The need for new stories: walking and the wâhkôhtowin imagination

Image credit: Darby P. darbylee12, Unsplash

By Hero Laird

The stories we tell have profound effects. They can change the way we act, individually and collectively. This blog explores how land-based learning practices like walking can affect the stories we tell in law and beyond.

Sometimes Canadian law can seem removed from ordinary life, yet it impacts families, communities and the way we all live. Some forms of law have had and continue to have a disproportionately harmful effect on Indigenous Peoples. These harms persist, with painful impacts for many Indigenous families and communities. Many of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Calls to Action speak directly to changes needed in the way we think about and practice law in Canada; changes that still need to happen. That need coexists with the fact that, thanks to the leadership and advocacy of Indigenous people, and others, hopeful actions and opportunities for change are also happening today.  

A simple act like walking can be hopeful. It can be a way to learn from the land. As scholars like John Borrows and Lindsay Borrows discuss in a legal context, land-based learning methods are ways to engage seriously with Indigenous laws (see e.g. Outsider Education: Indigenous Law and Land-based Learning and Learning Law from Plants).

This fall the Wahkohtowin Law & Governance Lodge hosted an interdisciplinary opportunity to consider walking as a land-based learning and life practice connected to the Nêhiyaw (Cree) concept of wahkohtowin. Education scholar Dr. Dwayne Donald led participants in the Amiskwaciwâskahikan area (Edmonton, Treaty 6) through a walk in the river valley. 

On the walk, Dr. Donald discussed the importance of stories in shaping societies and how this connects to walking, as he has written about in We Need a New Story: Walking and the wâhkôhtowin Imagination. He explained how wahkohtowin can be expressed literally as "bent-walking-over-the-land-reciprocity-movement-concept” (at 59) and how walking can be a way to imagine and practice wahkohtowin as a concept of "enmeshment within kinship relations that connect all forms of life" (at 55). While walking, we experienced how wahkohtowin can guide action towards good relationships when taken seriously as a life practice.

Dr. Donald reminded us that wahkohtowin and other Nêhiyaw ways of understanding draw on thousands of years of study and knowledge. He described ways that Nêhiyaw people have been and continue to learn from the land, and how their learning and analysis informs Nêhiyaw concepts connected to the rivers, plants and other living beings. 

I believe walking with wahkohtowin in mind is a way to shift the stories we tell in Canadian law and create hopeful practices and imagination collectively, in law and beyond. In Treaty 6 there is much work and, I hope, much walking to be done. I was grateful for the chance to reflect with Dr. Donald as part of this practice.