All Our Relations: from Disconnection to Connection

Presented by Jennifer David, NVision Insight Group on July 9, 2024 at the Canadian Institute of Planners (CIP) 2024 Conference, Edmonton, Alberta

Wachay, aanii and good morning. I acknowledge our Elder who started this conference in a good way, and to Notorious Cree for that incredible dancing and teachings.

I am from Treaty 9 and with the Elder and Notorious Cree, we now have Treaty 6, Treaty 8 and Treaty 9 covered! The Plains Cree call themselves Nehiyaw; in my territory, called Omushkego, we call ourselves Inninew and Illilew. Thank you, miigwetch for the opportunity to provide your keynote address this morning. I acknowledge that I am on Treaty 6 land, home of Cree, Dene, Nakota, Saulteaux and Niitsitapi, as well as Metis Nation of Alberta region 4.

I am grateful to CIP for endorsing NVision’s online Indigenous cultural awareness course The Path: Your Journey Through Indigenous Canada, and I appreciated meeting some of you during the Kitchen Table discussions about The Path yesterday, and at the President’s meeting as well. I’m honoured that you’re giving me an opportunity to expound on the theme of your conference, CONNECTION. I have a lot I could say about this, but I promise to be done in my time allotted.

In this talk, I’m going to share some Anishinaabe wisdom and some Cree wisdom—that’s to placate both of my First Nations ancestors. And I’ll sprinkle in quotes from Elders and leaders far wiser than me. Some of the concepts I am talking about will be familiar to you if you’ve already completed The Path. If you plan to take the course, then this will be a taste of what you’ll learn.

I want to put this word ‘CONNECTIONS’ into some cultural contexts. As you participate in the workshops and presentations and listen to the speakers over the next few days of this conference, I’d like to plant some seeds. I’d like to provide some cultural considerations for what we mean by connections. Every one of us brings our own cultural considerations to our connections, to our relationships. And these cultural considerations have a profound effect on how we form our connections and how they inform our connections.

Let me start by introducing you to two phrases: a Cree word: WAHKOTOWIN. It’s a huge concept, and I’ll unpack it a little, but at its core, it means connection, kinship, relationships. And an Anishinaabe phrase ‘Nikiinaaginaa”. Meaning ‘all my relations’.

You’ve likely heard a phrase something like ‘Indigenous people have a connection to the land, or ‘Indigenous people have a special relationship with the land.” I’m here to tell you this is not true. Or rather, it’s not accurate. What are you talking about? You might ask.
First, I’m speaking in English, so all remarks I make are constrained by this colonial language, no getting around that. But people sometimes say, ‘we are connected to the land’ or ‘we come from the land’ or ‘we are of the land’.

Here’s why this isn’t accurate.

First, it ‘others’ Indigenous people—oh ‘they’ have the connection to the land. It ‘spiritualizes’ it—yes, in English we say this relationship is sacred—but that makes it sound like only Indigenous people can have a spiritual connection to land.

And, by saying, ‘Indigenous people have a relationship with the land, it takes responsibility away from everyone else. But I think, if I asked each of you to picture someplace in nature, in the mountains, forest, near the water, in a garden, you would acknowledge your connection to that place, and how meaningful it is to you.

So, instead, let’s revise this, let’s consider a different way to look at it. Think about this phrase instead: ‘we are the land’ and, as a recently released book about Treaty 11 says in the title ‘We are a River’. Molikah Aweri is an educator at the Art Gallery of Ontario. She said, ‘We are ethe land. There’s no separation from law, our identities, our resistance, our resilience, our past, present or future legacies.”

How does this change our perspective? Living in harmony and being the land does not mean we don’t touch it or do anything with it, on it or around it. We survived by treating the land as a relative, we treated the animals like relatives. We need the plants and animals to live, but we always took a life with respect and gratitude; in my Cree and Anishinaabe ways, we would leave tobacco near the waters where we took fish, or near a tree where we took plants, medicine, animals we hunted. So, we didn’t take indiscriminately, and we didn’t take more than we needed. This is how I want you to picture this word connection.

And now, let me tell you about this concept of wahkotowin that gives us an even richer picture of what connection really means. In the Cree language, the word wahkotowin is often translated into English as ‘laws’ but that’s not quite right. It’s more like relationships, like kinship, like connection, or even better, the interconnectedness of all things, or Nikinaaginaa ‘we are all related.’ Wahkotowin is the act of being related, plus it’s a worldview that everything IS related, plus it is our laws and our responsibilities to ensure we have good relationships.

In a Cree worldview, our identity is inseparable from land, from family, from the animals on our land, from community. In our origin stories, we learn that at one time, in the beginning, we could speak to the animals, and they could speak to us, but when humans decided that they were superior to animals, and wanted to be in charge, that ability was lost, so now, we are disconnected. But we remember that there was a time when our relationship was equal, when we could communicate with each other. Wahkotowin is about how all things were created to be in relationship with each other. We have obligations, we have responsibilities, and so does creation.

In Canada today, we’ve forgotten these obligations and responsibilities, we’ve severed these connections. Our western thinking, our western perspectives and worldview, which informs our western education has taught us that man is master over the environment; that land is about property; that land is about the economy, and about resources to be extracted from that land. But you are all planners, you have the ability, and I say the responsibility to think deeply about your relationship to land. When you create a ‘land use plan’, what are the interconnected relationships between everything and everyone who is on and in and under that land, not just who and how to use the land. When you create an urban plan, how do you ensure that the land is not forgotten, or hidden, or built upon, or bulldozed. What is artificial and what is real?

If you’ve taken The Path: Your Journey Through Indigenous Canada, my company’s online Indigenous cultural awareness course, you will understand how we’ve severed our reciprocal relationships to each other through racist policies that said, ‘these humans are more important than those humans.’ And what humans think they need from the land and animals is more important than what the land and the animals need. And this western way of thinking and being, this Christian religion that says it is superior to Indigenous ways of being,’, it means we’re out of balance, detached, separated. We’ve severed our reciprocal relationships to the land, through exploitative policies, attitudes, laws that said, ‘this land is terra nullius—empty land—because it was not being properly cultivated or possessed’. It was not being appropriately planned, with plots, and fences, and properties, and taxes and bylaws. But is that the true value of the land?

More than 200 years ago, an Onondaga leader named Canassatego (pronounced Gahn-ne-se-tay-go), while discussing land and treaties with the British in what was then Pennsylvania, said, “We know our lands have now become more valuable. The white people think we do not know their value; but we know that the land is everlasting, and the few goods we receive for it are soon worn out and gone.” This is what we mean by the word, ‘value’. This is wahkotowin.

There is no such thing as Indigenous spirituality. No such thing as a Cree religion. We have teachings, we have ways of being, we see the connection between all things. Hunting is spiritual, cooking is spiritual, teaching is spiritual, dancing is spiritual. The English word ‘spiritual’ is too flat, to incomplete, to encompass the holistic way that we see the world. A central teaching in the Anishinaabe worldview is what we call the Seven Grandfather Teachings, or the Seven Sacred Teachings. The number seven is significant—we have seven fires, seven prophesies, etc. The Seven Sacred Teachings are: Love, bravery, honesty, truth, humility, respect and wisdom. They teach us how to live in the world, how to behave towards each other, in essence, our ‘guiding principles.’ Inuit in Nunavut have something similar, what they call Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit, Inuit societal values, principles, laws, beliefs, like respecting others, providing for family, working together for a common cause, consensus decision making. Other nations, other cultures have their own teachings, grounded in the land, and grounded in relationships. This is wahkotowin.

There’s an English phrase ‘kinship bonds’, that sounds kind of clinical, but it’s trying to get at our notions of family, and of our connections. We say, ‘all my relations’, nikinaagina, and if you’ve ever been around First Nations people, or in a First Nations community, you might notice that people use the word ‘cousin’, ‘auntie’, ‘uncle’ and ‘grandmother’ a lot. My father’s brother’s child is my first cousin by blood, but again, that’s too flat, too narrow. We don’t have distinctions between first cousin, and second cousin twice removed (what does that even mean?). We are all related. The animals are our cousins, we treat them like family. Families are not mother-father-children; it’s so much more—kinship bonds are expansive—before colonization, the phrase ‘it takes a village to raise a child’ was literally true. This is wahtotowin.

The western concept of law is very binary, very black and white, very adversarial. You have judges, you have lawyers, you have guilty and not guilty, you have good and bad, you have right and wrong, you have laws and punishment. For First Nations, we have laws, too, but they are framed in a more holistic way. Certainly, we had punishment, and I won’t say it was a utopia before Europeans came along, as we had banishment, wars, retribution, kidnapping, torture. But our concept of law was grounded in wahkotowin. Our aim when someone acted outside the accepted cultural norms was to restore that person to wholeness, to bring that person back into the circle, into community, to reconnect them to family, to bring about reconciliation and restoration. This is wahkotowin.

Let’s think about planning. You might develop a 5-year strategic plan, a one-year business plan, maybe a 10-year capital plan or land use plan, what about a 150-year plan? In Haudenosaunee culture, their guiding principles are enunciated in something they call the Great Law of Peace; it’s essentially a constitution (which, btw, influenced the development of the American Declaration of Independence). The Great Law of Peace talks about social organization, ceremonies, and relationships. In one section, it says ““In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations.” That’s about 150 years. How does that change our perspective about planning? How does it frame the actions we include in the plan, the decisions we make, if we need to consider how it will impact people seven generations from now. This is wahkotowin.

We have been taught that, if we are to live well, to live what the Anishinaabe call mino bimaadziwin, what the Cree call mino – pimatisiwin, roughly translated as the good life, then our relations must also live well—the living world around us must be cared for. We must share, we must take only what we need, so there will be some more when we need it…today we use the word ‘sustainable’. Here are two stories about taking what we need.

In Cree stories, we have an important character named Wisakejack. In Anishinaabe stories, we have an important character called Nanabush or Nanabozho. They are both Tricksters and I think they’re cousins. Here’s a variation on a story that both Cree and Anishinaabe tell. It’s about the dancing ducks.

So, it’s late fall, and our protagonist is so hungry. That’s all he can think about. Suddenly, he sees a flock of big juicy ducks. He knows he only needs two of them to fill his belly, but he decides to play a trick on all 12 of them. He invited them to play a game. They built a fire and Nanabush said it was a dancing game. “Ducks, you must close your eyes tight, and dance faster and faster. The duck that dances the best and keeps his eyes closed wins a prize.” So, while the ducks were busy enjoying the game and dancing, Nanabush grabbed one duck at a time, wrung its neck and put it into a sack. He was so excited to eat those ducks. But he was so tired from all that dancing, that he fell asleep. When he woke up, the ducks were gone. It was his brother, Pakwis, who told him, despite being so clever, because you were greedy, you can’t have any of the ducks, you should have stuck with just two.

And here’s another story, this one is from the non-fiction book Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. She told a story about sweetgrass, which is a sacred plant, a sacred medicine to some First Nations. She’s Potawatomi and a western-trained scientist. She did an experiment with her university students to see how to make sweetgrass grow faster and stronger. What they found was, if they pulled out all the sweetgrass but left the seeds, it did not reseed—it did not grow back at all. If they left the sweetgrass alone, it grew but very slowly. But if they picked the sweetgrass selectively, respectfully, and just enough for their ceremonial needs, then it grew back fastest of all. She calls this reciprocity. I call it wahkotowin.

Tomson Highway is a multi-talented, award-winning author, who is Cree, of course. He speaks several languages, plays piano at a professional level, and, in 2022, he gave the CBC Massey Lecture called Laughing with the Trickster: On sex, death and accordians. Check it out if you haven’t heard it. It’s hilarious, and profound. He says our culture, our humour, our way of thinking is embedded in our language. He speaks English, French and Cree. He says, English is a language of the head. French is a language of the heart and the stomach. Cree is a language of the body, which is also bawdy. So, it’s very funny, even when talking about the most mundane things. He says, “English is so hierarchical. In Cree, we don’t have animate-inanimate comparisons between things. Animals have souls that are equal to ours. Rocks have souls, Trees have souls. Trees are ‘who,’ not ‘what.” So how you see the world is influenced by the language you use to see it, dream it, understand it. Indigenous languages are rooted in the land, in the connections between all our relations. This is wahkotowin.

So, how can we embrace wahkotowin? How can you, as planners, as members of CIP, embrace these teachings about interconnectedness, and about relationships. Let me talk about three ways:
By integrating Indigenous worldviews; by re-establishing right relationships; and by understanding we are all related.

1. How to integrate Indigenous worldviews?

There’s a concept from Mi’kmaq elder Albert Marshall called epautmumk or ‘two-eyed seeing’. It means, we are grounded in Indigenous ways, but we incorporate the best of western ways. Here’s how Elder Marshall describes it: “We call it two-eyed seeing because as individuals we only have two eyes. But it should not limit us just to look at everything from just two… As a Native, with my left eye, I see everything from my Native perspective. And since now I must coexist with other cultures, I draw the best from those cultures. And I put those two together as one. Not one over the other, but one as equals.”

What might that look like in your practice? Whereas, in the past, it was colonial ideas, western-based thought that took precedence, what might happen if your process, your plan was grounded in Indigenous ways, while keeping the best of your western methodologies and protocols?

This is a quote from an Inuit Elder, Larry Audlalak. My NVision colleague, Chris is a landscape architect. He was working with an Inuit community on a planning project. Chris was using a standard map that showed the land as green and the water as blue. This is what Larry said: “People of the south see ice as frozen water; we see water as melted ice.” Let me repeat that. “People of the south see ice as frozen water; we see water as melted ice.” So, Larry said the map looked like the world he knew in August when the ice and snow melted, but for 10 months of the year, the world he knows and thrives in is frozen and white. The ice is important to him because he travels on it and hunts from it. His connection to the world is with ice and snow. So, the map didn’t represent his relationship to his environment.

So, you see, it’s all about perspectives. Indigenous peoples bring Indigenous perspectives, they bring Indigenous worldviews, to they table. They help us shift our own perspectives, sometimes our own preconceived notions.
So, what perspectives are being integrated into your thinking? Into your projects? Which perspectives are given preference? Are being elevated? Are being used as a standard or a baseline? What are the indigenous perspectives that could strengthen your design, your process, your plan?

2. How to re-establish right relationships?

Think about where you live, where you work, where your contracts and projects are located. Whether you’re a municipal planner, a land use planner, an urban planner, a social planner, a designer, etc., I encourage you, when you go home, to stand outside, where one of your projects it is taking shape. Whose land are you on? I am sure that some of you have heard someone do a land acknowledgement before, maybe even first thing this morning. As we grapple with Canada’s colonial past that still reverberates today, and we consider our relationship to land, we can only establish right relationships with First Nations by acknowledging the land theft and dispossession that has enabled the country we know as Canada today. Land acknowledgements are not about guilt, or shame, but it’s also not a get out of jail free card. You can’t just say, ‘oh hey I acknowledge this used to be your land, but, oh well, too bad, we’re in charge now.” That is not respect. But if you choose to go beyond performative land acknowledgements and think deeply about how you and I have benefited from colonization, from this theft of land, from disingenuous treaty processes, then we can move forward in right relationships.

I encourage you to think about your relationship with the First Nation (in southern Canada), or Inuit community (across Inuit Nunangat) upon whose land your project is taking place? What does it mean to have a relationship with them? Is it transactional? Or reciprocal? Does it embrace wahkotowin?

A relationship is a two-way street. Seems self evident, but if you have an Indigenous partner, have you been to the community, or the local Friendship Centre, or the Indigenous organization’s office? What are you bringing to the relationship? Consider what you’re giving, along with what you’re taking.

A right relationship begins with knowledge and education. What do you know about your Indigenous partners? For example, if you’re working with a First Nation, are they signatories to a historical treaty, or a modern treaty or no treaty at all? If you’re working with an Inuit community, what are the legal requirements for outside contractors as set out in their land claim agreement? This has huge impact on the relationship.

A true relationship is built on trust and respect. How are you showing respect to your Indigenous partners? Are you listening to elder voices, and compensating them for their time and knowledge? Have you considered that maybe you need translation or interpretation so they can fully grasp what you’re talking about, in their own language? Are you following OCAP or other community protocols (OCAP is a First Nations protocol that stands for Ownership, Control, Access and Possession As in who owns the research or info, who controls it, who accesses it, who possesses it?) If you’re interested in this, I encourage you to take the online course on OCAP, offered by the First Nations Information Governance Centre or FNIGC. Again, First Nations Information Governance Centre—the course is available on their web site. In your relationships, are you willing to take the time it takes to build trust? How many proverbial cups of tea are you willing to drink with your Indigenous partners before talking strictly business?

And #3 How to incorporate the fact that we are all related?

Look around, and then literally a-round, so you can bring yourself into the circle, where there is no hierarchy, try to get outside your linear thinking. Here’s what Black Elk said about circles. Black Elk was an Oglala Sioux leader, orator, writer. In the early 20th century, he wrote a book, and this is one thing he wrote:

“You have noticed that everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the Power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round…the sky is round, and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars. The wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours. The sun comes forth and goes down again in a circle. The moon does the same, and both are round. Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were. The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it is in everything where power moves.”

Let me end with one final quote from Chief Seattle, he was a warrior, a leader and orator from the Suquamish and Duwamish nation in what is now Washington state. This is from a speech he gave in the 1850s.

“Will you teach your children what we have taught our children? That the earth is our mother? What befalls the earth befalls all the sons of the earth.

This we know, the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.” This is wahkotowin.

Miigwetch, thank you.

I’ll be at the CIP booth today; please come by, I’d love to meet you in person. And one final plug for NVision, we’re looking to hire an intermediate Indigenous land use planner, let me know if you know someone who might be interested.

A member of Chapleau Cree First Nation, Jennifer David is of mixed ancestry and was born and raised in Omushkego/Treaty 9 territory (Northeastern Ontario). As a partner, senior consultant, and minority shareholder of NVision Insight Group, a majority Indigenous-owned consulting company, she oversees cultural awareness and competency programming under the banner of The Path. As a skilled and experienced communicator, researcher, published writer and facilitator, Jennifer brings energy, creativity, and professionalism to every project, driven by her commitment to the promotion of Indigenous communities and cultures, and to amplifying First Nations, Inuit and Métis voices.