Educator
My central preoccupation is bringing love into the classroom, which I believe is integral to our developing ideas of what it means to “Indigenize” the curriculum. Ultimately, it’s about sustained, boundaried and authentic connections with students.
I enjoy ease and fascination with the metacognitive and can make rich and complex analyses accessible to people with all “levels” of education. I love talking about how we talk, and thinking about how we think – the neuroscience underpinning educational experiences is accessible to all, and sewn into all aspects of my approach.
Writer
My writing is usually about the joy of learning, which I consider a birthright, while I’m certain that curiosity is part of the hardware of consciousness – yet through unjust and unchosen experiences, too many of us are alienated from both.
My deepest desire is to name where the real problems lie, so that brilliant adults stop feeling stupid, blameless adults stop feeling guilty, and beautiful souls stop feeling ugly. Tall order, I know. That’s why I sometimes have to use poetry.
Editor
Attunement to meaning-making is central in my capacity as freelance editor of dissertations and other published texts in several genres (poetry, fiction, and memoir, among others). I offer both substantive revisionary editing and granular copyediting; though I excel at the latter, I truly enjoy the former, involving as it does the chance to work with what’s really inhibiting authors. I support people to see their process as one where self-expression and self-esteem can galvanize each other through the liberating and clarifying capacities of writing. And I know where to put the semi-colon.
PLACE
My family is Anishinaabemowin (Saulteaux) Red River Metis, from the Interlake district in Manitoba, and I live in Toronto (a city I adore ardently). My soul (however you define that) belongs to the bush up there though, or the bush belongs to my soul… in any case, I know that “belonging” has the concept of “place” completely bound up in it. Lately I’m challenged and enchanted as I learn about making online spaces into places, but nothing, for me, will ever move me like celebrating and supporting my cousins, my aunties and uncles, and especially my Elders, on rez and in urban spaces, all my relations. Let’s follow this path, peppered with wisdom from colonizer’s philosophy, and listen humbly together to what will be taught.
The photos that frame this space, and cover me, are of the land I claim home.
The images immediately above are from Nunavut – land that spoke to my spirit when I visited to teach and learn.
