Educational Work

ÍY SȻÁĆEL HÁLE! Good day everyone! This episode is all about local indigenous food sovereignty. Peter Underwood and I have collaborated on this episode. We interviewed elders and community activists from the local communities of W̱SÁNEĆ and Lekwungen. We learn about plants, medicines, clam harvesting, camas harvesting, plant restoration and more! 

Science, Technology, Engineering, & Math (STEM) education helps kids understand the natural world in a fun way. It can help foster an interest in sciences that opens  many careers. 

W̱SÁNEĆ youth at QENEṈ,IW̱ Connecting with ÁLEṈENEȻ

Re-connecting with our ṮEṮÁĆES (Our Islands), literally our "Relative of the Deep" has been an important cultural reset. The forced creation of reserves moved W̱SÁNEĆ people to the Saanich Peninsula, but the Gulf Islands are also our homelands and homewaters. This video (by Eli Hirtle) is from one of the youth trips and highlights the restoration work, oral hsitory, and the good food we've shared on S,DÁYES (Pender Island).

Part of my job at the UVic Native Students Union was education and advocacy. I created the NSU website to host resourses like this info page on Territory Acknowledgements or this one on settler resources. 

When living in Norway, I spent one school year as a student in this Global Village Folkehøgskule course, then another year as the educational assistant (stipendiat). The course photos on cross-cultural global studies through a photography lense. The course covers topics such as photography, editing, ethics, history, and more. Each year students are brought on trips backpacking through countries on 2 different continents.  

The acronym for UVic Indigenous Film Festival (UVIFF) is a play on the Vancouver International Film Festival (VIFF), according to one of the event’s organizers, Peter Underwood. 

Underwood, who is Office Coordinator at the NSU has organized “casual movie nights, but nothing like multiple films and directors speaking,” and said that simultaneously organizing a live event and an online version was difficult. 

Underwood considered screening films made by Indigenous filmmakers beyond the university, but decided to keep this festival small, short, and timely. All three films were made in the last two years, and run under 25 minutes.

I have had the honour of being a guest lecturer for an intro to gender and sexual identity for middle and high schools. I think it's important for every young person to learn a bit about these things and the different perspectives other members of our society, or those from other cultures, might have on them. I stress that there is no right answer. Afterall, non-natives might think long hair is feminine, and Scots think kilts are masculine. Who are we to disagree on something so subjective, or ephemeral, even?