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Focus C: Land and Worldviews

Personal Connections
with the Land

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\n Focus Question: Option C.\n

\n How does the Indigenous understanding of land and land rights highlight gaps in the Western system of land ownership?\n

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Text 01

Something in the Water

\n There's Something in the Water touches not just upon the environmental\n racism of the Indigenous peoples, but also upon their motivations for\n protecting the land threatened by such injustice.\n

\n Unlike the motivations of someone with a Western perspective, the\n Sipekne'katik First Nation peoples do not protest against these\n actions simply to protect property or resource, instead they do it to\n preserve a fundamental relationship they share with the land. Their\n relationship with the land is one of mutualism, as opposed to the more\n parasitic relationship seen in Western culture.\n

\n \"It wouldn't matter if you had gold. You can't drink gold. You can't\n drink money.\"\n

\n The land provides the Sipekne'katik people with home, resource, and\n community, and in turn they provide it with offerings, protection, and\n reverence. This symbiotic relationship is the core of their belief,\n that the most fundamental source of life, the land, is the most\n valuable thing.\n

\n This exemplifies the key dissonance seen in Western society, a\n disconnect between what we value and what is truly most important to\n our lives.\n

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Text 02

The Rez Sisters

\n Throughout the play, Marie Adele interacts with Nanabush, a Trickster\n spirit who appears as a seagull and a nighthawk. In Western education,\n I learned to categorize nature as distinct from human experience—birds\n were biological entities, death was a medical event, and spiritual\n experiences were purely metaphorical. But The Rez Sisters presents\n land as an active participant with agency and voice.\n

\n Marie Adele's interactions with Nanabush are not framed as delusion or\n symbolism. When the spirit calls to her, she responds directly, \"I\n can't fly away. I have no wings. Yet.\" This is a conversation with the\n land itself. Her cancer, from a Western clinical perspective, makes\n her experience one of purely symptoms and decline. But the Indigenous\n framework in the play characterizes her death as a transition guided\n by the land—not a failure of medicine.\n

\"I can't fly away. I have no wings. Yet.\"

\n This difference is fundamental. Western thinking positions humans as\n separate from nature, with land serving as a passive resource for\n human activity. Indigenous worldviews in the play demonstrate land as\n conscious, active, and relational. The dissonance isn't just an\n abstract belief—it shapes how we understand our responsibilities, our\n deaths, and our place in the natural world. Where Western view-points\n see resources to manage, Indigenous perspectives sees a vital\n relationship.\n

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Personal Connection

My Relation to Place

\n My childhood home in Burlington had a backyard that was connected to\n Kerncliff park. For years, there was no fence. An apple tree in my\n backyard attracted deer regularly, and animals traveled without\n restriction between \"my yard\" and the \"wild\" park. I lived as an equal\n with the animals that ate from that tree —they ate the apples, we\n enjoyed seeing them, and the distinction between our space and theirs\n was non-existent.\n

\n When we moved, the new owners built a fence soon after. At the time, I\n thought little of it—I no longer lived their, and had no reason to\n care what they did with \"their\" land. But understanding Indigenous\n perspectives on land exposes what that fence actually represented, a\n Western label of ownership. The fence acted to sever an existing\n relationship between living things and that land. The deer lost access\n to their food source, and the land was made distinctly seperate from\n the land of the park. It replaced a system that supported all things\n with one that only worked to reinforece a label of ownership.\n

\n This is the physical manifestation of the difference in worldview. The\n fence embodies a Western assumption that humans should control and\n limit land, as opposed to sharing it. It's not soley about deer nor\n apples, it is instead about a fundamental belief about the natural\n world that prioritizes ownership above all else.\n

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References

Works Cited

Highway, Tomson. The Rez Sisters. Fifth House Publishers, 1988.

\n Page, Elliot, and Ian Daniel, directors. There's Something in the\n Water. 2019.\n

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Focus C: Land and Worldviews

Personal Connectionswith the Land

Text 01

Something in the Water

Text 02

The Rez Sisters

Personal Connection

My Relation to Place

References

Works Cited

Personal Connections
with the Land