Today’s episode is a gentle but powerful invitation to return to relationship—with land, with learning, and with one another.
In today’s conversation on Good Medicine, we are joined by educator, artist, and co-editor Katya Adamov Ferguson, whose work is rooted in Indigenous-centred curriculum, relational learning, and land-based education.
Katya shares her personal journey as a learning support teacher and mother, and reflects on what led her into this work—particularly witnessing how educational systems too often work against Indigenous children. We explore her collaborative work on Renewal: Indigenous Perspectives on Land-Based Education In and Beyond the Classroom, the second book in the Footbridge series, created to support reconciliation through learning.
Together, we talk about the process of gathering teachings, essays, artwork, and guidance from Indigenous leaders, scholars, knowledge keepers, and land defenders, and how these offerings can be meaningfully adapted for students from kindergarten through grade twelve. Katya speaks to the role of creativity, arts-based research, and inquiry learning in classrooms, and how land-based practices support mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual wellness. She also reflects on the importance of listening deeply, building authentic relationships, and understanding urban spaces as Indigenous homelands—always and still.
Katya shares:
“ I was experiencing things in my practice, systems were working against children, specifically Indigenous children. I’ve seen kids have much more success in environments that are connected to land-based experiences. These are profound ways of knowing and being, and living and doing. A relational way of living in the world. This is important to us as human beings, to understand this web of connectivity on this planet, and it is important for our survival. You cannot understand land if you do not take the time to listen with an open heart, because the true journey of land-based education happens in your mind, heart, and soul.”
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