SUNRISE SCHOOL DIVISION
LdBSS Selected for RBC Future Launch Community Challenge Grant

Students and staff were honoured at a luncheon on Thursday, November 28^th, 2019 as the project was selected to receive a grant of $9250.00.  Student leaders and staff spoke very eloquently after receiving the much appreciated grant.  Below are the powerful words that were shared. 

Lac du Bonnet Senior School is striving to continue taking collaborative, cross-curricular, and intergenerational steps towards a long-term project focused on education for/as sustainable development. Our desire is to continue creating the processes, ideologies, and projects that will allow a transformation of our land and community to occur over time. The shape of this transformation will come in the form of a Medicine Wheel structure, outdoor learning, gathering, and ceremonial areas, and Indigenous gardens.

We are well into the process of re-envisioning and re-shaping a large, outdoor space in a way that will call us out to engage more deeply with the natural environment surrounding us. Our intent is to create a space for teaching, learning, growing, planting, harvesting, healing, reflecting, socializing, and engaging in ceremony, a place to experience ourselves alongside the earth and all its inhabitants, all of our relations.

We do not wish to see ourselves as the owners or creators of The Wheel. Instead, once developed, we shall strive to see ourselves as its caretakers, students, and interpreters.

The inner circle of our Medicine Wheel "Garden" is a representation of our commitment to Indigenous knowledge, worldview, and peoples, wholeness and balance, teaching and learning, interconnections and autonomy, The Great Binding Law, ourselves, our school, our community, and all our relations. This is the heart and spirit of sustainable development.

Inside our sacred circle, we will listen and speak, teach and learn, witness and observe, read and write, be together and be in solitude, sing, and paint, and dance, and act, think and meditate, speak and be silent, question and answer, experiment and discover.

Arising from our sacred circle is the energy that will, one day, create the rest of The Wheel. From our four paths we will develop four quadrants (for Indigenous plants and medicines, garden varieties, and Grandfathers) and four circular learning environments. Each of the four learning environments will have its own agency and individuality. We currently envision a water focused learning environment in the west, a sacred fire focused learning environment in the east, a Sundance tree and shade focused learning environment in the south, and a white bear and wind-chime garden in the north.

We have laid the bones of our Medicine Wheel structure. The RBC Future Launch grant will allow us to move forward on our journey, planting seeds, trees, berries, and medicines. We will also be able to begin building some of the teaching, learning, seating, and ceremonial fixtures.

The land is not to be owned by a few. Instead, it is to be shared among us. We hope that many people will be drawn to the Medicine Wheel. Perhaps, they will pick berries there, or harvest the fruits of a sultry summer. Maybe they will light a scared fire and send smoke and prayers up to the grandfathers and grandmothers, those that walked before us. We hope that the people will come to sit on our benches, to pay their respects to the bees, and the ants, the sun and the sky, the wind and the trees, the four-legged, all our relations.

Our grand vision began with a beating heart, the Creator's Circle. It is the center of our dream. Today we remain determined to create the, literal and metaphorical, pathways towards peace and harmony. We continue to dream. Today, we would like to express our deepest gratitude to you for helping us make our dream a new, vibrant, and sustainable reality. Thank you. Megwetch.