During the Indigenous Day of Learning, I was able to watch the opening remarks, the keynote speaker Ashley Callingbull, and elected to watch Keynote session A on living sustainably during a time of climate change with Nikki Sanchez. All speakers were excellent, but I will choose here to focus on Keynote speaker Ashley Callingbull. Ashley’s talk was about her story from being a young child to the present and the trials and obstacles she had to overcome in her life to not just succeed but survive. One of the First Peoples’ Principles of Learning (FPPLs) is that learning is embedded in memory, history, and story. I think that Ashley’s story was a strong representation of this FPPL because it provided a connection to her message on a far more personal level—one that appears to naturally induce an empathetic response to the listeners. Often, we as a society are told or shown facts, statistics, and provocative headlines in attempts to bring attention to a cause, but this often results in an ideological division amongst people because the context is unspecific, and we often have preconceived biases. Ashley’s story told a message that we the audience could connect to and therefore the impact was meaningful because it was relatable on a human, rather than an ideological, level. I think the more we treat and view one another as human beings who each have stories and experiences, rather than as ideas, the father we will move forward together.
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