What Does It Really Mean? :Creative Journal #3

Growing up in a small farm town one would have thought we would have learnt about the land, how we live off the land, rely on the land, and how to be good to the land but that was not the case. Creating this creative journal like two others before this was a mind-opening journey and recognization of my past, present, and future. Throughout this course, the word disrupt has played a major role in how I view not only class projects but my everyday life. Using the quietly powerful word to begin thinking about commonsense ideas of the “Canadian” wilderness started with Newberry’s quotation of Jacques Derrida in the reading “Canoe Pedagogy and Colonial History: Exploring Contested Spaces of Outdoor Environmental Education“. The quotation said “…there is no place outside such cultural practices from which nature can be objectively known. Even when our relation to nature seems most immediate, it is profoundly shaped by the narratives, knowledges, and technologies that enable experience” (p.15).

I tried to represent the quote above as well as the importance of acknowledging the action of disruption through disrupting images taken of what can be coined “the wilderness” in a white settler viewpoint. Through the use of photoshop, I began creating a story that I had not planned for. The first image above I titled “But What Does it Really Mean?”, through this image I wanted to portray my outdoor ed experience. The definition of wilderness represents my outdoor ed teacher in the way he had a very eurocentric mindset about the land and what one needed to do in order to survive on the land. The representation of where the definition lies tells a story within itself. The school systems, politics, and many other things that settlers have deemed their “own” always need labels, you can’t enjoy something unless you know what it is, so those labels and definitions are always going to be in the background putting labels on everything even in the “wild”. The second image above I titled “Breathing Down Natures Back” due to the western idea of wilderness and that it is a getaway, a place to find one’s self, away from reality, etc. To me, the “wilderness” in this context does not exist because the hum city center just a few miles away from where one may label it as the wild can still be heard or all the trees and landscape around you has been strategically planned by humans. This is how I felt within my outdoor ed experience as we just went to a campsite and learnt how to “survive” with all of our packed food wrapped in plastic and warm cosy sleeping bags. Nature should not be one’s “break from the real world” because what does that even mean? The third image above I titled “Flocks” and it has the same concept of “Breathing Down Natures Back” where one may believe they are in the “wilderness” but once they look up what do they see? They see flocks, but what kind of flock is it? Their idea of a place untouched/undisturbed by humans is interrupted by “Flocks”.