We want to repair our relationships with the Indigenous communities, and work towards co-creating trusting, safe, and reciprocal relationships with them. We hope to recreate the Forest and Nature School Practitioners Course, and co-create all future programming with Indigenous partners across Canada. In doing that, we hope that Indigenous and Western worldviews will have equitable voice and space in our programs, so that they are safe, meaningful, and culturally relevant for all participants.
Relationship with the Land is at the heart of what we do, and this Land is Indigenous Land. But the origins of the Child and Nature Alliance of Canada and Forest School Canada are rooted in white settler thinking and approaches. We are an organization currently led by white settlers, headquartered on the unceded traditional territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabe. We have imposed a settler colonial way of being with the Land because our programs were not co-created with Indigenous people. This approach means we perpetuate and benefit from colonization in the ways that we operate, and this causes harm.
