Early childhood pedagogy based on relationality rather than separation could serve as a form of resistance to an extractive relationship with the more-than-human worldThis theoretical paper focuses on young children’s relations with Burnaby Mountain in British Columbia, Canada and calls for a critical examination of the curriculum used in the childcare centers located on the mountain. Burnaby Mountain, which is on unceded Indigenous Coast Salish territories, is a potential site for the location of an oil pipeline; and test drilling for a tunnel through the mountain has already occurred. Indigenous and other environmental activists are protesting this development.
Much of Burnaby Mountain is second growth forest and is under the management of the local municipality as a designated protected conservation land. This designated status is not without controversy, as “designation” reflects colonial dispossession of Indigenous lands. Other colonial practices, along with accompanying material artefacts (maps, travel logs, almanacs, etc.), represent additional controversial ways of defining Indigenous land. Measurements, calculations, and geologic surveys led to viewing the British Columbia mountains as objects of knowledge and open to extraction. The pipeline proposal is consistent with this view of the mountains.
The author, who worked with the Burnaby Mountain childcare centers as pedagogical mentor, suggests that children’s experiences with the mountain and what they learn about the mountain should be recognized, respected, and integrated into the curriculum. The children’s view of the mountain includes an alternative to the normalization of the colonial human-centric and extractive framework and is more in keeping with the Indigenous view of the mountain. The children’s experience of the mountain, however, also includes an awareness of the protest events. The author presents this paper as an attempt to think through the separations of the protest and extractive events on the mountain from the children’s lessons – or learnings -- on this same mountain.
Observations of the children indicated that their learnings can’t be easily contained within a single way of knowing the mountain. At times, children engage in dialogues with and about the liveliness of rocks. They see the rocks as becoming entangled with moss and other “more-than-human life.” Children use such words as “eating,” “helping,” and “drinking rain” to describe rocks’ liveliness. Their way of thinking about the rocks and the moss erases the life/non-life dualism. The author refers to this way of thinking as “geontological world-making” and notes how it unsettles human-centric modes of learning.
The author recognizes the growth of nature/forest kindergartens and appreciates their focus on connecting children with nature, but suggests that their curricular approach fails to adequately address difficult assumptions about colonial thinking. Such assumptions allow for Indigenous displacements and environmental degradation. The author proposes a curricular approach that builds on children’s everyday affective experiences with the more-than-human world. These experiences are often relational rather than divisive. Tapping into the relational aspects of these experiences can serve as a form of resistance to the more normalized human-centric and extractive relationship with the natural world.
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