Education program connects land to wellness
Hundreds of students attend Wellness Out Loud event
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Students from across the Grand Erie District School Board converged at The Gathering Place at Six Nations of the Grand River First Nation on Friday for the second annual Wellness Out Loud event to mark the start of Education Week and Mental Health Week.
“The whole day is about Indigenous ways of knowing and being for mental health,” said Jessie Hooper, principal leader of school culture and wellbeing at the GEDSB. “We really wanted students to connect and understand the land and all that Mother Nature gives us that is good for our health, and the need to care for the Earth so our health can be sustained.”
Maggie Baker, a GEDSB student trustee in her final year at Simcoe Composite School, said the day was a way to bring students together to understand land-based learning.
“We are learning how to manage our mental health in relation to the land, how it’s here to help us, along with strategies and coping mechanisms.”
Baker said she had not previously made a correlation between land-based learning and mental health but described the experience as “really impactful for us.”
Activities in which students took part included Haudenosaunee singing and dancing, cordage making, traditional medicines, making medicine pouches, and a Celestial Bear show inside a portable planetarium.
Former Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation giima (chief) Stacey Laforme – a best-selling poet who just had his second book published — read two of his poems to the students.
Here is an excerpt from Moments:
“I am no different than you. All our pain may be different, our hurt different, but we are the same. In the moment all seems lost, all hope seems gone. But it is not. It is in these moments – despair, anger, hurt and pain — that we must push away. Walk, run, talk, find something, find someone, but do not let that moment get you, rob you, take you. Do not let one moment claim you forever.”
Laforme said his poetry is about understanding who you really are.
“We have rules, laws, and processes we all have to respect, but we should never be afraid of who we are. That’s important.”
bethompson@postmedia.com
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