ABSTRACT
Indigenous ways of knowing emerge from Indigenous peoples’ relationship to land and place. Their knowledge of, experiences with, and relationship to land and place are expressed through languages, stories, histories, ceremonies, and practices that demonstrate care and respect for the physical, ancestral, and spiritual dimensions associated with land and place. This chapter highlights a pedagogical activity conducted with pre- and in-service educators that required them to reflect on their storied relationships to history, land, time, and place using the university campus, where they attend a teacher education program, as a site for decolonizing dialogue and experiential learning. Post-secondary institutions are implicated in colonial practices that shape what is valued in curriculum, knowledge production, and cultural representations. This has resulted in the erasure of Indigenous presence, marginalization of Indigenous students from higher learning, and delegitimizing of Indigenous knowledges. The University of British Columbia (UBC) Vancouver campus is located on the tradition, ancestral and unceded territory of the Musqueam People. Through a guided campus walk-about that drew from public knowledge co-constructed by UBC, the Musqueam community, and other Indigenous people, learners were prompted to consider how these spaces have been materially, spatially, symbolically, and ideologically constructed to erase or appropriate Indigenous knowledges, histories, and presence.
