The piece on the Athabascan story, The Girl Who Swam with the Fish, obliged me to advance beyond the usual academic analysis to experience-driven learning.It is an account of a girl reincarnated into a salmon so that she can obtain an image of their world, a tale that transpires to convey a message regarding respect and reciprocity. Instead of authoring an essay about this tale, I utilized the cutting-edge Maker Space at TRU, working several hours to sculpt something that could symbolize the teachings of the tale of interconnectedness between land, water, animals, and people.
The experiential aspect played a vital role since it prompted me to experience ways of knowing Indigenous people through action rather than cognition. Manual work, construction, working with materials, and the transfer of abstract ideas into a concrete form helped me see how the transformation of the girl operates you cannot comprehend the other way of being in a distant. The process of creating would turn to embodied learning because now I had to slow down, work diligently with intentions, and create something that would be a creation that would fit the story and my learning as well. This practical method of learning was consistent with Indigenous pedagogies that are focused on making and sharing and not intellectual processing.
The Maker Space project brought my own learning styles and educational conceptions into question, offering new approaches to challenging the traditional educational process and teaching me that sometimes decolonization in education may require embarking on a more text-based education and adopting alternative thinking methods that incorporate our entire being. It was much more effective and memorable to have a tangible object that helped me to comprehend the dimensions of reciprocity, interconnectedness, and the need to respect other non-human individuals than to complete some common assignment. A growth of knowledge through growing intellectually was presented in the form of an expression of what I created to reflect upon the experiential understanding.
Disclaimer: Photos in which the author appears were taken by a colleague or friend, and are used here with permission.