Culturally sustaining curriculum/education/pedagogy:

• I use the terms curriculum, education, and pedagogy to describe different parts of the same thread. Curriculum is the how we make the pedagogy happen, the education is what we, as educators and learners, both walk away with. I am inspired by many teachers: particulary bell hooks, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and those that work with young ones each and every day.

• By including culturally-sustaining (Ladson-Billings, Gay, Paris), it is acknowledgement that whatever is being delivered is doing so in a way that aims to not only be appropriate for the learners’ cultural background, but culturally enhancing and sustaining. It may include cultural stories, seeds, language, foods, elders, etc.

Land Back:

Mineral rights:

• Mineral rights is a term from colonial property law that breaks the Earth up into layers to be owned — minerals typically refer to what is underneath the surface, or in some circumstances deposited into mountains which were once underground. Historically, everything in the land underneath the surface was owned by the English Crown for their extraction. It is unique to Turtle Island that inviduals can own mineral rights.

• The economics of minerals is a dark and decieving world in how they are sold, negotiated, and extracted. Because of the centuries-long dependency on fossil fuels in many places, the first minerals that come to mind are often coal, oil, and gas. But, as we move towards different technologies, mineral rights is increasingly referring to the minerals of lithium, cobalt, nickel, and other rare minerals.

Owning class:

• Owning class refers to the class bracket of peoples that “own the means of production,” most often operating as the top hierarchy in the chain of labor through owning the buildings, the land, the labor, the corporations, while the majority of the population is working class. You can read more about class distictions HERE or explore it through Marxist theory.

• Because I was born into an owning-class family, I use this term to position myself in class. Doing so helps break the generational class patterns of not talking about money, lets others who might have class privilege see themselves reflected and move closer to claiming their own responsibility and healing, and is part of my practice of telling the truth so that people with different class experiences know this is part of my unseverable positionality from the start.

Reparations:

Root culture:

Settler/settler colonialism:

Turtle Island