Weyt-kp, Research Friends!

Kara ren skwekwst. In Gaelic, the pre-colonial language of my ancestors, my name means friend, or stemét in Secwepemctsín. But hello doesn't exist in Gaelic because blessings were used to honour the sacredness of encountering another soul. I share the Celtic blessing for the senses, translated by O’Donohue (1997), to honour our meeting:

May your body be blessed. 

May you realize that your body is a beautiful friend of your soul. 

And may you be peaceful and joyful and recognize that your senses are sacred thresholds. 

May you realize that holiness is gazing, feeling, hearing, and touching. 

May your senses gather you and bring you home.

May your senses always enable you to celebrate the universe and the mystery and possibilities in your presence here. 

Wandering | My Dad, whose name means ‘strong-rock’, taught my siblings and I how to wander in the forest of our minds, journeying from threshold to threshold to find meaning in each new experience. Wandering through the old growth forest of the Tsimshian, ‘the people inside the Skeena River’ in northern British Columbia, is also how I came to know the relational currency exchanged between neighbours and nature. 

Vacilando | As a young woman, separated by a continent from my father and the forest, I found myself at home in my neighbours’ dirt floor hut in war-torn rural El Salvador. The Spanish term vacilando refers to walking—or wandering—but with the understanding that visiting with the people you meet along the way is more important than your destination. 

Walking Together | Secwépemc Elder Mike Arnouse’s invitation to "walk together and learn not only our history and our ways, but each others’..." (ALBAA, 2011, p. v) is what drew me to TRU and to develop this study that honours the rich diversity of intercultural and intergenerational wisdom that we carry within us and between us.

Research Friends | In Celtic traditions, the role of the Anam Ċara, a friend of your soul, was often held by teachers. The nurturing shelter of a teacher who sees and cares for your soul is depicted in Celtic stories as a sacred threshold—a hidden place—where the façade of curated identity safely falls away and you come home to yourself. The sacredness, wholeness, and transformational quality of friendship that infuses our senses with tenderness and compassion is what informs my understanding of teaching, learning, and researching belonging in the distinctly heart-shaped campus of TRU.

Thompson Rivers University's vision of a campus of community members empowered to transform themselves, their communities, and the world, is built on intergenerational Secwépemc wisdom reflected in the term kw'seltktnews, the understanding that we are all related and interconnected with nature, each other, and all things. 

Belonging to an interconnected network of reciprocal relationships is vital to our capacity to learn, participate, and collaborate toward shared goals. Air, water, food, fire, and shelter "are the five basic elements that people need to survive. But to do more than just survive, to live and prosper as part of a community, we need one more thing: stories [to] nourish the soul" (Fonseca-Chávez et al., 2020, p. 269). Disconnection from our languages and stories that enable us to cultivate meaning from our experiences is trauma (Maté, 2018). But Ortega-Williams et al. (2021) powerfully posit that if we carry intergenerational trauma, then we also carry intergenerational wisdom.  

Conscious of generations of trauma caused by ethnocentric education systems and mapping methodologies — tools used to disposes Secwépemc peoples of the very land now occupied by Thompson Rivers University — this study takes a holistic, anti-deficit approach to overcoming “academic resistance to researching messy, multi-faceted subjects” so that “inter-cross-cultural mental framework[s]” can be more holistically understood (Brendtro et al., 2013; McIlwraith and Cormier, 2015; Page, 2021, p. 5; Smith, 2013). 

I introduce this research by honouring the interwoven tapestry of intergenerational and intercultural wisdom of the places I belong to that shape who I am and how I inhabit this place. Although sharing our stories is uncommon in academic research traditions, as a guest on the unceded and occupied territory of the Secwépemc peoples, honouring Secwépemc protocols is an act of integrity with who I am and the sacredness of our meeting and learning together at TRU: 

“When we introduce ourselves we share who our ancestors are and where we come from. This serves the purpose of identifying yourself, as well as your story. Remember that universities come into Secwépemc territory without introduction or telling their story. And then harm has happened” (Gottfriedson et al., 2019, p. 8).