1. Cultivating Intergenerational Resilience
through disruptive pedagogies of
Decolonization and Reconciliation
Dr Lewis Williams, Associate Fellow, Centre for Global Studies,
University of Victoria, Founding Director International
Resilience Network and KIN.
XXI Society for Human Ecology Conference, 12-15th April,
2016Santa Ana, U.S.A.

2. Tane Ascends to the Heavens

3. “A Moment in Time”, Dawn, September 21st, TIXEN Spit,
traditional territory Tsawout Nation, Vancouver Island.
In Conversation with the more than
human
 ‘Instead of holding onto
anger…….they held on to something
much stronger – they held onto
love……..[they held on to] the art of
connection…….the honouring of all
our relations, not just with people,
but with plant nations, and the water
nations…and that art of connection
is resilience – resilience is love”
Young Cree woman at the Summit, talking of her Elders
resistance to colonization

4. Elders Voices Summit, Tsawout
Territory, Vancouver Island Sept 19-
22nd 2015..

6. 1 Tixen Spit, Saanich Peninsula

7. About Tsawout and the WSANEC
people
 WSANEC known as the ‘Emerging
People’ also known as Salt Water
people
 Part of the Coast Salish Group
 Have occupied this territory for at
least 10,000 yrs
 Tsawout refers to house on the hill
 Cedar and salmon people
 1852 Douglas Treaties (Hudson Bay
company)
 To Fish as formerly – ReefNet fishing

9. Questions for enacting life-giving
Futures.
 What are the kinds of practices that will facilitate the alchemical potential of
the collective - enabling epistemological, relational and creative solidarities to
emerge?
 What are the types of pedagogical practices (disruptive and regenerative) that
will enable us to re-map and renew our cultural-ecological terrain in more life-
giving ways?
 What kinds of pedagogical practices enable us to hold the paradoxes – e.g,,
our common humanity and ‘Shared Skin’ with all life forms, AND work skilfully
with our diverse ancestral lineages, cultural-power disparities and respective
woundings that are often seen to divide us?
 What taonga (treasures) in our own cultural – epistemological lineages can we
bring to this work? (This latter question is particularly important for those who
have lost touch with their own Indigenous heritage).

10. Our Collective Work
“We need to re-imagine a way of being as
we’re all in this canoe together!” (Paul
Lacerte, Summit participant, Canada).

11. Elders Voices Summit:
What, Why and How
 International Resilience Network – Developing Community
 Indigenous, Intergenerational, Intercultural, insectoral
 Over 100 people, between 17-80 years of age, over four days
 Indigenous, Setter-migrant groups, Turtle Island, Oceania, U.K.
 Held on Tsawout Territory, B.C, Canada
 Combination of ceremony, arts-based approaches, dialogue, land
based learning
 Spiritual holding by Elders, Tsawout Band and Council, Local org
committee

12. Day 1 19th Sept
Preparing the Ground
Elders and Youth Circles
Day 2 20th Sept
Indigenous Knowledge &
Resilience
Day 3 21st Sept
Holistic approaches to learning
Day 4 22nd Sept
Social-ecological Resilience &
innovation
10.00 Colonial Reality Tour
Elders day on the land
Youth Dialogue Circles, Victoria
Native Friendship Centre
9am Opening Ceremony
9.30am The Radical Human
Ecology of Resilience
10.00 am Unpacking the
Challenges – Stirring the
Potential
11.15 – 12.30pm Toku Reo
Ngaiterangi, Toku Mapihi
Maurea
Lunchtime resilience dialogues
9am Ceremony and Holistic
Learning
9.30am WSANEC Elders
Land base learning – visit to
TIXEN Traditional food
preparation, stories of the land
and traditional plants, shamanic
drumming and healing of the
land.
Networking Lunch
9am Ceremony and Social
Innovation
9.30am Innovating for Resilient
Futures: Where Social Innovation
is at and Where it Needs to Go.
11.15-12.30pm
Indigenous and Inter-peoples
Resilience - Examples
Networking Lunch
6.30-8.00pm The Whole of
Human Relations
1.45-3.15pm Intergenerational
Resilience: Youth Elders Panel
5.00-6.00pm Concurrent paper
and workshop sessions
1.45 – 3.15pm Concurrent paper
and workshop sessions
6.30pmBanquet and Public
Event: Changing Cultures –
Changing Climates:
Institutionalizing Indigenous
practices of Resilience for our
Common Futures.
1.30 pm Dr. Richard Atleo
(Umeek): Tsawalk trilogy -
3.45- 5.00pm Concluding
reflections: Indigenous Youth,
Indigenous scholars & Elders
Summation Panels
Closing Ceremony.

14. Elders’ Voices Summit: Nurturing
Intergenerational Resilience
 Ensuring to the best extent
possible that the next
generations of human and
other than human relations
have what they need to
flourish
 Involves intergenerational
knowledge transmission
within (vertical) and
between (horizontal)
species.
Maori Whakapapa (genealogy) stick used to recite geology

15. Cultural Re-mapping
‘Cultural Mapping’: Processes
of reclaimation of submerged
cultural, spiritual and
ecological heritages towards
re-integration of traditional
knowledge and ways of being
in ways that are relevant to
contemporary life.

16. Cultural Re-mapping
 1) The remapping of socio-historical
narratives that involves the disruption of
dominant white-settler colonial narratives
of the ecology of culture and place
through re-surfacing and repositioning
Indigenous narratives of country, culture,
and kin; and
 2) The remapping of ontology and
epistemology in an embodied sense upon
the human psyche through the dreamtime,
ceremony, stories, and simply being one
with country.

17. Day 1 19th Sept
Preparing the Ground
Elders and Youth Circles
Day 2 20th Sept
Indigenous Knowledge &
Resilience
Day 3 21st Sept
Holistic approaches to learning
Day 4 22nd Sept
Social-ecological Resilience &
innovation
10.00 Colonial Reality Tour
Elders day on the land
Youth Dialogue Circles, Victoria
Native Friendship Centre
9am Opening Ceremony
9.30am The Radical Human
Ecology of Resilience
10.00 am Unpacking the
Challenges – Stirring the
Potential
11.15 – 12.30pm Toku Reo
Ngaiterangi, Toku Mapihi
Maurea
Lunchtime resilience dialogues
9am Ceremony and Holistic
Learning
9.30am WSANEC Elders
Land base learning – visit to
TIXEN Traditional food
preparation, stories of the land
and traditional plants, shamanic
drumming and healing of the
land.
Networking Lunch
9am Ceremony and Social
Innovation
9.30am Innovating for Resilient
Futures: Where Social Innovation
is at and Where it Needs to Go.
11.15-12.30pm
Indigenous and Inter-peoples
Resilience - Examples
Networking Lunch
6.30-8.00pm The Whole of
Human Relations
1.45-3.15pm Intergenerational
Resilience: Youth Elders Panel
5.00-6.00pm Concurrent paper
and workshop sessions
1.45 – 3.15pm Concurrent paper
and workshop sessions
6.30pmBanquet and Public
Event: Changing Cultures –
Changing Climates:
Institutionalizing Indigenous
practices of Resilience for our
Common Futures.
1.30 pm Dr. Richard Atleo
(Umeek): Tsawalk trilogy -
3.45- 5.00pm Concluding
reflections: Indigenous Youth,
Indigenous scholars & Elders
Summation Panels
Closing Ceremony.

18. 1 Tixen Spit, Saanich Peninsula
The implicit Nature and presence of
conversation with the more than
human
 “I want to express my
endless gratitude to the
Tsawout First Nations
People. I felt the synergies
of their land and water flow
through me. I know that I
will return to that place
again” (Arianna Waller,
Aotearoa).

19. Relational Space: Eldership, Ceremony,
& spiritual holding
I liked the use of ceremony at the start
and end of each day, and around our
meals, to cultivate or emphasise a sense
of the sacred, and a respectful intent for
our engagement with each other…..The
related emotional and analytical depths
which we explored and shared in our
sessions was supported and held by the
use of ceremony. (Dr. Iain Mackinnon,
Scotland)

20. Relational Space: Eldership, Ceremony,
& spiritual holding
 The seemingly simple concept of
gathering is immensely powerful and
can have an ongoing global effect. On
a human level, we created together a
space to experience
unity/kotahitanga. In such a safe and
co-created place, we were able to
access a depth of emotion that surely
made shifts within all of those who
resonated with the ideas, imagery,
sounds and stories we shared. (Mairi
Gunn, Aotearoa)
2 Participants connecting in the Social Innovation Session

21. 3 Colonial Reality Tour, Songhees Educator and Tour Director Cheryl
Bryce, second from right
Cultural Re-mapping one:
Colonial Reality Tour
Today was absolutely soul fulfilling. We walked on native lands, we heard
the truth in their stories. I felt the mamae (pain), the trauma, the strength
and the wairua (spirit). Nothing that was done to our native whānau (family)
here on these lands was justified, it was and IS abuse. Actually, nothing that
was done to us as Indigenous people by the colonizer was justified, it was
and is senseless abuse! (Arianna Waller, Aotearoa)
Being there and hearing and seeing these has far more impact than reading
a book or hearing this on a panel. (Prof. Susan Shantz, Canada)
4 Colonial Reality Tour, Traditional Camus planting grounds for
Lekwungen People – renamed by colonial government as Beacon
Hill Park.

22. Cultural Re-mapping one:
Colonial Reality Tour
 I re-call the words of Cheryl
Bryce, who led a tour of Victoria
telling us the history of the
Lekwungen people. When she
spoke of her peoples’ work with
the camas bulbs she said their
interaction with the bulbs while
‘being with them’ led the bulbs to
growing faster (Jeanette
McCullough, Canada).

23.  We learned by experience. We also learned by
being out on the land and finding our
roots…..So what I do now to be part of passing
on the resilience of my ancestors……we are like
a library…..If you look around the room and
think of the knowledge you all carry…….we (the
Haida Nation) were 30,000 before diseases
came to these lands……..by 1936 we were less
than 600 people. That’s like having a massive
fire in your library and losing all of about 600
books….periodicals, journals, books of
knowledge, ideas. Then you try to put it all back
together again. Every one of you have a
responsibility to donate your own book of
knowledge
Cultural Re-mapping One:
Intergenerational Resilience
Panel

24. Cultural Re-mapping One:
Intergenerational Resilience Panel
 Instead of holding onto anger…….they held on to something much
stronger – they held on to love. The ability to love people and their own is
so fierce….I’ll do anything to protect it and protect. By the time my grand
mother passed away at 82 she said she was proud to be a native
woman…she’s been a big part of my life and my understanding of
resilience.
 [there had been so much] severing of relationships to others to one’s self,
deep self, severing of relationships to languages, to one another as
Indigenous people, severing relationship to spirit…….to land, and even
whole territories…But even stronger medicine is the art of connection…the
honoring of all our relations…not just with people, but with the plant
nations and the water nations….and that art of connection is resilience. For
me resilience is love, connection, speaking my language…….(Erynne Giplin,
Indigenous Youth)

25. Cultural Re-mapping Two: Holistic and
Land-based Learning
13 Salmon cooking, Tixen Spit
From hearing Belinda speak, it became clear that for
these Tsawout tradition carriers – like for many of older
country dwellers in Scotland – their sense of identity does
not stop at their skin, but instead it travels out and is
constantly permeating and permeated by their homelands
and the places where they know and find life. As the
South Uist bard Domhnall Aonghais Bhain put it:
Gach ait anns an ghluais sinn, tha e fuaight rinn le gaol
Each place that we walk in become part of us by love

26. Some Key takeaways for Participants
 Depth of Relationality in all its dimensions
 Struggles of peoples still Indigenous to place
 Revisiting notion so indigeneity
 Indigeneity and keeping racialization in the picture
 Deepened connection to land and spirit
 Waiata, haka, bagpipes, poetry, art, land

28. Some References
 Watts V. (2013) Indigenous place-thought and agency amongst humans and non-
humans (First Woman and Sky woman go on a European world tour!) Decolonization:
Indigeneity, Education and Society, 2, 21.
 Williams, L. and Turner, N. (2015). Resilient Places – Resilient Peoples: Elders Voices
Summit Evaluation Report. A Four day university-community symposium and learning
event. 20 pages. Available at http://www.eldersvoicessummit.com (November).
 Williams, L. (2016). Empowerment and the Ecological Determinants of Health: Three
Critical Capacities for Practitioners. Health Promotion International
 Williams,, L. Stuart, L., and Reedy, N. (2015). Remapping culture, kin and country on the
Darling Downs and Southwest Queensland: Suggestions for Indigenous and non-
Indigenous Resilience. Journal of Australian Indigenous Issues, Vol 18(4), 21-37.
 UNESCO. 2013. ‘Cultural Mapping’. http://www.unescobkk.org/?id=4933 (accessed 23rd
September 2013).