Taking Good Care
I stopped to watch a flying insect walking on the ground. One of the children noticed and watched with me. I wondered aloud what the bug was doing. Why wasn’t it flying? Bugs usually fly away when we get close to them. The child replied, “I think his wings are wet.” I agreed and said that a lot of insects can’t fly if their wings are wet. We watched the bug walk across the ground and attempt to climb some blades of grass. I asked the child what kind of bug he thought it was. He told me it was a wasp. I responded that I wasn’t sure because wasps have a lot of yellow stripes, and this one doesn’t. He thought for a moment and said, “maybe it’s a bee.” We didn’t want him to get stepped on, so the child decided we should move the bee. I told him that I didn’t want to pick the bee up with my hand because I didn’t know if it was a stinging bee, so he suggested using a stick. We turned to look for a stick or a longer wood chip, but when we turned back, the bee was gone. We looked around the area, but we couldn’t find him. I said that his wings must have dried so he could fly away because he should be easy to find if he had walked away. After searching a minute more, the child agreed with me and went to play.
I believe that in learning how to care for our more-than-human relations we learn to care for each other. If we believe that the bee is worthy of care and attention, wouldn’t it make sense that the same would apply to a peer? If we are required to care for each other, why are we not required to care as deeply for our more-than-human relations?
Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013) reminds us how young children often use personal pronouns (he/she/they) for everything. They offer “intention and compassion – until we teach them not to” (p. 57). As we get older, living things are reduced to being an “it” which allows us to reframe them as being somehow less than, and not worthy of the same care. “Saying it makes a living land into ‘natural resources.’ If a maple is an it, we can take up the chain saw. If a maple is a her, we think twice” (Kimmerer, 2013, p. 57).
Many Indigenous languages are verb-based, which means that things are described by their relationship to other things, or by their use (Styres, 2011). With noun-based languages (such as English) we are able to create an objectification of things that we should be in relationship with. When we do not have the context of how we are in relationship with the things around us, we are able to deny the interconnectedness of the land, our more-than-human relations, and ourselves (Styres, 2011).
As a part of our living inquiries in the BC Early Learning Framework (2019) we are invited to explore pathways involving social responsibility and how we are connected to everything around us. It states that “learning is not an individual act, but happens in relationship with people, materials, and place” (p. 67). To be in relationship with a place, we should consider the Indigenous definition of land and place as put forth by Anja Kanngieser and Zoe Todd (2020). They tell us that in Indigenous philosophy land is not just a physical place, but also an abstract space as it is “conceptual, experiential, relational, and embodied” (p. 386).
When we consider our more-than-human relations (both plants and animals) living on and with the land, how can we be separate from them? We can’t. Whether you look at it from a settler or Indigenous viewpoint, we rely on the land for everything. The land and our more-than-human relations feed and clothe us. If we do not have ground cover like “weeds,” the soil will eventually erode or become infertile (Frick & Johnson, 2002). We will be unable to grow food. If we do not have the pollinators, like our friend the bee, both edible plants and “weeds” will be unable to grow. This is why it is so important to teach the children in our care to live with the land and our more-than-human relations in a good way. To take good care.
References
British Columbia Ministry of Education, Ministry of Children and Family Development, and Ministry of Health. (2019). British Columbia Early Learning Framework. https://www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/education/early-learning/teach/earlylearning/early_learning_framework.pdf
Frick, B. & Johnson, E. (2002). Weeds – When are they a good thing? Organic agriculture centre of Canada, faculty of agriculture. https://www.dal.ca/faculty/agriculture/oacc/en-home/resources/pest-management/weed-management/organic-weed-mgmt-resources/weeds-good.html
Kanngieser, A. & Todd, Z. (2020). From environmental case study to environmental kin study. History and Theory, 59(3), 385-393. https://doi.org/10.1111/hith.12166
Kimmerer, R. W. (2013) Braiding sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the teachings of plants. Milkweed Editions.
Styres, S. D. (2011). Land as first teacher: A philosophical journeying. Reflective Practice, 12(6), 717-731. https://doi.org/10.1080/14623943.2011.601083
“Can we unlearn the language of objectification and throw off colonized thought?”
(Kimmerer, 2017, para. 19)
While I hope we are beginning to see some shifts in education, it seems progress and development type narratives are still pervasive in many early educational settings and I think that works to perpetuate binary logics, like nature/culture, subject/object, or self/other (human or more-than). It can be easy as educators trained in ‘child-centered’ approaches to view children (active subjects) learning about nature (passive objects), and I think in this way we risk viewing nature as a resource to exploit or manage or simply a backdrop to children’s learning, not to mention dismissing more-than-human agency and relational ways of knowing. I appreciate you drawing attention to Kimmerer’s writing about the grammar of animacy and the importance of language. I have been intentionally trying to avoid ‘it’ when referring to the multiple beings in Yard, but I definitely have my stumblings, however I do often hear the children using pronouns or giving names to those more-than-human they encounter.
Two past UVic educators, Kelsey Wapenaar and Aideen DeSchutter, wrote an article that you might find interesting. In it they think with Kimmerer’s writing and a community garden plot of ‘weeds’, Becoming Garden: https://journals.uvic.ca/index.php/jcs/article/view/18268
Reference
Kimmerer, R. W. (2017, June 12). Speaking of nature. Orion Magazine. https://orionmagazine.org/article/speaking-of-nature/
Hi Sherri Lynn,
Thanks for responding. I actually already read Becoming Garden! I went down a research rabbit hole in the Journal of Childhood Studies.
I have also been working on avoiding “it” when referring to the others in our garden. I’ve noticed that it’s common in English (or in North American culture, at least) to assign specific genders to some objects and beings, no matter their sex or level of animacy. For example, a car is a she, ladybugs are she, bears are he unless they’re obviously a mama bear, and so on. I’ve been noticing it in myself when I use a pronoun for an animal. It’s an interesting linguistic anomaly.
Hannah