The Tikkun Indigenous Youth Project: A Land-based Well-being Retreat by Youth, with Youth, for Youth

Lakehead University’s Tikkun Indigenous Youth Project in northern Ontario/ Canada was a collaborative Indigenous youth leadership, community engagement, and well-being project that was designed to support Indigenous students who have to leave their northern home communities to pursue secondary schooling in Thunder Bay – a challenging, difficult, and risky journey for many. Through our collaborative research with high schools, youth role-models, and educators, we were able to provide the conditions whereby Indigenous youth gained opportunities to meet and gain strength with their Indigenous peers in culturally-focused activities, share stories in a holistic circle, and develop leadership skills while engaging in well-being practices and self-determining needs and actions. We ran the Indigenous Tikkun Youth Project to carve out action sites where young people from systemically oppressed and marginalized communities could self-determine their needs and actively contribute to collective healing, repair, and change through civic engagement in their school communities. We designed weekly Indigenous youth drop-in sessions, a leaders-intraining (LiT) program for self-selected Indigenous students, and our culminating Land-based well-being outdoor camp retreat. This chapter details the philosophy and purpose of the culminating Land-based wellbeing retreat, the Land-based outdoor leadership camp processes, the Leaders-in-Training strengths-based activities, and the responses of the youth participants, all decided, led, and engaged in by Indigenous youth, for Indigenous youth, and with Indigenous youth. The Tikkun Indigenous Youth Project | 162 This chapter focuses on a Land 1-based well-being retreat organized by, for, and with Nishnawbe2 youth in Thunder Bay, Ontario, as the culminating event of the Indigenous3 Tikkun Youth Project. Lakehead University’s Tikkun Indigenous Youth Project was designed to provide a culturally safe (Cooke, 2018; Hare & Pidgeon, 2011), holistically healing (Castellano, 2006; First Nations Health Authority, 2015; First Nations Information Governance Centre, 2014), and open/welcoming space (Korteweg & Bissell, 2016) where Indigenous youth would be able to decide by/for/with themselves what civic or community engagement means to them as Indigenous youth in Canada. Civic education was reconceptualized as a space for Indigenous youth to decide what actions they wanted to claim in order to start decolonizing education at this critical time of Canada’s post-Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) era. We felt compelled to try and improve Indigenous civic engagement education as we were already involved with many Indigenous education projects and knew how difficult and colonial education systems were for Indigenous youth across Canada. As stated in their own words, the Indigenous youth writers of the Feathers of Hope report (Provincial Advocate for Children & Youth, 2014) had many testimonials of how devastating and damaging colonialism has been on Indigenous communities and Indigenous youth’s futures: With these deeply internalized negative beliefs we carry within ourselves, how can we be expected to feel confident enough to be able to achieve the dreams we had as small children, before the shabby reality of our life situations set in? (Provincial Advocate for Children & Youth, 2014, p. 70) We felt compelled as education researchers to address the role of education, specifically civic engagement education, in this era of the post Truth & Reconciliation Commission’s (2015) Calls to Action for educators (#62 and #63). However, we also knew that seeking civic engagement education with/ by/for Indigenous youth as non-Indigenous settler-researchers does not come without many complexities and difficult implications. As described by Korteweg and Bissell (2016), [I]t is highly problematic to design and implement a research project 163 | The Tikkun Indigenous Youth Project whose primary goal is to support civic engagement when Indigenous youth have been told and taught, [explicitly or implicitly,] that their communities, systems of government, Elders as wisdom leaders, languages, laws and protocols are all at a deficit to Western models of citizenship. (p. 19) The Lakehead University Tikkun site is located in Thunder Bay and focused on northern4 Nishnawbe youth who have no choice but to leave their communities and families in the Far North of Ontario in order to “get an education” in this city’s high schools. “Getting an education” has become, for many northern students, a short-hand expression for a rite of passage of life in the city. This passage either results in the successful completion of secondary school before the age of 20, dropping out, or being “forced out” (Tuck, 2011) by racism and extreme alienation, thus causing the youth to return home to their northern community without many options for an education, a job, or a promising future. Thunder Bay has long been a critical case study of the continuing colonialism and inequities against Indigenous youth in Canadian education systems that reproduce oppression and systemic racism (Hare & Pidgeon, 2011); dysfunctional bureaucracies that govern daily life and needs of housing, food insecurity, chronic poverty, and lack of access to basic services such as dental and healthcare (Macdonald, 2017; Talaga, 2017); and desperate mental health conditions of illnesses, homesickness, loneliness, and social alienation that are real and compounding for many northern Indigenous youth (Gardam & Giles, 2016). We primarily focused on serving northern, Nishnawbe youth who have no choice but to leave their communities and families in order to “get an education” in urban (provincial) high schools, a phenomenon that impacts most First Nations communities across Canada. This risky predicament continues because most northern or rural First Nations, such as those in the Nishnawbe Aski Nation (NAN) territories, do not have the federal funding or capacity to run their own on-reserve community-based high schools (Parriag, Chaulk, Wright, & MacDonald, 2011), which means that most Nishnawbe Indigenous youth have to leave their homes to pursue secondary education in towns and cities (Richards, 2014). Indigenous youth’s dislocation from their communities then subjects them to multiple risks, harms, and dangers: institutionalized racism in schools, Eurocentric cognitive imperialism in the curriculum (Battiste, 2013), teacher deficit perceptions of academic abilities, psychological isolation in alienating classrooms, and The Tikkun Indigenous Youth Project | 164 racist abuse or physical aggression on the bus, streets, or school hallways (Richards, 2014; Talaga, 2017). These unsafe conditions can all lead to serious educational disengagement or being forced out from achieving a high school diploma, resulting in a significant loss of talent, ability, and hope (Neeganagwedgin, 2013; Tuck, 2011). From 2000 to 2011, seven NAN youth, now referred to as the “Seven Fallen Feathers” (Talaga, 2017), flew hundreds of kilometers away from their communities and families and died while attending school in Thunder Bay. The youths’ untimely deaths led to the longest Ontario coroner’s inquest where “three of the five river deaths could not be explained” (Macdonald, 2017, para. 37) and from which a list of 200 recommendations were made to all municipal institutions and services that failed in their duty to protect the city’s most vulnerable, Indigenous students. These unresolved deaths continue to increase the racial tensions and gulf of misunderstandings between non-Indigenous settler-residents and Indigenous peoples. The deaths also instill fear and mistrust of schools for the physical, mental, and cultural safety of Indigenous youth (Macdonald, 2017; Talaga, 2017). We believe Thunder Bay is the bellwether for the educational challenges, risks, and dangers that many Indigenous students face in urban centres and towns across Canada (see Talaga’s Massey Lectures, 2018). Thunder Bay is also a prime site for teachers and educators’ civic responsibilities in reconciliationas-education (Korteweg & Fiddler, 2018). We follow Senator Murray Sinclair’s wise counsel (Sinclair, 2015) that reconciliation by Canadian settler society has to start and be driven by teachers and education systems; educators, curriculum and pedagogies have to proactively acknowledge and repair the damages and injustices instilled by the Indian Residential School (IRS) system that continue to harm Indigenous youth and communities and perpetuate neo-colonialism in mainstream schools. In this chapter, we present our Tikkun Youth Project contribution of a model that includes a Land-based well-being retreat that was designed and implemented by Nishnawbe youth, with Nishnawbe youth, and for a collective gathering of youth strengths and healing while “getting an education” in the city of Thunder Bay. We outline the key components of this retreat’s design, including a youth-to-youth mentorship process and youthled activities that create a culturally safe space for positive engagement with peers and create the conditions for youth to decide by/for themselves as a community what they want for collective strength and civic engagement. We conclude the chapter by providing recommendations for educators, 165 | The Tikkun Indigenous Youth Project community organizers, and school equity activists on how to co-design and facilitate a Land-based well-being retreat by and with youth to support the selfand collective-determination of marginalized students who continue to face serious risks and barriers in their rights to “get an education.” Year Three of the Lakehead University Tikkun Indigenous Youth Project In the third and final year of the Tikkun Indigenous Youth Project, we focused on one urban high school (provincial jurisdiction) and their FourDirections Program for northern Indigenous youth – a program focused on keeping students in school and