Looking for learning in all the wrong places: urban Native youths’ cultured response to Western-oriented place-based learning

For Indigenous youth growing up in today’s Canadian cities, summer, non-formal learning programs developed around outdoor and/or environmental education themes offer the chance for reconnecting with ancestral territories. While tenable, few interpretive studies focus on youths’ engagement with such learning. This paper offers an analysis of the effects of one such program, in the process examining how discourses of primitivism and authenticity in place-based learning practice (emphasizing Western-oriented outdoor and environmental education) serve to challenge rather than benefit urban Native youth. Instead of interpreting youths’ response as a direct affront to the hegemony of Western education, I make the case for seeing this in connection with a long history of resistance to assimilating practices and in keeping with Cree traditions of orality. Through their actions in the process of learning, these youth contribute something vital to contemporary place-making and a growing Indigenous resurgence on the Canadian prairies.