Animal Teachings Kit from Indigenous Elders

Yesterday I arrived home to find a box at my doorstep from Canada. This has been an ongoing theme over the last two years. So many packages from Canada!

The box contained an Animals Teaching kit from the Indigenized Expressive Arts Therapy program in Manitoba. The kit was put together by one of the Metis elders in the program. I’m just stunned by the beauty of this teaching tool.

There’s a quote on the cover of the teaching manual that I’ve learned to be profoundly true over the last year. I’ll carry with me in my work in the world:

“If you talk with the animals, they will talk with you and you will know each other. If you don’t talk with them, you will not know them, and what you do not know, you fear. What one fears, one destroys.” —Chief Dan George

I joined the Indigenized program because I know how important my relationship to both art and nature have been in my own healing journey. The program helped me figure out how to integrate these elements into my work with others in a way that is grounded in sustainable and time-tested practices and traditions.

But as you can imagine, this year of experiential learning filled with ceremonial healing practices offered so much more than I ever could have anticipated. Mainly, I’m waking away totally humbled and filled with profound respect for the resilience, creative capacity, and endless generosity of the people from nations that have experienced unfathomable ruptures and trauma. And I’m so grateful that I was allowed to experience such beauty and belonging as a non-Indigenous person.

I’ve come to fully appreciate that the quality of our relationships with all the life forms of this earth—other people, the trees, all the creatures, and sources of sustenance—is what matters most. And that we really can regenerate these severed relationships if we tend to them.

And that this work of tending—in all its myriad forms— is everything now. It’s good for the earth, good for your heart, good for our children and communities.