Dr. Kim Anderson, Dr. Sheri Longboat and Dr. Brittany Luby are the driving force behind Nokom’s House, a new lab in development at the University of Guelph. Together with a community of elders they are establishing an indigenous learning, sharing, teaching space which will be using relational pedagogies, community research, and land-based learning to make home for cultural recovery, inter-generational training, and the creation of indigenous futurities.

On the show we hear why there is a need for Nokom’s House within the academic setting, what the cultural architecture of safety can look like for marginalized students, the roles of women, especially older women, have within indigineous communities, and also why there needs to be spaces specifically for indigineous people on the University of Guelph campus, within the city of Guelph, and further afield.

Again spaces like this are truly inspiring for me. I end up with so many questions and hopes. What can settler folks learn from spaces like this, and how can we take the lessons and direction from indigenous folks and bring some cultural change to the spaces we create now and into the future? How do we decompose the structures we’ve created that actively separate folks from the land and from our more-than-human relationships? More questions than answers, of course.

Learn more about how you can support what they are doing here.