Where did I stumble across Dwayne Donald’s essay, “We Need a New Story: Walking and the wâhkôhtowin Imagination”? Someone must have mentioned it, or cited it, but who? The past week has been a whirlwind and I don’t recall where it came from. That’s okay. What matters is that I’m reading it.
Donald, a nêhiyaw (Cree) professor of education at the University of Alberta, starts by framing story “as a foundational way through which human beings express their understandings of the world and their place in it” (55). However, the stories usually told in schools “continue to perpetuate the damaging and divisive colonial legacies that result from relationship denial” (55). I think he means a denial of the relationships between people and the land, but also between people as well. Walking, Donald continues, is “a life practice that has the potential to enable relationship renewal” (55). He is inspired by the nêhiyaw concept of wâhkôhtowin, “which refers to enmeshment within kinship relations that connect all forms of life”—those are the kind of relationships that are denied by legacies of settler colonialism (55). “When human beings undertake walking as a life practice, the wâhkôhtowin imagination can be activated, wherein the networks of human and more than human relations that enmesh us become vivified and apparent,” he continues. “From this confluence of walking and the wâhkôhtowin imagination emerges the possibility of a new story that can give good guidance on how to live life in accordance with kinship relationality” (55).
Donald recalls a walk he took just before the summer solstice in 2008, a personal pilgrimage that was “the enactment of multiple wisdom teachings” shared with him over several years, teachings framed as stories “that tell of places as living relatives, who offer wisdom on how to live a good life” (55). “I had learned how to approach such sacred places with reverence and to honour the presences that reside there,” he writes. “I participated in ceremonial practices that feed the presences at these sites and noticed how people were, in return, given sustenance back” (55). The stories of such stories slowly became part of his own story (55).
His destination on that walk was the Viking Ribstones, buffalo stones that are a sacred site dedicated to the spirit of the buffalo (55). It is one of the few remaining sites on the prairies that still has buffalo stones in their original location, and it is a place of pilgrimage for nêhiyawak and others (55-56). Donald’s walk was “an intentional act of relational renewal”:
I walked to honour the spirit of the buffalo. I walked to step in the footprints of my ancestors and approach the site as they once did. However, attempting to renew these relations when so much has changed proved to be difficult. Instead of natural prairie, I walked on a gravel road. Instead of free-ranging herds of buffalo, I saw cattle behind barbed wire fences. Instead of the rich diversity of flora and fauna my ancestors knew, I saw monocrops, dugout sloughs and the occasional bird. (56)
Donald walked for five hours before he saw the hill where the Viking Ribstones are located. He squeezed through a barbed wire fence and crossed a meadow (trespassing on private land) before climbing that hill and making an offering (56). “I had visited this site several times before, but the act of walking to the site deepened my relationship to the place,” he writes. “I felt like the stones recognized me as a long-lost relative who had finally returned home” (56).
Standing on that hill and looking at the land, he noticed “that the relational psychosis that troubles Indigenous-Canadian relations was on display” all around him (56). The buffalo stones are “tangible remnants of an ancient story of kinship relationality” and representatives of “original treaties between human beings and all other forms of life” (56). “The Viking Ribstones are an expression of these original treaty commitments to honour the generosity of the buffalo,” he writes (56). However, when settlers arrived, “the story of ancient kinship relationality was gradually replaced by the emerging story of a Canadian nation and nationality,” and the land began to be exploited to build that country’s economy (56). The narrative of economic development taught that the needs of human beings “must always supersede the needs of all other forms of life,” a story “commonly referred to as Progress” (56-57). At the Ribstones site, these two stories are juxtaposed, and that juxtaposition “characterizes the pressing challenge faced by educators today”: the need for a new story, one “that can repair inherited colonial divides and give good guidance on how to proceed differently” (57). For Donald, “the emergence of a new story can be facilitated through the life practice of walking” (57).
Donald has been thinking about the relationship between movement and thought for decades. He knows he has to move in order to think creatively: “the rhythmic sway puts me in a meditative flow that attunes me to the diverse life energies that surrounds me. My mind becomes animated with a dynamic flux of thoughts and ideas” (57). He rushes to write down those ideas when he gets home, because the clarity he experiences while walking disappears when he sits down at his desk again. However, “the connections between knowing and moving have not been supported in my formal educational experience at any level,” he writes (57).
For Donald, walking enables an attunement to elemental relationships because it enables the walker to recognize the self “as intricately interwoven with the surroundings” in which the walk takes place. He cites Tim Ingold’s contention that walking is an intelligent activity, but that its intelligence “is distributed throughout the entire field of relations comprised by the presence of the human being in the inhabited world” (qtd. 58). “As we walk, we simultaneously step into the organic flow of knowledge and knowing that generates attunement to relationality,” he states (58).
Donald notes that wâhkôhtowin is usually translated into English as kinship or relationality: “In a practical way, wâhkôhtowin describes ethical guidelines regarding how you are related to your kin and how to conduct yourself as a good relative” (58) However, the term “also refers to more-than-human kinship relations” (58). That emphasis requires humans to understand themselves “as fully enmeshed in networks of relationships that support and enable their life and living” (58-59). Those relationships bring with them obligations as well (59). “Thus, following the relational kinship wisdom of wâhkôhtowin, human beings are called to repeatedly acknowledge and honour the sun, the moon, the land, the wind, the water, the animals and the trees (just to name a few animate entities) as, quite literally, our kinship relations, because we carry parts of each of them inside our own bodies,” he writes, noting that we need all of these for our own survival (59). A wise person, he continues, “works to ensure that those more-than-human relatives are healthy and consistently honoured” (59).
The etymological roots of the term wâhkôhtowin are important. It consists of multiple morphemes brought together:
The first one is “wâki,” which refers to something that is bent or curved. The second is “pimohtê,” which means to walk, but can be broken down to “pim” (movement) and “ohtê” (over land). Put together, then, “pim” and “ohtê” literally expresses walking as movement over land. Also included in wâhkôhtowin is “ito,” which connotes reciprocity. The ending “win” is a nominalizer, which I understand to mean that a verb (movement) is converted into a concept (noun). So when the original morphemes are placed side by side—wâki + pimohtê + ito + win—what is expressed literally is a “bent-walking-over-the-land-reciprocity-movement-concept.” (59)
Donald notes that the nêhiyaw poet Louise Halfe suggests that wâhkôhtowin means “our crooked good” (qtd. 59). It is a form of “crooked bending to honour life” and it “occurs while walking upon the earth. The act of walking activates the wâhkôhtowin imagination” (59).
Donald is inspired by this concept, but he sees education as “dominated by cultural assumptions that block meaningful and deep engagement with Indigenous understandings of knowledge and knowing,” blockages that are “symptomatic of the perpetuation of colonial logics founded upon relationship denial” (60). Settler colonial ways of thinking are founded on notions of mastery of “new worlds, new peoples, new species and unfamiliar ways of knowing” (60). They are “a centuries-long hegemonic process wherein a universalized model of the human being was imposed on people around the world” (60). Thus knowledge has become “written, objectified, desacralized, deplacialized and sedentary” (60). It’s become difficult to imagine other systems of knowledge or ways of being—other epistemologies or ontologies—and that struggle “is implicated in the deepest difficulties faced today in trying to live in less damaging, divisive and destructive ways” (60). “If we wish to take seriously the task of addressing the most troubling issues we face today, we must be willing to consider insights from knowledge systems that express alternative ways of being in the world,” he writes (60).
Those alternative ways of being in the world include walking—but walking as a way of coming to be recognized as a relative of the place where the walking happens (61). “As I walk, bent-over-holding-hands-in-reciprocity-with-all-my-relations, I am simultaneously imagining a new story to live by,” Donald writes (61). He leads people on walks beside the North Saskatchewan River in Edmonton, walks that “wake up something important inside of people that was put to sleep as they became educated. By walking and listening, people begin to perceive the world around themselves differently. They feel enmeshed in relationships. . . . They walk themselves into kinship relationality” (61).
These walks, he continues, are the most important contributions that he can make to “the complex task of repairing Indigenous-Canadian relations and renewing them on more ethical terms” (61). That task cannot be accomplished by Canadians learning about Indigenous peoples; rather, it requires engaging in those topics “in qualitatively different ways” (61). Walking won’t solve all of our problems, but it “is a fundamental way that human beings perceive the world and come to story their place in it” (61). “The intimate connections between movement and knowing need to be taken seriously if we wish to reconceptualize human life and living,” Donald concludes. “Walking and the wâhkôhtowin imagination can help us re-story ourselves—individually and collectively—as real human beings bent-over-holding-hands-in-reciprocity-with-all-our-relations” (61-62).
Donald’s essay is refreshing, because it gives me hope that I’m not on the wrong track in my research. I’m really interested in his use of Tim Ingold’s work, which I’ve read and blogged about but need to return to. I’m also really interested in the etymology of wâhkôhtowin that he provides. His bibliography is helpful as well, particularly the article on Louise Halfe’s book The Crooked Good he cites. For the first time in quite a while, I feel positive about what I’m doing. And you have no idea how good that feels.
Works Cited
Donald, Dwayne. “We Need a New Story: Walking and the wâhkôhtowin Imagination.” Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, vol. 18, no. 2, 2021, pp. 53-63.
