Summary
Wahkohtowin is a Cree teaching about kinship: human beings live inside a web of relationships, with other people and the more-than-human world, that give us life. The Papaschase Cree scholar Dwayne Donald, citing Patti LaBoucane-Benson and colleagues, describes its model person as one who “acknowledges those relationships daily and strives to live in ways that sustains them. To do otherwise is to act against life and the survival of those relational networks.”
Donald sets this against ‘homo economicus’, the self-interested individual, whom he argues schooling trains children to become. Wahkohtowin is lived daily within Cree communities, more than an idea to adopt; this entry rests on a single passage.
Rationale
Donald warns that this “cannot be addressed by simply replacing one story with another”: a relational teaching slotted into an unchanged curriculum changes little. Part 1 agrees: “Stories don’t arrive on neutral ground”.