Wildsight Golden has signed up with Columbia Basin Environmental Education Network to participate in their Every Child Matters Year Long Learning Challenge.
The purpose of this challenge is to help deepen knowledge and extend the actions required to move towards truth and reconciliation beyond just one day, and help to enable real change over time.
By signing up, Wildsight Golden has committed to:
– picking a day/week over the coming year (Oct 1, 2021 – Sept 30, 2022) where you encourage your staff to wear orange and provide time, resources and/or opportunities each week for your staff to deepen their knowledge of local Indigenous culture, and engage in meaningful action
CBEEN is supporting our organization in this by providing us with a weekly email with a suggested Indigenous learning link that we can share and providing a lunchtime opportunity each season to come together virtually with other participants and Indigenous leaders for an opportunity to learn, share and connect. (among other supports)
They are looking forward to working with organizations and communities as we collectively try to deepen our understanding and take meaningful action towards positive change.
We received our first email challenge this week:
“Weytk / Ki?su?k kyukyit / Tawnshi – Thank-you for registering your organization, school or business for the Every Child Matters Year-long Learning Challenge, and in doing so, committing to taking time over the coming year to deepen your knowledge and understanding of Indigenous knowledge, culture and perspectives.
We are pleased to share that more than 60 organizations, schools and businesses representing over 800 people have committed to joining us on this journey. You can see these here: While most of these are from the Kootenay region of Southeast British Columbia where we call home, we are pleased to see many organizations joining us from further afield. We will leave registration open until October 15th. And each week following that we will highlight an organization that is taking part. 🙂
At the beginning of each week we will share a suggestion for Learning, Sharing and Reflecting that week. To ensure maximum engagement over the longer run, we’ll keep the core of this to 20-30 minutes, with opportunities for extension as your time allows. To get warmed up, for this week we will like to invite each of your team members to share your Learning Intentions in this shared spreadsheet for the year ahead.
We also invite you to learn from what others write, and reflect on this throughout the year. As you’ll see, in this same shared spreadsheet we’ve also added a worksheet for excellent Indigenous Learning Resources. As our time is somewhat limited, and we won’t be able to cover every excellent resource available, welcome you to add resources to this list that participants can review and engage with as their time allows.
Please share this message with your staff team.
We look forward to learning with you in the year ahead!
Jenna Jasek, District VP for Indigenous Learning and Equity, Rocky Mountain School District 6
Duncan Whittick, Executive Director, Columbia Basin Environmental Education Network (CBEEN)”
Wildsight Golden has signed on for this challenge because we believe that the healing of relationships with indigenous communities is extremely important to healing our environment and fighting climate change.
Indigenous communities have a close relationship with the environment and their historical knowledge must be at the centre of the climate action discussion.
“Many of the richest biodiverse regions are protected largely in part because of the resistance by Indigenous communities to those regions,” says Eriel Deranger, executive director of Indigenous Climate Action.
Indigenous people have a historical, spiritual and social relationship with the land and their science is key to understanding our connections to the land. Without including Indigenous science and leadership to combat our current climate crisis, we are lost.
“Indigenous peoples are repositories of learning and knowledge about how to cope successfully with local-level climate change and respond effectively to major environmental changes such as natural disasters,” says Myrna Cunningham Kain, chair of the Pawanka Fund.
Honouring Canada’s First Peoples, listening to their stories and working on reconciling the major trauma that colonization has had on their culture and knowledge is critical for reconciliation. Reconciliation is defined as: “the restoration of friendly relations” (Oxford dictionary) and reconciliation must happen so that we can work together to save our planet.
We would like to invite you, our Wildsight Golden Members to participate in this challenge with us. If this interests you, please go to our event page to register.
