ABSTRACT
Between 1993 and 2001, I worked with the Dogrib1 Regional Elders’ Committee on three separate multi-year research projects to document the Tåîchô people’s knowledge of governance, caribou and places. The Tåîchô2 are among the Dene (or Athapaskan language speaking people) of northwestern Canada, and continue to occupy and use the area between Great Slave and Great Bear Lakes in the Canadian Northwest Territories.3 While working on these projects a constant theme for discussion and action among the elders and their leadership was the importance of telling stories, travelling trails and walking the locations where past events occurred. Although the projects were to document Tåîchô knowledge for the purposes of resource management and self-government, it became increasingly clear that both elders and the leadership were primarily concerned with the significance of becoming knowledgeable and using stories to ‘think with’. Since 2002, I have been trying to come to grips with this process; to understand what it means to become knowledgeable to a Tåîchô person. In this chapter, I will consider becoming knowledgeable from the perspective of walking stories and leaving footprints. More specifically, I will consider walking as the experience that binds narrative to the acquisition of personal knowledge. Walking, then, validates the reality of the past in the present and in so doing, continually re-establishes the relation between place, story and all the beings who use the locale. When walking a person can become intimate with a locale, creating situations in which one can grow intellectually while travelling trails under the guidance of predecessors who have both followed and left footprints.
