Re-Rooting Identity Through Learning: How Knowledge Becomes Medicine
Apr 04, 2025When I spoke with Dr. Kathy Absolon and Dr. Brenda Child for The Ontario Native Women's Association's (ONWA) She Is Wise, what struck me wasn’t just their brilliance, it was the way they treat cultural identity as a form of medicine.
In a world where Indigenous identity has been dissected, documented, and distorted through colonial systems, their work reclaims that identity as something alive and relational. A deeply powerful connection.
From Anishinaabe land-based healing to Ojibwe matriarchal teachings, both Absolon and Child show us what it means to re-root identity through learning, and how academia can transform when it becomes a site of resurgence, not erasure.
Featured Quote:
“Indigenous identity is complex, shaped by colonization and its impacts on land, language and culture.”
— Dr. Kathy Absolon
Read the Full Article:
She Is Wise – Spring/Summer 2024, pg. 36
View full issue online
Download the full article as a PDF
OCInsight
Cultural knowledge isn’t just academic , t’s ancestral. And when we root education in land, language, and relational teachings, we create space for healing. We begin the process of reconnection, and through that, generational repair.
About Bryan Hansen
Bryan Hansen is a Métis educator, speaker, and writer. He’s the founder of OCI, where he helps organizations move beyond land acknowledgments into meaningful, nation-based reconciliation.
As a proud Two-Spirit person, Bryan brings a lens shaped by lived experience, cultural knowledge, and deep relational accountability. His work blends humour, truth-telling, and clarity — inviting audiences to go beyond optics and into transformation.
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