2020-2025 Activities

Land Education Incubator: Collaborators and a team of researchers at the University of Toronto will develop curriculum and materials for developing land education programs for youth and communities. This two-year project is funded by the Spencer Foundation, and intends to (1) provide workshops and resources to the collaborators creating their own land education programs, (2) create conditions for knowledge exchange between Indigenous and non-Indigenous land based education organizations, and (3) create a web-based toolkit for future land education programs.

Returning Indigenous Land: Three of the collaborators - Sogorea Te’, Metis in Space, and the Underground Center - have recently had land returned to them: Metis in Space through a Landraiser to purchase land; Sogorea Te’ through a municipal decree; and the Underground Center through land donations and 99-year leases. To learn about different approaches to Indigenous land return, this project will involve site visits, interviews and focus groups with stakeholders in the land return project, and collaborator meetings. This four-year study is funded by the SSHRC Insight Grant and seeks to encourage further land-return initiatives.

As part of this project, all five organizations in the Land Relationships Super Collective are working with researchers in the Tkaronto CIRCLE lab and librarian Desmond Wong to create a new digital community archive on land relationships. This archive, built on the Omeka platform, will include audio-visual and text materials from the many years of activity of each organization, with emphasis on how each organization has approached recovering land.

Youth in Relation to Returned Land: Sogorea Te’ will be developing a land education program for Indigenous, Black, and racialized youth living on Ohlone lands (Oakland). The curriculum for the afterschool and summer programs will include land and water-based learning activities, participatory visual activities, histories of Indigenous people in California, Ohlone language activities, and history of community organizing in the San Francisco Bay Area. This project is funded by the William T. Grant Foundation.