Blog Post: Meet Ziigwan, Summer Instructor

Aaniin! Hey everyone, my name is Shki-Ziigwan LaPointe, but people call me Ziigwan. I’m Anishinaabe from Ardoch First Nation and Métis from Penetanguishene. I live in Nogojiwanong/Peterborough and I’m attending Toronto Metropolitan University for my second year of Sociology. I’ve worked with TRACKS for a few years off and on, and now I’m happy to be working for them as an Educational Instructor. 

I’ve always been interested in combining different sciences together to see the overlap and the similarities but also the different perspectives used in observing the same thing, and being able to use that to find a more whole image of a single thing. TRACKS really interests me in this way because it combines and teaches things using both a western scientific approach and traditional Indigenous land based knowledge systems together. 

Before grade 9, I spent my summer volunteering with TRACKS and then I kept working with them through the Oshkwazin Program over the next summer and learned a lot. What kept me coming back was being able to learn while I was teaching. After leaving for the next couple years, I kept in touch with TRACKS and would often came back as a guest to speak to student teachers and others about my experience in education. I noticed a distinct lack of Indigenous information or teachings in school and so after graduating highschool, and completing some years in University, I came back to TRACKS to learn more and to help teach some of what I learned on my own, now as an Educational Instructor.

 I always found working with TRACKS to be a positive experience, and the goal of braiding Indignenous knowledge and teachings with western science taught in school to be an effective way to teach kids. I’m looking forward to having more of a hand in program development and helping out to deliver programing to students at school and over the summer.