls silk from their bodies. The protagonist resists The Machine, weaving all the women’s stories into the fabric of the resistance. These speculative/science fiction stories inspire educational practices that ask us to consider alternatives that resist the “coming barbarism” of an unaltered course of human supremacy (Stengers, 2015, p. 29). Meanwhile, we are reminded that storytelling is an integral part of alternative movements. Russell’s story is one that I reflect on often as I work to hold the many stories of educators and children and weave them together with stories that matter in our place.
I am always asking two questions as I work with children and educators to ground our work in anti-extractive movements: What happens when education is an endeavour to become closely attuned to the place where we live? What alternatives become possible? To notice how the landscape has been shaped historically and presently, educators, children and I must bring our pedagogical practices onto the land itself and notice how we are interacting with the land. Through this careful and close work, we are trying to become intimate with the landscape and the more-than-human inhabitants who live alongside us, in the hope that the work we do today might offer new ways of looking at education as an intimate, joyful, life-giving enterprise, not only as skills acquisition for continued market consumerism.
In my next post, I will share moments from an educator engagement series on the land, as well as field notes from classrooms, to offer an enlivening glimpse of the anti-extractive and intimate storytelling in early childhood education. These moments will illustrate how I am proposing alternative educational questions with educators and children.
References
Bonneuil, C., & Fressoz, J.-B. (2017). The shock of the Anthropocene: The earth, history and us (D. Fernbach, Trans.). Verso.
Common Worlds Research Collective. (2023). About the collective. http://commonworlds.net/about-the-collective/
Fawcett, B. (2003). Virtual clearcut, or, the way things are in my hometown. Dundurn Press.
Griffiths, T. (2007). “The humanities and an environmentally sustainable Australia.”
Australian Humanities Review 43. http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-December-2007/EcoHumanities/EcoGriffiths.html
Meet Helen Knott, Canada. Nobel Women’s Initiative. (n.d.).
https://www.nobelwomensinitiative.org/meet-helen-knott-canada/
Krivak, A. (2020). The bear. Bellevue Literary Press.
Loveless, N. (2019). How to make art at the end of the world: A manifesto for research-creation. Duke University Press.
Wolf-Meyer, M. J. (2019). Theory for the world to come: speculative fiction and apocalyptic anthropology. University of Minnesota Press.
Moran, B. (1988). Stoney Creek woman: The story of Mary John. Arsenal Pulp Press.
Moran, B. (1990). Judgement at Stoney Creek. Arsenal Pulp Press.
Moss, Peter. (2014). Transformative change and real utopias in early childhood education: a story of
democracy, experimentation and potentiality. Routledge.
Naccarato, A. (2022). Imminent domains: Reckoning with the Anthropocene . Bookhug Press.
Russell, K. (2013). Reeling for the empire. In Vampires in the lemon grove. Alfred A. Knopf.
Stengers, I. (2015). In catastrophic times: Resisting the coming barbarism (A. Goffey, Trans.). Open Humanities Press.
van Dooren, T., Kryduba, W., & Smith, M. A. (2014). Flight ways: Life and loss at the edge of extinction. Columbia University Press. https://doi.org/10.7312/vand16618
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