Participatory Knowledge of Motion: Ezhianishinaabebimaadiziyaang mii sa ezhianishinaabeaadisokeyaang. The way in which we live, that is the way we write stories.

• Main Author: Huner, Erin E
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: Scholarship@Western 2021
• Subjects: Indigenous Storytelling; Listening; Land-based Knowledge; Natural Language Processing; Story Networks; Indigenous Geography; Digital Humanities; Environmental Studies; Human Geography; Indigenous Studies; Nature and Society Relations; Nonfiction; Other Geography; Poetry; Reading and Language; Social Justice; anishina*
• Online Access: https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/7913; https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=10415&context=etd

This is a dissertation based upon the Customary Ways Dataset, which is comprised of 50 interviews given by Elders from Walpole Island First Nation, in 2010. The over-arching, community-designed research question that guided this dissertation was: How do the Elders of Walpole Island describe their relationship to the land? To answer this question, I co-designed a mixed-methods analysis that included traditional methods from the Social Sciences, including Grounded Theory, to establish emergent themes, and some simple statistical analysis using Chi-square and crosstab analysis. I also utilized methods closely related to the Humanities, deploying Story Mapping, Close Reading and a Digital Humanities technique of using Natural Language Processing. The main contributions of this dissertation are: 1) These are 305 Indigenous Stories, and not 50 interviews. This dissertation demonstrates that Elders were telling stories, and not giving interview answers, as the means by which they describe the ways they engage in a relationship with the land, and how they describe the ethical boundaries of this relationship. 2) Intergenerational knowledge can be shown to be statistically relevant to the complexity of the stories told by Elders within the Customary Ways Dataset. 3) A local description of Indigenous Knowledge emerges: Indigenous Knowledge at Walpole Island is not conceptual, but rather is a participatory knowledge of motion that occurs both through listening to the motion of the land and the act of telling about this motion through stories. Thus, we must begin to recognize stories are both the form of, and the subjects of Indigenous Knowledge. 4) A new definition of listening emerges wherein listening is a process that occurs through land-based participatory activities. This thesis demonstrates that hunting is listening; basket making is listening; gathering medicine is listening; fishing is listening. What is common across all of these forms of listening, is that this type of listening informs the Elder’s relationship with the land, and the stories they tell. Thus, storytelling is listening to the land, which allows the Elders of Walpole Island to practice Ezhi-anishinaabebimaadiziyaang mii sa ezhianishinaabeaadisokeyaang[1] [1] The way in which we live, that is the way we write (make) stories. I learned this concept from the work of Margaret Noodin, in her work Megwa Baabaamiiaayaayaang Dibaajomoyaang (Anishinaabe Literature as Memory in Motion, p.183, 2014).