Grappling with the mess : a case study of a settler-led organization navigating commitments to reconciliation at the UBC Farm Wonders summer camps

Educational organizations across Canada are increasingly seeking to respond to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action by incorporating Indigenous perspectives, knowledges, and practices into their programming. While these efforts are often undertaken with care and good intentions, less is understood about what emerges as organizations attempt to enact reconciliation within existing institutional structures. This thesis examines these questions through a case study of the university-affiliated Farm Wonders summer camps, a children’s outdoor education program operating on unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) territory at the UBC Farm. Drawing on the principles of participatory action research, this study integrates semi-structured interviews and focus groups with research participants, participant observation, field notes, and reflexive journaling to explore how land-based and Indigenous-informed educational approaches were understood and practiced within the camps. The researcher occupied a dual role as both a Children's Program Assistant and the primary researcher throughout the summer of 2024, shaping what was recorded and interpreted. Findings reveal that staff aspirations toward reconciliation-oriented practice were frequently accompanied by uncertainty, hesitation, contradiction, and questions regarding knowledge, authority, legitimacy, and relationships with land. Informed by scholarship from the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective and Cash Ahenakew’s metaphor of grafting ontologies, the thesis interprets these tensions as more than logistical or pedagogical challenges. Findings suggest that introducing Indigenous-informed practices into settler institutions is simultaneously necessary and insufficient, as deeper ontological and epistemological assumptions continue to shape how people understand learning, authority, and human relationships with land. Rather than offering a model for achieving reconciliation, this thesis provides an honest account of what reconciliation-oriented institutional transition from the inside can look like in practice: aspirational, relational, uncertain, and ongoing. Guided by Dustin Louie and Kari Grain's concept of relentless incrementalism, it understands this work as one increment in a longer sequence of organizational learning and institutional transformation. This thesis contributes to broader conversations about outdoor education, organizational change, and the challenges of fostering different ways of relating within settler-led educational spaces.