GroundED

We're Anna and Andrew, and this is the landing page for our audio story, GroundED. This project comes as a cross-over between two courses we've taken together this year, Race, Culture, and Ethnicity in Education and of course Troubled Waters: Race, Law, and the Environment. Below you will find a synopsis of our project, the guiding questions that brought us here, and a link to give it a listen!

We recorded this story at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. This is the traditional, ancestral, and contemporary homeland of the Dakota people, specifically the Waȟpékhute band of the Dakota nation. Just a few miles south of campus is Bdote, which in English translates to “river confluence”, where Ȟaȟáwakpa often called the Mississippi River and the Mnísota Wakpá, or Minnesota River converge. This Bdote is the spiritual center of the Dakota world.

This place is the site of genocide and erasure through persistent and aggressive settler colonialism, and also of resistance. The American Indian Movement was birthed from Indigenous organizers in Minneapolis in 1968. Currently, the Twin Cities is home to one of the largest urban Native populations in the US.

We make this acknowledgment to affirm the sovereignty of the Dakota people and to pay respect to the land and all of our more than human relatives.

Our podcast is a brief exploration into Environmental Justice education, Land-based pedagogy, and traditional ecological knowledge, particularly as they are practiced in the Twin Cities. We were fortunate enough to get to speak with Keeli Siyaka, the Environmental Justice Educator and Organizer with the Lower Phalen Creek Project. Founded in 1997, the LPCP is a Native-led environmental conservation organization located in St. Paul, MN which partners with many community organizations and local government groups to restore and protect the land from Lake Phalen to the Mississippi River. Keeli not only spoke on her role with the LPCP but also about all of the different forms that learning can take and the importance of teaching students, particularly Black and Native students, the history of their ancestors.

When we began our project, we hoped to answer the following guiding questions:

1. What are the environmental education standards in the Twin Cities?

2. How are local environmental issues worked into the science curriculum in St. Paul?

3. How do environmental education standards impact what and how students are taught?

4. What is the overlap (if any) between K-12 Native Studies and Environmental Studies?

5. How does the location of schools impact what students are exposed to?

6. How common is it for graduates of St Paul public schools to become involved in environmental activism?

Although our focus shifted as our project developed and we did not end up answering all of these questions throughout our process, we think it is important to feature these guiding questions on our landing page as a way to share our idea development with you (the listener).