ABSTRACT
The writing of Ted Aoki on place and situatedness, relationality and tensionality, and the curriculum-as-lived (Pinar & Irwin, 2005) opened for me a landscape where I could ground myself as a scholar in the curricular world of the Denendeh. This collection of poems based on the phenology of fireweed demonstrates an organic unfolding of understanding that occurred as I lived and taught along the shores of the Deh Cho 1 . Dwelling there in the Aokian sense, I learned from the natural patterns of the land and traditional lifeways of Dene education that they inform. The Dene, like most place-based cultures, understand life to occur in cycles, the constants in nature forming definite patterns in the ecosystem and repeating themselves over time (Fixico, 2003): the rise and fall of the moon and sun; the cycles of seasons that shape lands, waterways, flora, and fauna according to the Earth's movements.
