Liane Zafiropoulos
Liane Zafiropoulos is currently doing a PhD in Canadian and Indigenous Studies at Trent University. As an elementary school teacher, she has been seeking ways to encourage students to actively connect with their natural environment by incorporating Indigenous pedagogy into daily teaching practice. Her research involves using arts-based methodologies to encourage students to be more engaged in reconciliation efforts and climate justice.
About her presentation:
They Were the Seeds: Beading a Garden of Hope
They Were the Seeds, is a project intended to commemorate the children who were recently recovered in unmarked graves at several former residential “school” locations across the country. When the initial reports came out that they had recovered the remains of 215 children in Kamloops, it seemed as though the entire nation was finally beginning to understand the depths of atrocities that occurred in these institutions. But as more unmarked graves were uncovered across the country, it started feeling like we were just tallying lives and no longer remembering that these were children. The goal of the project is to create a collaborative mural with over 10,000 beaded orange flowers to represent each life lost. Participants in this Friday afternoon session will have the opportunity to bead their own orange flower that will then be incorporated into the larger mural.
