Indigenizing the Alternative Campus Tour at York University,Toronto,Canada

Abstract

This article presents the Alternative Campus Tour at York University, Toronto, Canada, as a land acknowledgement that critically engages with the neoliberal university and contributes to the indigenization efforts on and of the campus. This article also explores the potential of re-wording common-day academic concepts and words as a means of decolonization. Words and names can lack the animacy and intimacy that are necessary in addressing the current social justice and sustainability crisis. Translated and unique words and concepts from Indigenous languages hold room for innovation. They convey a consistent message of interconnectedness between the human and more-than-human worlds. This article recognizes that some universities have adopted Indigenous-inspired or Indigenous names for various campus attributes. But this article also points to the practice of incorporating Indigenous words, concepts and expressions as routine features on the campus tour rather than confining them to specific disciplines, courses and programmes.

Introduction

I have thought about and studied the place I teach, the York University Keele Campus in Toronto, Canada, for many years, but not in a systematic or consistent way. It has been more about curiosity, a love of learning about and interrogating the familiar sites I pass by in the everyday, such as artwork in the shapes of statues, sculptures, and paintings, the names of buildings, faculties and departments, the planned and unplanned flora and fauna, and the architectural history of campus. Much of my knowledge and many of my ideas are contained in the Alternative Campus Tour, a tour I use in my pedagogy, the courses I teach, and on the public tours I conduct periodically for university members, visiting academics, Indigenous groups, and the general public. Some of the information on the tours is contained in previous publications and on a website that tells different stories about the campus (Bardekjian et al., 2012; Sandberg, 2015; York University, n.d.).

The basic premise of the Alternative Campus Tour is to pose critical questions about the campus and to present Alternative visions. It is about imagining a different world, about re-worlding, seeing the world as constantly evolving in infinite directions. Over time, it has inevitably been about an engagement with the Indigenous presence or lack thereof on campus. This article is a reflection of the evolution of the tour in that direction. It proposes the Alternative Campus Tour as a form of land acknowledgement that goes beyond mentioning the traditional Indigenous holders of the campus lands and the treaties associated with them but that centres a closer examination, engagement and understanding of the campus lands from Indigenous perspectives.

I write from the perspective of a non-Indigenous scholar with ancestral roots in Sweden and an educational and academic career in Canada over the last 50 years. Over the years, I have supported and co-written with Indigenous scholars and students in different capacities, including the Alternative Campus Tour, where Indigenous faculty and community members have collaborated on specific projects. In this article, I point to some of these efforts as well as reflect on my aspiration to broaden and deepen them in the future.

I begin the article by situating the Alternative Tour in the three-part spectrum of indigenization developed by Gaudry and Lorentz (2018). I then explore the Tour as a land acknowledgement, point to some key literature, and recount their contributions, tensions, and limitations in promoting indigenization. The next section introduces the history and some of the content of the Alternative Campus Tour and its growing indigenization efforts and focus on Indigenous landscapes. I proceed by introducing the concept of re-wording or “righting words” (Sinclair, 2022, p. 93) as a means to critique current names and concepts used on campus. I conclude by pointing to the contributions that Indigenous concepts and words, in particular the expression all my relations, can make to the indigenization of the university campus. I draw primarily on sources from Turtle Island, North America, given their relevance and proximity to the Alternative Campus Tour, and Aotearoa New Zealand, because of its universities’ pioneering efforts in Indigenous namings and re-namings. The examples carry broader lessons and also suggest that there are other lessons to be learnt in other geographical contexts, such as, for example, Australia and Scandinavia—some of which I note.

A theoretical positioning

Gaudry and Lorentz (2018) classify the different efforts to indigenize university campuses in Canada into three categories, Indigenous inclusion, Indigenous reconciliation, and Indigenous decolonization. The inclusion model is a policy that advocates for an increase in the number of Indigenous staff, students and faculty in the academy. It is an important model, but it is limited in that it routinely incorporates Indigenous people into a system that is hostile and foreign to them. The reconciliation model puts Indigenous and Canadian ideals on an equal footing, striving to create a new and wider consensus. It insists that some elements of Indigenous content be infused in all University curricula, an example being so-called Indigenous course requirements that are mandatory for all students. The decolonization model is the most radical. It envisions a complete transformation of the academy and the promotion of a balance of power between Indigenous and Canadian academic traditions, where both ideals are respected and included in teaching curricula and research programmes. Of these models, the inclusion model is by far the most common, though it is, as Gaudry and Lorentz (2018) point out, more often talked about than acted upon.

Settler academics can support the inclusion model by lobbying for the hiring of Indigenous scholars and to offer to co-research and write with Indigenous scholars and community members. As for reconciliation, settler academics can foreground and put on an equal footing rather than footnote Indigenous perspectives on whatever they may be teaching. They can also incorporate Indigenous dimensions in all their courses, such as I do when teaching environmental history, political ecology and environmental planning. But indigenization is also about decolonization, that is, moving towards a more radical revisioning. Decolonization can be treaty- or resurgence-based (Gaudry & Lorentz, 2018). The former takes treaties seriously and acknowledges Indigenous sovereignty and governance systems as equal to colonial legal and governance structures. The latter, by contrast, recognizes and urges a strengthening of ceremony, prayer, language, and ancestral connections to promote Indigenous decolonization. In this situation, as Sinclair (2022, p. 95) puts it, the “righting” of European-derived names that elevate settler colonial history and ignore the histories of Indigenous peoples, names that are often hidden in plain sight, can play an important role.

There are Indigenous scholars who argue that there is an element of incommensurability or incompatibility with advancing decolonization in a settler university system. The incommensurability can only be resolved through a dual university structure where Indigenous academics are accorded their own governance structure, budget, curriculum, and land-based courses and degrees (Gaudry & Lorentz, 2018; Tuck & Yang, 2012). I appreciate this position but feel, humbly, that the boundaries are not absolute and that ally- and settler-initiated and curated initiatives, such as an Alternative Campus Tour, can help support and advance the objectives of a resurgence decolonization agenda. I also understand that such a Tour may cooperate, complement and stand in solidarity with other attempts to indigenize the campus as articulated in formal and informal policies led by Indigenous groups on campus.

The Alternative Campus Tour as land acknowledgement

The Alternative Campus Tour concept can be seen as a land acknowledgement as defined by Anishinaabe (a group of culturally-related First Nations inhabiting the Great Lakes region, Canada and USA) scholar Deborah McGregor and her former student Emma Nelson. Land acknowledgements, they write, should:

provide a chance to bring awareness of surroundings into space which otherwise might not address them [and] . . . draw audiences into thinking about the spaces they share with others . . . with all the complexities of historical and ongoing colonial dispossession and violence. (McGregor & Nelson, 2022, p. 125)

The Alternative Campus Tour has the potential to move land acknowledgements beyond the mixed reviews they have in the academic literature and respond to the growing number of academic critics who dismiss them as ineffective and coopting, and even suggesting that they may cause more harm than good (Asher et al., 2018; Hewitt, 2018; Robinson et al., 2019; Stewart-Ambo & Yang, 2021; Wark, 2021). Cree (a North American Indigenous people who live primarily in Canada) scholar Michelle Daigle (2019) calls them a settler colonial spectacle that naturalizes and fetishizes Indigenous suffering and trauma. Māori (collective name for the Indigenous people of New Zealand) scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2023, p. 1) suggests they are often a “tokenistic and meaningless gesture, an awkward and embarrassing display of institutional arrogance, a show of neoliberal performativity, and a cynical act of cultural appropriation.”

There are a growing number of examples of critical tours that examine and engage with campus environments. The perhaps most successful, in terms of attendance, example of a critical campus tour is the Uncomfortable Oxford (2023) walking tours that explores the stories “beneath the spires” of the university that uncover the unheard voices from Oxford’s past (para. 1). One prominent stop on the tours features the debates over the removal of a statue of Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College that have resulted in a plaque next to the statue describing Rhodes as a “’committed British colonialist’ who exploited the ‘peoples of southern Africa’” (“Oxford college installs plaque calling Cecil Rhodes a ‘committed colonialist,’” 2021, para. 1). The University of Cape Town has gone a step further. In 2014, its heritage trail problematized the institution’s “biological heritage and the heritage determined by language, landscape and trauma” by a series of plaques that told critical stories about the history of apartheid (University of Cape Town, 2014, para. 2). Then, in 2015, the administration removed a statue of Rhodes, the university’s founder, and has since renamed campus features that honour Black Indigenous people and Black activists who were instrumental in toppling the apartheid regime (The Contested Histories Initiative, 2021). At the Universities of Virginia and Alabama, Hilary Green (2020a, 2020b) has created tours documenting the presence and work of enslaved African Americans on their campuses. Minthorn and Nelson (2018, p. 78) have constructed a Colonized and Racist Indigenous Campus Tour at the University of New Mexico; it overtly names “the systemic and oppressive values that college campuses perpetuate at the expense of Indigenous students from communities who have a troubling past with colonization and genocide.” At the University of British Columbia, Metcalfe (2019, p. 8), in a photographic essay, witnesses the deforestation of the campus to make room for development, “seeing it as part and parcel of the colonial academic enterprise in situ.” McGill University (2023) recently launched a critical campus tour to encourage thoughtfulness about McGill University’s occupied sites using a truth-seeking and anti-colonial lens. There are other campus tours that celebrate significant sites associated with Indigenous peoples, such as University of Windsor (2024), Humber College (2024) and Lethbridge College (2023).

There are few documented Indigenous resurgence-based tours. It may be because Indigenous people do not conduct such tours. It may also be that Indigenous community members conduct them informally and privately, and they are not advertised as campus tours. Recollet and Johnson (2019, p. 177) emphasize this point in connection with Indigenous tours they have conducted over a number of years in Toronto, suggesting that settler-Indigenous encounters often become “fetishistic and voyeuristic” and that tours exclusively for Indigenous people can “foster more meaningful, respectful, and consensual relationality with places and each other.” In a few rare cases, there are campus tours that fall into or move towards decolonization. Oliver (2021), an Indigenous student from the Lower Columbia River, has produced an Indigenous Walking Tour at the University of Washington that provides a unique Indigenous perspective on sites on the campus where Indigenous knowledge systems “are rooted in the natural landscape that ties language and sacred history into what we call ‘Place’” (Oliver, 2021, para. 1). There are also individual sites on campuses rather than extensive campus tours that feature decolonization efforts. Bell (2020) and Beasley (2022) show how the use of Indigenous medicine gardens can serve as land acknowledgements, and how the invocation of Indigenous knowledge can unsettle a sterile university campus where the teaching of industrial agriculture remains dominant. Such indigenization respond to Blenkinsop and Fettes’ (2020) call for land acknowledgements that extend beyond words to a deeper understanding of land, language, and listening. Barker and Pickerill (2020, p. 655) suggest this could be done by working with Indigenous communities through “doings on the land,” that is physical interventions on the land, or making space for ceremony on and with the land.

Indigenizing the Alternative Campus Tour at York University, Toronto, Canada

When the Alternative Campus Tour was born over two decades ago, most of the sites fell in the category of critiquing the neoliberal and colonial university while giving voices and presence to marginalized stories, which occasionally include Indigenous reconciliation. These tours explore the shift from modernist and functionalist to spectacular post-modernist architectures (Sandberg, 2018a, 2018b); the change from the public to the private naming of buildings, especially as a function of the university’s growing dependence on private donors for funding; and the declining practice of honouring public figures, citizen-taxpayers and faculty, staff and student labour who maintain the university on a day-to-day basis (Sandberg, 2022, 2024). They are also critical of the universities’ technocratic and technicist focus on campus sustainability issues related to, for example, solar-powered EV battery recharging stations, stormwater management (Sandberg, 2017), personal security matters (McMahon, 2018), disability (Halferty, 2021), and Native and invasive species (Classens, 2018).

The tour now also points to a number of presences and absences of Indigenous features and histories of the campus. These involve a continuous effort in raising awareness of the presence of an ancestral Huron-Wendat (one of several First Nations of an Iroquoian-speaking People Indigenous to the Northeastern woodland of North America located in Wendake, Québec, Canada) village south of the campus, a village whose Three Sisters—bean, squash, and corn, farm fields once covered large parts of the campus, but whose presence on the campus is hardly known, let alone celebrated (Sandberg, 2021; Sandberg et al., 2021). Another site calls attention to the Indigenous absence in a pioneer village complex south of the campus, until recently named Black Creek Pioneer Village, that seeks to reproduce the life of a farm village in late nineteenth century Ontario; this effort has prompted the village administration to reconsider its position on excluding Indigenous content and removing the word “Pioneer” in the village name. It is now working in cooperation with relevant non-Indigenous and Indigenous scholars to fill in the absence of Indigenous people at the site (Sandberg et al., 2021; Thistle, 2018).

In two recent efforts, the visits of two Indigenous groups have reinforced the possibilities and challenges of addressing decolonization efforts on the tour. In 2022, I was asked by one of my colleagues to conduct a campus tour for a group of Indigenous girls (Flicker et al., 2023). The tour remained mostly based in the reconciliation tradition of indigenization, showing the presence and celebration of Indigenous voices on campus. But the tour also inspired an attempt at a deeper engagement with one of the most visible Indigenous features on campus, the sculpture Ahqahizu, depicting a giant Inuk (the singular of Inuit, the Indigenous people of the Arctic) man playing soccer with the head of a walrus, which was sculpted by two Inuit (the Indigenous people of the Arctic) artists (Sandberg, 2023b). The sculpture references the Northern Lights that represent Inuit ancestors who play soccer in the sky and provide a bond and support to their living descendants. The scene had relevance during the tuberculosis crisis in the North in the 1950s, when many Inuit were transferred to hospitals in the South never to come back. More recently, the sculpture has had relevance to the suicide crisis of Inuit youth in the North. These situations speak to the spiritual messages of artistic expression and its ability to heal human loss and relationships.

Ahqahizu also allowed me to reference a student art project that used the granite remnants of the sculpture to create figures that made a brief appearance on campus. I have managed to salvage some pieces and have also identified some fragments of the granite lodged in the ground. I now use them as teaching devices, reminding students of the living nature of stones, and reminding them, as Anishinaabe artist and scholar Bonnie Devine (Hickey, 2019, p. 176) does, that Indigenous people view stones as kin and ancestors whose lives are a lot longer than humans and that they have lessons to teach us.

On another occasion in 2023, the tour welcomed Metis scholar Kim Anderson and her research group from Guelph University. It featured a tour of the Osgoode Hall Law School, noting the prominence of symbols and icons celebrating Canadian law, and by implication the Aboriginal laws contained within it, and prominent Canadian law firm donors but containing a near absence of signs of Indigenous law, the set of laws rooted in pre-contact Indigenous traditions, and Indigenous law advocacy (Sandberg, 2023a). The contrast invited a conversation about the often assumed incommensurability of two sets of legal systems, the marginalized, though continued presence of strong, independent, and autonomous Indigenous laws, and the all-encompassing presence of an innocent, illusive and limited Western-based Aboriginal law. The contrast illustrates Tuck and Yang’s (2012, p. 1) important point that “decolonization is not a metaphor,” and that decolonization is not about bringing Indigenous people into Western law, but to recognize that there are Indigenous laws that operate outside and independently of it. The tour recognizes the lack of Indigenous resurgence decolonization in the Law School. It also exposes the limitations of an Alternative Campus Tour led by a non-Indigenous person. It can only go so far in representing ceremony, language, prayer and ancestral connections on the campus though one way it can begin to do so, I suggest, is through the concept of re-wording, or, the recognition of Indigenous languages and concepts.

Re-wording as decolonization

In Western society, names are often sites of political, hierarchical, statist, and colonial power. For many Indigenous cultures, so Rebekah Sinclair (2022, p. 93) writes, “names also come with their own power; names have power to create or destroy worlds, build or raze relationships, and embed their bearers in networks or being and meaning that extend far beyond the ‘human.’” She further states (Sinclair, 2022, p. 93) that Indigenous people’s naming acts “do not simply pick out singular, complete entities; rather, naming is a humble, communal, educational enactment of the ways in which Native Americans know and relate to their world and each other.” Sinclair’s lessons, in most cases, only seem to extend to a critique of Western naming traditions rather than employing Indigenous philosophies to also right names. Renaming buildings, or de-naming, removing statues of individuals for example, are common practice at many American universities that are confronting the racism contained in past naming practices honouring the Confederate South.

At York University, the Alternative Campus Tour offers in-depth analyses that shed light on questionable colonial names and historical figures on campus, including the name of the University, York, with its problematic colonial and slavery legacies that are associated with the Dukedom of York (Sandberg, 2020a); the name Osgoode of the law school, named after Upper Canada’s Chief Justice, with its endorsement of colonial rather than Indigenous laws (Sandberg, 2020b); and sculptures of the founders of the nation states of India and Pakistan, Gandhi and Jinnah, whose celebratory achievements hide darker dimensions of oppression (Sandberg, 2019). These interventions point to the lack of critical assessments of place names and sculptures on campus generally, never mind re-namings and the righting of names, though they do pave the way for discussions leading in that direction.

I here argue that not only names of places and buildings, but also conceptual words can serve the same oppressive function and should therefore be equally subject to critical inquiry. These include common and everyday words, such as the words environment, resources, and history, that are routinely displayed on campus signage without questioning their origins and meanings. The word environment, a word that dons the name of my faculty building, the faculty letterhead, and my name cards, can be seen as an imperial spectacle used widely but unquestionably in everyday academic speech. It is part of a complex of imperial and colonial languages and words and proxies for the broader divide and incompatibilities between Western and Indigenous social, economic and legal systems. At the most basic level, the word environment comes from French, which, as English, is a colonial and imperialist language that empowers, disempowers, enlightens and obscures. English is the language that gives credibility and exposure to research and publications. On many campuses, even in the non-English-speaking world, course texts and articles, and other instructional materials, are often in English.

Questioning such seemingly innocent and taken-for-granted words gets at the heart of colonial namings and names and lend themselves to convenient discussions on campus tours. Criticizing and finding Indigenous-inspired English words or Indigenous word substitutes can also be a means of promoting Indigenous decolonization. Sinclair (2022, p. 102) writes:

[Indigenous] names are agents that actively situate bodies back in networks of power with land, rivers, places, and peoples. These naming practices are a mode of resistance against settler coloniality because they have the power to establish communities, connect entities to one another, and affirm future-oriented relations; they “make present certain relational realities.” Names enact the relations.

This has far-reaching implications because languages themselves, their words, and their grammars carry with them particularities that contain biases and concepts that shape the way we think about and act in the world. Mi’gmaq (First Nations Indigenous to Canada’s Atlantic provinces and the eastern parts of the province of Québec) scholar and former Alternative Campus Tour guide, Fred Metallic (2017), puts it well when contrasting the Mi’gmaq language with English: “Our language is very complex. There are numerous prefixes and suffixes connected to root words. Most words are verbs and communicate actions rather than objects or the privileging of ‘I’ in conversation” (p. 173). Languages are encoded in conventions that are part of the everyday, unquestioned and absolute, obscuring ways of thinking and doing things differently. They also convey meanings and ways of thinking that instruct the way we devise and enact policy. Ari Akusti Lehtinen (2012) argues that research projects based in colonial language uses and patterns, even when they aim to respect Indigenous values, can, in practice, become another means by which the established relations of domination are confirmed and perpetuated.

The word environment is itself imperial, colonial, and anthropocentric. It means that which surrounds us, positioning humans at the centre of the world and everything else encircling them. As French philosopher Michel Serres (1995) contends, the word environment assumes that we, humans, are at the centre of a system of nature. The centring of humans in the word then assigns them a sense of hubris and self-importance. Humans become the actors who hold dominion over everything. As Wyandott (an Iroquoian-speaking People Indigenous to the Northeastern woodland of North America living in Ontario) artist Catherine Tàmmaro (2022, p. 175) puts it, it has then created a dualism where “’power-over’ nature [is] used as a device to turn our lifeways into superstitious fetishism.”

Indigenous botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer reminds us that nouns that refer to the non-human world as sentient and alive are rarely present in the English language (as cited by Hynes, 2020). We all too readily employ words like environment, it, and natural resources to refer to the non-human, setting the non-human worlds apart and belittling and subordinating them to human needs and demands. In addition, these words obscure and marginalize the concepts and words used by Indigenous peoples to relate to the land. Simpson (2019) proposes that the word resource not only has the potential of generating violence, the word in fact embodies and represents violence. He then proceeds to show how bitumen underwent a process of re-definition as resource in the nineteenth century, long before exploitation started in the 1960s.

By distancing the non-human worlds from people, we disrespect them and make them more readily into objects of utility and exploitation. And by distancing Indigenous words and concepts from the land, replacing them with words like resources and environment, we alienate Indigenous peoples from their lands. This, Kimmerer (as cited by Hynes, 2020) argues, lies at the root of the environmental crisis. The word environment, like the word natural resource, simply lacks the grammar of animacy and intimacy that Kimmerer feels is necessary in dealing with the current environmental crisis. The word is part of a settler colonial space that is subjective and wanting and obscures and limits the alternatives that could open up the prospects of drawing on and adopting other words, expressions and languages that could inspire a different future. Many English speakers recognize this situation yet remain stuck in the use of words and terms that refuse to challenge it.

All my relations

Several scholars point to the incompatibility between languages, and the difficulties of translation. But translation can also hold possibilities and in the spaces between different languages there may be room for innovation. Kimmerer (as cited by Hynes, 2020), for example, points to the fact that Indigenous languages typically refer to the more-than-human world as relatives or gifts, concepts that lend themselves to more respectful and reciprocal relationships. Vine Deloria (as cited by Middleton, 2015, p. 566) similarly writes about “we are all relatives,” that is, “everything in the natural world has relationships with every other thing and the total set of relationships makes up the nature world as we experience it.” This has inspired and could inspire and give rise to interesting new expressions. Thomas King (1990) and Winona LaDuke (1999), for example, points to an English expression, all my relations, that perhaps comes close to an Indigenous way of seeing the world that is more sustainable, equitable and respectful of the human and non-human worlds alike. In an often-quoted statement, King (1990, p. ix) writes:

“All my relations” is at first a reminder of who we are and of our relationship with both our family and our relatives. It also reminds us of the extended relationship we share with all human beings. But the relationships that Native people see go further, the web of kinship to animals, to the birds, to the fish, to the plants, to all the animate and inanimate forms that can be seen or imagined. More than that, “all my relations” is an encouragement for us to accept the responsibilities we have within the universal family by living our lives in a harmonious and moral manner.

In Indigenous Australia, Wooltorton et al. (2020, p. 917) similarly refer to “place as family” and the inherent right of all Australians to learn the joy of place and the responsibilities that go along with caring for it. The Alternative Campus Tour lends itself well to the use of the “place as family” and all my relations concepts because all the non-human actors and features on the tour can be, as a group moves across space, invoked and engaged with, a situation that is much more difficult to achieve in the classroom. The Tour also allows for an experiential experience, a situation that allows for the beginnings of a “feeling and hearing” of the campus (Poelina et al., 2020, p. 6, 2023, p. 1). Perhaps an aspiration ought to be a conception of the campus as an author in its own right, emulating the co-becoming of place and time (Bawaka Country, Burarrwanga, et al., 2016; Bawaka Country, Wright, et al., 2016). But the all my relations and similar concepts are not always welcome. When Kimmerer (Hynes, 2020) advised the Department of Natural Resources to change its name to the Department of Earthly Gifts, its members baulked at the suggestion, preferring to retain its existing conventional name.

Weaver and Yuen (2015, p. 145) employ the words “all my relations” in their work on Indigenous peoples with disabilities, pointing out that “Indigenous philosophies and belief systems are typically inclusive and recognize people with disabilities as community members, relations, and people who are part of the balance of all elements of creation.” This position parallels a disability rights perspective, a position represented by one of the stories on the Alternative Campus Tour that questions the ableist dimensions of a wheelchair ramp on campus (Halferty, 2021). This situation is also similar to Indigenous peoples’ conception of invasive species which challenges their out-of-placeness and consider them as people whose presence and qualities are not necessarily seen as negative but negotiable and potentially positive (Reo & Ogden, 2018; Wehi et al., 2023). On the Alternative Campus Tour, we similarly speak about a Native species garden as deeply problematic because the term does not recognize the fluidity and grey areas surrounding Native and exotic species, their alleged positive and negative attributes, and the management options that surround them (Classens, 2018).

There are lessons to learn from Aotearoa where there is a long-standing drive to introduce Māori knowledge, concepts and words into the mainstream language and university campuses and curricula. The Māori do in fact have a word, taiao (environment) for the more-than-human world. But the word cannot be seen in isolation (Our Land and Water, 2020). It is inseparable from or kin to the tinana (human body), and many other words and expressions. As Māori scholar Hone Waengarangi Morris (2020) contends, the taiao and the tinana constitute an interrelated whole of interconnectedness and infinite moods. His ancestors, he claims, “fashioned a knowledge that everything in this world is connected through whakapapa (genealogy)” (p. 1).

In 2019, Victoria University of Wellington adopted a new conceptual name Te Herenga Waka (a mooring place for canoes). It signifies a place:

where people from around the country and beyond can “hitch their canoes” and find shelter. When people are ready to leave the University, they can unhitch their canoe and sail off to new horizons, while still maintaining a deep connection to Te Herenga Waka. (Victoria University of Wellington—Te Herenga Waka, 2022a, para. 6)

Aotearoa universities and their departments now routinely use Māori as a complement to English names. Some of the names are literal translations. At Victoria University of Wellington—Te Herenga Waka (2022b), one school calls itself Te Kura Tātai Aro Whenua (School of Geography, Environment and Earth Sciences).

Other Aotearoa universities have similarly adopted Māori names that go beyond literal translations and that speak to the all my relations concept. These include Waipapa Taumata Rau (where hundreds of mountain peaks meet the shoreline), the Māori name for the University of Auckland that was gifted to the university by the people of Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei (a Māori sub-tribe based in Auckland, New Zealand) in an official ceremony in 2021. Waipapa (shoreline) refers to the nearby shoreline that gave the University of Auckland its name. Taumata (peaks) encompasses “the many peaks or points of ascension—pinnacles or sacred spaces where the land meets the sky; places of challenge, achievement, and revelation,” and rau (many), finally, means many or 100, denoting the many peaks that surround the university, also a metaphor for “many journeys towards success” (Morton, 2021, para. 16, 18).

Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2023) similarly points to the importance of the land in Māori culture, where an attachment and identification with specific mountains and the sea can be more important than your own name. Warburton (2021, p. 64), when chairing a session on land acknowledgements featuring a group of Indigenous people from all over the world at Brown University, was struck by “the specificity with which each person spoke to their relationship to place; to particular shorelines and horizons; to particular plants and their tastes and smells.”

Of course, the adoption of Indigenous names and concepts in Aotearoa universities has not gone unchallenged. In a recent case, seven professors, referring to themselves as defenders of science, argued that Indigenous concepts constitute a threat to the pursuit of an objective, empirically, and evidence-based science. The responses, though, have been strong in affirming the current trends (Stewart, 2021; Waitoki, 2022). One also has to be mindful to not let Indigenous words become mere marketing and recruitment tools in a university world competing for students, where environmental and climate change anxieties prevail among many students, and where students naively and superficially look for alternatives within Indigenous discourses and narratives. Hopefully, the Indigenous naming also prompt the inclusion of Māori knowledge in all aspects of university programmes.

For the three Indigenous groups recognized as the traditional holders of the York University lands, there are words and expressions that express the sentiments of the all my relations concept. These include the Haudenosaunee (a First Nation in northeast North America also known as the Six Nations Confederacy) concept ka’nikonhri:io (people’s minds and emotions are in harmony with the flow of the universe), the Anishinaabemowin (the language of the Anishinaabe—a group of culturally-related First Nations inhabiting the Great Lakes region, Canada and USA) word inawendiwin (honouring the interconnectedness of all relationships), and the Wendat (a collective name of an Iroquoian speaking People Indigenous to the Northeastern woodland of North America) word kwatatënonhonhk (we are related to one another; Reo, 2019; Williams & Brant, 2019; J. Steckley, personal communication, April 13, 2019; L. Lesage, personal communication, May 5, 2019). Most Indigenous groups have words that convey a similar message with regard to the environment. These include, for example, the Nehiyaw (Cree) and Michif (Métis— people of mixed European and Indigenous ancestry residing in Canada’s Prairie provinces and parts of British Columbia, the Northwest Territories, Northwest Ontario and the northern USA) word wâhkôhtowin (everything is a giant web of kinship) and the Huu-ay-aht (a First Nation located on the West Coast of Vancouver Island, Canada) phrase hishuk tsawalk (everything is one or connected; Coté, 2019; Thistle, 2020). For the Haida (a First Nation in North America occupying the northwest British Columbia, Canada, and Alaska, USA) yah’guudang (respect for all living things or knowing our place in the web of life) is a word concept that is incorporated in the everyday activities of the Haida Nation (Quail, 2014). And for the Lakota (a prominent subculture of the Sioux—a confederacy of North American Indigenous people, from the Great Plains—North and South Dakota, USA), the equivalent word is mitakuye oyasin (acknowledgement of thanks, balance, interrelationships, and the recognition of sacredness of all beings; Weaver & Yuen, 2015). In her quest to build an Indigenous political ecology, Middleton (2015) uses the Mountain Maidu, a Native American people residing in the Sierra Nevada of northern California, USA, term jahát jatítotòdom (you will be good to each other) to inspire an understanding of Mountain Maidu land stewardship, rights and history, a term that fits well with the all my relations concept. And Anishinaabe artist Rene Meshake (Meshake & Anderson, 2019, p. 164) recounts that you carry the rules of these relationships within you, “you carry the law in your own body.” Some of these expressions I now mention on the tour when looking at that signage of my own faculty, which is traditionally and uncritically named the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change.

There are already many examples of Indigenous people and academics using Indigenous words to reference unique concepts that can be used in both curriculum and on campus tours. Lianne Leddy (2016, p. 95) uses the Anishinaabemowin word dibaajimowinan (stories) to denote the unique method of researching and recording Indigenous history beyond standard historical documentations. Aimée Craft (2016) uses another Anishnaabemowin word combination, Anishinaabe nibi inaakonigewin (Anishinaabe water law), to describe a water law that is understood and executed in radically different ways than Western law. I now employ these words in my teaching and on the campus tour, making students and tour members learn how to pronounce them correctly, and impressing on them that there are research methods that extend beyond standard environmental history research. I also employ the all my relations concept for my environmental planning course, which I call all my relations deliberations, an expression that humbles humans in the more-than-human world, and that favours deliberation between all actors in the planning process. No longer does that class think about planning for specific humans and a more-than-human environment but instead of deliberating with the humans and non-humans that are part of the planning process.

Conclusion

The Alternative Campus Tour concept questions the everyday campus by examining common and often unquestioned physical features, management practices, and naming practices on campus. This can constitute, I argue, a land acknowledgement that engages with the campus, both celebrating and criticizing it, including noting Indigenous presences and absences. In the efforts to move from a reconciliation to a decolonization indigenization and make associated land acknowledgements more meaningful, the critical scrutiny of colonial signs and words, even single ones, matter. They are, in some regard monuments, or mini versions, of colonial and imperial oppressions, spectacles, that can get us stuck in asking the same old questions. But they can also, I suggest, invite critical investigation, even rejection, and an inspiration to adopt new words and expressions and words from Indigenous languages. This is already happening with place names, where colonial and racist names are challenged and removed, sometimes replaced by Indigenous-inspired or Indigenous names, names based in the grounds walked and seen in the everyday. But it could also include words used in academic fields of research and teaching curricula, where the incorporation of Indigenous words, concepts and expressions as routine features could be widely applied rather than confined to specific disciplines, courses and programmes. It could also mean changing the names of specific courses in respect of Indigenous thinking. And this could in turn pave the way for their use in Alternative campus tours and other engagements with all my relations and kin on the campus.