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A sense of place and connection to the land are vital elements of Indigenous learning at �첥��Ƶ, says an assistant professor in the Faculty of Education who teaches Indigenous education courses at York.

John Waaseyaabin Hupfield (Anishinaabe, Wasauksing First Nation) teaches two courses in the Faculty of Education: Indigeneity and Territory in Cultural Traditions, a graduate studies class, and Place and Learning, an undergraduate educational studies course.

The courses, like much of Indigenous education, hinge on the teaching of reciprocity, what Hupfield calls “the idea of giving back.” 

“Whenever you take something, you give something back. That is embedded in us through our childhoods and how we are raised.”  

That concept connects with how teaching and learning happens within Indigenous culture where knowledge flows naturally through conversation between Elders and youth, rather than through the colonial model of instructors lecturing to students.  

Hupfield calls it “a generational shift of knowledge that has been happening and has worked since time immemorial. And I know, just listening to Elders and folks back in my home community, that we did a pretty good job at it. We are always teaching and learning.”  

He helps students in his class understand that connection is the base for everything they learn in the class. One activity he assigns to help them make that connection is to go to an empty space, without their phones or other devices, and “just try to be present.”  

“Every time, I get these responses that it’s really uncomfortable, and that, to me, explains a lot. It’s a very telling phenomenon that this young generation, young adults coming into post-secondary, are uncomfortable with themselves,” Hupfield says.  

He explains that “relationality,” Indigenous knowledge, is about how students connect to those who teach them and how they connect to a place and to themselves. Those elements help students develop a better understanding of who they are, which in turn helps them “do better work for our family, our community and to our nation.”  

Hupfield says there’s an interesting mix of students in his classes. He finds students from families that are newer to Canada and have perhaps experienced harms from colonization or displacement in their homeland catch onto the lesson more easily. He starts his teaching with a colonization timeline to illustrate why current circumstances exist. 

“It’s almost like the folks who are products of the Canadian education system have not been exposed to, or have not thought about, colonization,” he says. “It is actually quite unsettling for them to think about Canada’s role in that; because they grew up here, they feel implicated, or they feel shame.”  

The students who are newer to Canada often say they feel validated by the course. “They’ll tell me that they grew up on the Mediterranean or in the Middle East and their family perhaps were farmers and were pushed off the land,” Hupfield says. These students, he says, catch onto the lessons more easily than Canadian-raised students  

“The ways in which colonization has impacted all of us comes to the fore. And then what do people do with that? I don't know. I can't know. I only have them for so long in the class,” Hupfield says. “I can't tell them what to do when they go off and teach. But I hope that it's helped them open up to some further learning.”

Hupfield looks back on his decision to come to York for his graduate work and the effect of working with Professor Susan Dion, a Lenape and Potawatomi scholar and the first Indigenous tenure-track faculty member in York’s Faculty of Education. Previous to that, he was working in the Friendship Centre movement, developing training programs for frontline staff.  

He started graduate school pondering questions of how Indigenous people teach and how that fits into a system that doesn’t work for everyone, weighing his own negative experiences of overt and systemic racism in Ontario’s school system.  

Hupfield says he and Dion talked and shared stories, passing along knowledge the way his community had always made the shift of knowledge. “That felt good. I enjoyed it because going in, you think you don't really know anything. I think that's a situation many Indigenous folks experience – they don't know who they are or feel they don't know enough. That's a byproduct of colonization.”  

That experience made clear to Hupfield there was a place for Indigenous people at university, that there was room for things to change.  

One who agrees with that is Dean of the Faculty of Education Robert Savage.  

“It is one of the great privileges and responsibilities of my role to continue to listen and to learn from John and Susan and indeed from all our Indigenous educators and students,” Savage says. “Our collective work as an engaged and deliberately diverse community focuses us all on the shared objective of the promotion of decolonizing, equitable and inclusive education in both our scholarly and community work. John’s and Susan’s work represents these understandings extremely strongly.”  

Hupfield pointed to “the beauty of working at York because you are combining research and teaching. 

“Those two remain interconnected,” he says. “The ability to think about and put into practice ideas that come from research into our teaching makes the program stronger.”

With files from Julie Carl

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