Education as Cultural Healing and Empowerment: Spaces for Learning in the Context of Anishinaabe Communities Surrounding the Georgian Bay

Abstract

This thesis seeks for cultural healing and empowerment through learning spaces reflective of Anishinaabe worldviews. The program responds to current efforts by the Anishinaabe people surrounding the Great Lakes to develop an educational system that preserves and promotes their cultural identity in a contemporary world. To develop a basis for the context of this thesis I researched the history of systematic oppression of First Nations culture through education, the Great Lakes’ role in connecting communities by the water, and First Nations’ traditional worldviews and teaching techniques. Looking to the past was equally as important as analysing current cross-cultural case studies in order to root the design in Anishinaabe culture that is also relevant to the contemporary architectural discourse.