Climate Futures
Reflections from the Artivism Cohort Lab 02
July 17 marked our second segment for this cohort’s year. For Lab 02, we ran Climate Futures in two forms: an outdoor walk edition along the North Saskatchewan River Valley in amiskwaciy-wâskahikan (Edmonton), and a virtual flower walk edition for cohort participants joining from further afield.
Both were held with deep gratitude to two partner organizations doing incredible land-based work: VIDEA’s Beyond the River team and Touch Grass Club. This wouldn’t be possible without them.
Grounding ourselves first
Before any testing or teaching began, Beyond the River led us through a tobacco offering, an Indigenous practice of introducing ourselves to the land and asking permission to be there. It set the tone for everything that followed. We weren’t arriving at the river as visitors passing through; we were arriving as guests asking to be in right relationship with the water, the plants and the people who have cared for this place for generations.
This is the piece of civic storytelling and artivism work that’s easy to rush past, but at ECHOFORM we do our best not to. Showing up with humility, and letting land-based protocols shape how we learn, is as much a part of the lab as anything we did with our hands afterward.
Meet Beyond the River
Beyond the River is a group of five First Nations, Métis and Inuit emerging leaders living and working in Amiskwacîwâskahikan, restoring relationships with the lands and waters they call home.
We had the privilege of learning from three members of the Beyond the River team during Lab 02:
Hillary Ronald (she/her/hers), Head of Climate Team, is passionate about climate justice and how it intersects with basically everything (and promises to have a podcast to back up all her fun facts one day). She is a settler on both sides of her family and currently lives and works on Ləkʷəŋən territory. She has the best job working with Indigenous youth, and not-so-secretly hopes to be part of a seaweed farming collective in the future.
Josephine Coyes-Loiselle is a community coordinator in amiskwâskahikan, where she has been involved in leading several local projects for the past two years. She feels very lucky to have grown up close to the river valley where she’s spent so much time over the years, and was excited to connect our cohort with the community and share the history of this beloved place.
Janelle Spry Papastesis introduced herself to us in Cree: tânisi, nitsîyihkâson Janelle Spry Papastesis, nemês Sakahikan ohci nîya — hello, my name is Janelle Spry Papastesis (pah-pah-sh-chees), which means woodpecker. She is from Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation in Treaty 8 territory but resides in Edmonton (Beaver Hills). She’s always felt connected to the city knowing her family lived here before it became a city, and brought her Cree culture into the lab with a hope of encouraging youth not to be afraid to reconnect and build a strong relationship with the land again.
Getting our hands in the water
With Hillary, Josephine and Janelle guiding us, our cohort got into water testing along the river, learning firsthand what indicators tell us about the health of the ecosystem we’re all downstream of.
Meet Touch Grass Club
Touch Grass Club’s slogan says it plainly: connecting urban dwellers to nature and one another. Their goal is to reduce barriers for people to access nature and land-based learning within Amiskwaciy-wâskahikan, meeting people where they’re at in their own nature learning journey so they can become better advocates for the health of Alberta’s unique ecosystems and the diverse Indigenous cultures across the province.
Maia Renata Mudrić joined us to help identify native plant species along the trail. Maia was born in Calgary and raised in between Edmonton, Red Willow in the County of Stettler, and the concrete landscape of Calgary. Travelling a lot as a child made her look for constants, the sky was always a constant friend. Watching it growing up, she noticed how the seasons moved along with the Pleiades, only high in the sky mid-winter, and later learned her own name was drawn from that same star cluster, named by ancient Greek astronomers and mythologists as one of the seven sisters. Her curiosity in the sky grew until she could see the night sky properly and today, that same sky she saw as a child now takes multiple hours of travel outside city limits to find. Increased development within the County of Stettler may have already taken away the night sky of her childhood.
Maia shared that she hopes to one day show her own children the dustlanes of the Milky Way, and is honest about the tension in that hope: we live in a society that believes in infinite growth within a closed system, a thought pattern that has already destroyed ecosystems irreparably, even here in Alberta. Natural cycles are being suppressed or disrupted, along with the cultures that built relationships to the landscape over thousands of years. The night sky’s clarity can return once the lights stop being so bright, but nature and culture aren’t so easy to repair once lost. Maia completed her Bachelor of Science with a major in Physics, a minor in Mathematics, and a certificate of leadership in 2023, and has worked in science communications since 2018. She’s passionate about humanity and our relationship to the one thing that gives us life: our planet.
The Virtual Flower Walk Edition
For cohort members joining us virtually, we ran a parallel activity so no one missed the chance to slow down and notice the land where they are. Here’s how it went:
You’ll need: cardboard, markers, a pencil (for poking holes)
Create Your Vase: Draw and decorate a vase on your cardboard, then poke small holes along the top.
Take a Flower Walk: Explore your neighbourhood, yard, park or trail. Slow down, notice what’s growing, and collect a few flowers or plants (only where it’s okay to pick them!).
Make Your Arrangement: Slide your stems into the holes to create your own floral artwork.
Reflect & Share: Notice something new. Learn the name of one plant if you can, then photograph or film your walk and finished piece. Anything you share becomes part of our collective installation.
Questions about the virtual edition can always be sent to info@echoxform.org.
Why this matters to ECHOFORM
Civic storytelling isn’t only about the stories we tell afterward; it’s about the practices we build while we’re learning. Lab 02 held space for reciprocity, curiosity and care, whether that showed up as a tobacco offering on the riverbank, a water sample pulled by cohort hands, a native plant named by Maia, or a paper vase filled with backyard flowers hundreds of kilometres away.
It reminded our cohort that climate futures aren’t abstract: they’re written in water quality data, in the plants growing along a riverbank, in the stars a person can or can’t see from their childhood home, and in whether we remembered to ask the land’s permission before we got started.
Huge thanks to Hillary, Josephine, and Janelle from VIDEA’s Beyond the River team, and to Maia from Touch Grass Club, for grounding us in both protocol and practice. This wouldn’t be possible without you.
Next up: Media Literacy & Digital Culture, July 24.
Resources
Partner links and full resources — Coming soon!