Art Exhibition highlights how technology is enhancing First Nations education

By Kristin Grant

TORONTO—First Nations students from remote and rural communities had access to field trips and exposure to guest speakers through technology made available through the Art Gallery of Ontario’s (AGO) “Connecting with Our First Family” exhibition at the opening reception on May 9.

The exhibition, which features the artwork of Ojibwe youth Nyle Miigizi Johnston, is a collaboration between Taking IT Global and Connected North.

As Connected North/Taking IT Global employee Waukoman Pawis explains, “I make these connections with the schools, the teachers, and the students, and I connect them with the experiences that schools here in the south have access to.”

Pawis states students can “check out a zoo or go to a science centre that is so readily available and accessible to communities in the south. And a lot of the communities we work with are remote communities, fly-in communities that don’t have access to these services or field trips.”

Audience members got a first-hand look at the technology at work during the reception because there was a live link to one of the participating schools in Fort Frances.

The technology allows for so much more than the field trips. Pawis said it allows them to “introduce [the students] to amazing guest experts and content providers that if they were to travel up there, the cost to travel would be extremely high.”

Artist Nyle Miigizi Johnston, also known as Miigizi, is one of content experts. Through video conferencing technology, Miigizi is able to teach art, which is based in traditional teachings to youth in rural communities.

Miigizi’s artwork is in the woodland style and contains traditional teachings throughout the images. The main image for the exhibition is that of a deer (or wawaskesiw in Cree). The image seen above is available for sale on tee shirts through the art gallery.

“Through Anishinaabe teaching and stories, I have been taught that the dear carries and a big heart and the lesson of kindness,” Miigizi explains on the sales tag.

The wawaskesiw heart is central to the image as it flows into everything. To the crowd at the opening reception, Miigizi spoke with great reverence about how the deer makes a pact with the Creator to lay down its life for mankind, and provides for us in so many ways from the hide that clothes us, the meat that sustains us and the sinew which is part of ceremonial drums.

In the exhibit and on the Connected North website, there is video of this technology at work, also detailed explanation of the meaning and stories behind some of Miigizi’s work.

“We need the art because that is who we are,” says Mohawk youth Arianna Roundpoint.

Roundpoint shared with the crowd how her Grandfather “helped with the Mohawk translations of the Miigizi’s drawings, because now we will be distributing them into the schools where I see it being a great help to all of our youth, because we are visual learners.”

This artwork has been incorporated into learning tools from colouring pages and flash cards. These resources are in various Indigenous languages.

“The colouring sheets currently have a total of 10 different Indigenous languages,” says Taking IT Global co-founder Jennifer Corriero. “The teachings within these [colouring] books are gathered from Treaty 3 territory which is in Fort Frances. And also, there are fun things that have been created like bingo, animal bingo. It started with Ojibwe but then we started getting a lot of other language requests.”

This project is also helping preserving our languages.

“I see it as a step forward into the revitalization of our language,” says youth Adriana Roundpoint. “We are dwindling, we’re almost like the embers of that flame…as long as those embers are still there, that flame is still able to ignite at some point, as long as somebody puts a fan to it, or gives it a little boost. And so, with his artwork, that’s what I’ve seen. I’ve seen those embers getting fanned by his artwork.”

The Connecting with Our First Family exhibit is located in the Community Gallery of the Weston Family Learning Centre of the AGO and runs until September 30.