Beyond the Edge of the Planted Field: Exploring Community-Based Environmental Education, and Invisible Losses in Settler and Indigenous Cultural Contexts

• Main Author: da Rosa Holmes, Samantha
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: Scholarship@Western 2016
• Subjects: Walpole Island First Nation; Decolonization; Indigenous Knowledge; Cultural Geography; Community-Based Research; Indigenous Environmental Education; Human Geography; Indigenous Studies; Nature and Society Relations; First Nations
• Online Access: https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/4358; https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/context/etd/article/6023/viewcontent/S._da_Rosa_Holmes_Final_Masters_Thesis_Submission.pdf

The Walpole Island Land Trust and the Sydenham Field Naturalists came together for a focus group at the Walpole Island Heritage Centre and spoke of the relevance environmental education plays in the awareness of a shared history between communities from separate cultural contexts. From the focus group this research is able to contextualize the conversation between a non-Indigenous and an Indigenous community-based environmental organization, and their focus on the relationship between people, place, and history. The context of the conversation being the colonial legacies of land use management and educational practices and how these institutions prolong the effect of invisible losses for First Nations people. The findings of this research indicate that groups from different cultural backgrounds can collaborate without being inhibited by their colonial past.