HOW to do Walk With Me
Our original one-hour experiential learning workshops involved fewer than 20 participants at a time. During the course of a single day, one group after another visited a series of five "stations" in a large room, metaphorically taking steps together on the path to voicing truths and building reconciliation.
Step 2
Connecting with Stories
At this station, participants are invited to take another step on the path where they find waiting for them on a table some short excerpts from memoirs, poetry, fiction, historical documents, song lyrics, and testimonies about the impact of colonialism on Indigenous peoples. In groups of three of four they are invited to choose one with a title that intrigues them, and discuss the reading together.
Step 3
Embodying the Stories
At this station, participants are given two handouts. One guides them through a creative process of identifying where someone in the story strove to hold onto their inherently buoyant, resilient, and loving spirits while experiencing extraordinarily oppressive circumstances. The other handout offers them a simple technique for collaboratively devising a short performative response to what they find, grounded in their own personal experience.
Step 4
Performing Our Empathetic Response to the Stories
At this station, each group takes turns offering their brief performances based on the elements in their readings that had moved them and resonated with something in their own lives. After each group’s presentation, their audience of other participants reflect on what they heard and saw. The performers then share their own thoughts on the links between the performed piece they have created and the story they have read.
Step 5
Closure, Reflections, and Looking Forward
At this final station, participants find handouts and flyers identifying specific actions one can take to build respectful, sustainable relationships and friendships with Indigenous people and their communities, and to support aspirations for social justice.