Japan
May/June 2024
Students spent the trip exploring both urban and rural Japanese towns and cities and historic museums. This included hands-on learning about local fishing practices within Japan's Indigenous community and Canada's deep-rooted connection to the town of Mio.
Description:
Fishing, Indigeneity and the Asia Pacific field school used the Canadian fishing industry as a vehicle to explore issues of Indigenous sovereignty, trans-pacific migration, ethnic and intercultural relations and globalization. Canada is a nation built on fish and the fishery remains culturally and economically integral to Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians. This field school offered the opportunity to reflect on the importance of the land, sea and marine life to local family networks in decolonized and indigenous ways of knowing and being. Also known as “property” from capitalist, settler colonial perspectives, and as ways of knowing in East Asian cultures.
Students participating in this field school were invited to reflect on Indigenous, Japanese and colonial ways of conceptualizing the world. They reflected on self, sense of community, property, sovereignty and fishing. The field school also explored the circumstances, conditions and motivations driving the Japanese migration to Canada. They considered them in the context of immigration and Indigenous rights today.