Falling with Heron
Writing, Teaching & Healing Practices
Books
Woven though my books is a search for ways to dialogue with the climatic and ecological relations of Mother Earth, Notre Dame de Turtle Island. This includes clarifying three relational processes that are related to the Two Row Wampum:
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1) do the "truth" work to renew a dialogue with the elder Indigenous cultures of the lands where I live and write;
2) through that intercultural dialogue, refine the interdisciplinary breadth and depth of modern knowledge systems; and,
3) re-discover and naturalize ancestral cultural (canadien) ways to experientially learn with Earth relations in our climate of change.
Two Row Image: From 2018/2022 Job Talks.
2016, McGill-Queens University Press
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"we are being awakened to the realization that we are part of something much bigger than our modern minds have been able to appreciate. It is not simply that the surrounding world is becoming more uncertain today, but that those changes are asking for significant shifts in how we mind relations. That is what the darkness beyond the perpetual light of urban living evokes in me as I stand on this ravine ridge and attend numinous presences beyond the sensible."
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For more about this book, follow this link:
https://www.mqup.ca/canadian-climate-of-mind--a-products-9780773547629.php
2010, University of Ottawa Press
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“Why don’t researchers ever ask us about
wisdom?” Almost a year after I began talking with Jaypeetee Arnakak about Inuit ways of minding northern warming, he asked me this question. From his position as an Inuit policy worker and philosopher, Arnakak stressed to me that wisdom, or silatuniq in Inuktitut, should be of central importance to anyone concerned with climate change... ​As with many other northern researchers, I originally focused on Inuit ecological knowledge of climate change before Jaypeetee Arnakak shifted our discussion to a consideration of silatuniq. This term came up while discussing how the sila (weather) and climate surround our lives, with silatuniq being a way of inquiring into “the context and consequence of applying knowledge and/or how our interacting with the surround affects that surround.” This understanding seemed relevant to global climate changes that are at root a planetary response to the industrial exhalation of carbon and other greenhouse gasses…
For more about this book, follow this link:
Gae Ho Hwako N. Jacobs:
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​"The Two Row is important for us to think with… It can teach us the value of keeping separate and independent our cultural ways of living, while also recognizing that when we walk side-by-side in a spirit of respect for each other it is possible to connect and learn."
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2022, McGill-Queens University Press
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"The circles of this book embody what Gae Ho Hwako describes as “esehsgwaowhaneh, meaning that you need to expand the teaching or story beyond what you hear and see; it is about clarity, questioning, and seeking answers.” Each of her teachings are followed by reflective responses from four of the circle participants, who write from their Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe, Métis, mixed, or in my case, French Canadien relational positions.”
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[writing to my daughter Iona] "My education in the medicines around us is that of a novice, but I am starting to learn of the spiritual mystery that cannot be contained in the sterile indoors and dualistic gulfs of our colonial languages, schools, universities, and other institutions of the ship. Like heron, we stand rooted in the mud around us, and from this position, we must forever resist colonialism. We are called to deconstruct, destabilize, and prune the ship, starting in the place where we work and live. But that is not all, for in the living spaces that open up, we need to begin naturalizing those viable seeds from our Canadien-Celtic ancestry that can take root here in the spirit of plantain’s embrace of diversity, indigeneity, and life on Mother Earth.."
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- Timothy B. Leduc
For more about this book, follow this link:
2015, ABL Group
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... the unique and flexible curriculum model of the Masters in Environmental Studies program could have only emerged during a late-1960s period of liberal arts university expansion, rising environmental awareness, emerging inquiries into the relations between power and knowledge, and optimism about the capacity of doing education differently. While such a context provided an opportunity, the creation of a program that would foster transdisciplinary innovations like individualized plans of study, a qualitative grading system (i.e., Pass/Unsatisfactory), and limited core curriculum to allow student flexibility was ultimately dependent upon leaders who recognized the need for something different and proposed an alternative...
For more about this book, follow this link:
https://www.amazon.ca/Five-Decades-FES-York-Environmental/dp/0993742726