ABSTRACT
Stories transcend our physical place; they are fluid and transformative. In Canada, Turtle Island, story and stories bring together the local and global—creating a literate landscape rich with cultures, peoples, languages, and histories. Literacy, in Canadian schools, has historically been considered through a settler lens, thereby contributing “to the erasure of Aboriginal Peoples’ ways of being and knowing”. Residential schools disrupted families and communities. They prevented elders from teaching children long-valued cultural and spiritual traditions and practices. Through stories, shameful secrets of Indigenous childhoods and their complicated relationships with Canadian policies leap out of the of the private realm and into the public, standing alongside and disrupting dominant stories. Stories from and intra-actions with the land offer critical opportunities towards decolonization and reinhabitation. Classrooms are places where identities are constructed and enacted, individually and collectively. Classrooms are places of knowing, becoming, and feeling.
