Trail Building: on the Land Learning with Penelakut Island Elementary Students

My spoken letter is intended to highlight how Indigenous people utilize the land and mother earth. The land is connected to languages, culture, traditions and identity. I wanted to highlight the way Penelakut Tribe is utilizing the land, to help viewers understand how important Mother Earth is.

My spoken letter encourages viewers to see the importance of implementing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s calls to action when it comes to languages, culture, and Indigenous rights to the land.

As a social work student, there tends to be a lot of focus on the negative statistics of Indigenous communities. For me, as an Indigenous woman, it was a joy to highlight the good and positive aspects of Indigenous communities. Being able to highlight positive initiatives does change the colonial narrative.

Many of the pictures that I utilized were my own. The others were from Riley Mcintosh, who is the lead trail builder for Penelakut. He was generous to let me utilize some of his pictures. He also sent me a video about the trail project and I used the elder’s and children’s voices within my presentation.

My spoken letter highlights the Penelakut Tribe community, specifically Penelakut
Elementary school and the trail building project. I reached out to Len Merriman, who is the principal of Penelakut Island elementary through email. Through this email, I explained my project and that I was interested in highlighting how the children at the school were utilizing the land and trail within their programming. Len offered to meet with me via zoom to discuss the project further. We met on zoom and he gave valuable information on how the school is utilizing the trail and the Penelakut land in their curriculum.

By: R. Charlie