There is a pattern to the universe and everything in it, and there are knowledge systems and traditions that follow this pattern to maintain balance…But recent traditions have emerged that break down creation systems like a virus, infecting complex patterns with artificial simplicity…”
– Tyson Yunkaporta, Sand Talk
The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
Therefore, what you learn, where you learn, when you learn, how you learn, with whom you learn really, really matters. Why? Because learning is alive.
The turn of the Gregorian calendar signals a new year on Turtle Island and across much of the world. But January, in the northern hemisphere, is not the time of enlivened action. We are still in winter, in the time—according to the Anishinaabe medicine wheel—of going within, of rest.
Our Asian kin understand this well and have continued to practice a more natural rhythm to the turning of a year, marking the completion of one full revolution of the earth around the sun. Lunar New Year celebrations across East and Central Asia occur closer to the beginning of spring, a time in Anishinaabe traditions that represent the spring of life, when seeds germinate and new possibilities begin to unfurl.
Amidst all the New Year’s resolutions and rush to be better, do more, and otherwise work against our sacred rhythms, I invite you to continue the necessary medicine of rest and reflection. It is paramount to our collective learning and ensuring healthy, sustainable growth.
I’ve spent almost a year writing variations of this blog. This is humbling. I am a writer. In the linear space time continuum known as the past, I have written poems in ten minutes, short stories in several hours. I’ve won awards. People tell me I’m good at it. You get the idea.
But after almost two decades of attempting to learn more about Indigenous ways, Anishinaabe ways, and Native epistemologies—assisted by elders, cultural wisdom bearers, ancestors, deer, hawks, trees—I understand how little any human being ever knows (we are the youngest here, awkward and headstrong) and writing about the nature of learning and its measurement process ‘evaluation’ seems naïve at best. But I shall anyway. Because life requires us to try and share what we are sensing with others. Because it is our collective responsibility to intervene when closed system thinking is being applied to complex living systems, when those paddling the canoe are moving in the wrong direction, and we don’t have enough food and water to withstand such a misguided journey.
The direction, or misdirection, I am speaking of here specifically is the field of Learning & Evaluation in the social change sector. Sprung from Foundation management practices—which have been historically rooted in judgment and control—traditional learning and evaluation efforts have both presently and historically served primarily to enable funders to assess their return on investment. This seems benign enough. Isn’t it a responsible practice to measure the impact of investing in a program or community effort to ensure it is doing what people said it would? Sure. But a problem, one of the misdirections of the evaluation machine, is that it doesn’t hold the long arc; it takes longer to heal than it does to withstand an injury. My own experience of being rear-ended by another vehicle decades ago taught me this. The accident only took an instant. It took me years to heal the collapse in my cervical spine. Likewise, a river can be polluted by a one-day long oil spill. Clean-up can take decades. When we are thinking about efforts to address centuries of gross systemic inequalities, evaluations tend to have time horizons more in common with the lifespan of a fruit fly than a recognition of deep time and the complex and interdependent nature of repair and health, sustainable growth.
Rooted Learning and Evaluation
Social justice is not a capital investment. It is a necessary, reparative, and generative good in service of long-term collective well-being. It cannot be thought of in terms of growth and scale, like a for-profit venture or a personal wealth-building investment. Such models of capital appreciation are rooted in agrilogistics—which predated industrial capitalism—and required the unending expansion of land and labor. Such a worldview is what propelled land left, genocide, and enslavement, “eventually requiring steam engines and industry to feed its proliferation.”
This approach to growth and scale does not sustainably map onto any social practices, not even the current economic realities of the post-industrial revolution, one riddled with racialized capitalism and colonialist extraction.
Sustainability is another potent tendril for exploration. And if I were to follow the true interconnectivity of all things, I would follow this path for a while, meander a bit, and see what plant and animal siblings have to share regarding their relationships to growth, scale, learning, and evaluation. But this blog is long overdue. So, back to learning talking to evaluation and evaluation talking back. What both agree on, when they are coming from their best selves, is that centering justice-orientated, complex systems change as the core purpose of learning and evaluation efforts is critical for social justice efforts to be understood as reparative in nature and operating in deep time—generations back and forth, subterranean, atmospheric, oceanic and mycelial.
While traditional (read white dominant—and I don’t mean the color or racialized marker, I mean settler colonialist, patriarchal, and extractively capitalistic) forms of learning and evaluation have done little to support social justice and complex systems change and much to harm community repair, there are emerging approaches (read ancient) in the field of learning and evaluation that are centering the stories of those closest to the fire, drawing on Indigenous and other culturally rooted ways of collective learning and wisdom sharing, where learning and evaluation are rooted in existing strength and capacity and honors emerging growth, skill, and depth. For while, like the limbs of trees, our boughs extend, we must also strengthen our roots. This is one of the lessons of Wind.
Context and Place
Last year, I wrote about the importance of reyoking learning and strategy in my blog “Learning & Strategy: Twining Their Story.” By rooting into Indigenous ways of knowing, the separation of learning and strategy can also be healed. Similarly, when we relocate the purpose of learning and impact efforts when we rematriate them, we can more easily see what such practices should entail and how they are connected to people and place. In the words of the wise women at Rematriation, “Rematriation is a powerful word Indigenous women of Turtle Island use to describe how they are restoring balance to the world…it means ‘Returning the Sacred to the Mother.’” Rematriation is both an orientation and a practice. It guides us on how to be in right relationship.
As Mi’kmaw educator and professor Marie Battiste reminds us, “Learning … is holistic, lifelong, purposeful, experiential, communal, spiritual, and learned within a language and a culture.” Learning is contextually specific.
Context is not a hypothetical. It is not a coordinate on a unit circle in precalculus. Context is a place. When learning is not rooted in place—meaning not connected to the people and the sentient environments in which the learning is happening—then the learning is not relational, and it is relationality through which learning can deepen and expand.
Aboriginal scholar and author Tyson Yunkaporta has often shared that “time and place are usually the same word in Aboriginal languages—the two are indivisible.” To speak across contexts, he and others offer us time-place. And it is here, from this time-place that our human learning must support rooting back and reaching forward: what was believed before, what we understand now, and what that present understanding means for the future. But not in any time, in time-place, in the context in which it grows. Learning is a life cycle, one that includes earlier versions, present shapes, and future possibilities. It is like the earth itself and, as such, requires symbiotic connection and presence.
Complexity and Emergence
Complexity theory originated in the physical and biological sciences and later was applied to social systems. Within social justice, there is now widespread recognition that institutional and social inequity are the result of interlocking, complex systems and cannot be transformed through linear approaches or expertise alone. Expertise was used to develop the automobile. Complexity and its associated approach of allowing the path forward to reveal itself through probing, sensing, then responding will offer essential paths forward to address climate catastrophes.
Indigenous epistemologies are ways of knowing woven with complexity as they account for the fundamental interdependence of all things. While it may be a complicated problem to figure out the most effective way to extract natural gas from the earth, we cannot address the impact of such extraction without connecting its relationship to the health of other elements (ones on which all of our lives depend) such as water and soil. But it has taken Native leaders to explicitly name the connection between a poisoned earth and a poisoned people. “Indigenous communities have seen increases in missing women, sex trafficking, and rape since oil workers have begun flooding their lands…” This is just the poison of the immediate term. Longitudinal impacts are exponential.
It is not just specific policies and laws that Indigenous leaders are pointing to. When attending to the relationships between interconnected systems and interconnected sentience, there is a depth of wisdom available. It is that wisdom, one that has been ever-present, that makes it possible for “Indigenous people [to] know [and have known] that economic and social systems based on Western epistemological logic are [and were] not sustainable…[and that] Western economic and social systems result in poverty and other alarming social inequities.”
Rooted learning and evaluation is born of this nutritive soil. It is contextually specific and place-based, and it draws on Indigenous knowledge of complex, interconnected systems and our deeply interdependent sentience.
Principles in Practice
Fire is an element of transformation in most Indigenous cultures. For the Ojibwe (Anishinaabe) people of Lake Superior Chippewa Oshgikin, the spirit of fire, is defined as “the thing or mechanism that makes things new.” When we locate learning and evaluation in the wisdom and strength of those seated closest to the fire, those who understand what is wrong, imbalanced, needing attention and those most able to employ the shifts and discern effects that would signal we are moving in the right directions.
To be closest to the fire requires skill and focus. Patience and courage. It requires reverence for the power of fire, reverence for the spirit of transfiguration.
In policy work, there is an expression for a common phenomenon: “unintended consequences.” Because of the complexity of ecosystems—land, water, sky, and their inhabitants—human interventions by those furthest from the fire, such as corporate or state-level agents advancing widescale policies that do hold these relationships, have negative effects. Humans are only one part of the ecosystems on Earth. The result, in aggregate, has not just been to accelerate inequality but to rush into a new era, what many call the Anthropocene, a geologic epoch dating the commencement of significant human impact on Earth up to the present day. But more than human centrism, these approaches are designed by people very, very far away from the fire. They are decentered from place; they are disconnected from source.
In the context of social justice efforts, its strategies, and learning, Rooted learning and evaluation can offer some sacred principles—meaning they always present, but their application and resulting creative expressions will be as varied as the topographies of Aki, of the earth.
Bezhig (one)

Bezhig is the principle that we are all connected. We are born of Sky Woman falling from a tear in the universe. One is the center of the spiritual belief and literal meaning of gidinawendimin: we are all related, and the world is our relative. This means that all learning should be focused on the relationship between the parts and the whole, the intricately veined dragonflies’ wings, and the communication to all sentient kin their population numbers provide regarding the health of local water and, thus, all living things.
In social justice learning and evaluation, the principle of bezhig is directing us to recognize the relationship between air quality and early childhood development. We cannot ‘evaluate’ the state of human health without also considering the state of the environment on which we all depend. It requires that our questions hold earth, sky, water as core to human-centered justice because she, Aki, is we.
Niizh (two)

Niizh is the principle of the twin, of reflection, of the light that makes the darkness visible and the darkness that makes the light illuminating.
An Iroquoian story about Woman Who Fell from the Sky and her twin sons Tsenstá and Taweskare describes the preparation of Turtle Island for the arrival of two-leggeds, of people. Tsenstá spent his days creating rivers and fertile valleys, but his brother Taweskare spent his time disturbing these creations, generating earthquakes, hurricanes, and volcanoes.. And so, Turtle Island is a place of generative and destructive forces living side by side.
Learning is composed of things that seem wondrous and things that seem challenging and irritating, like a wound that is just beginning to heal. It is in healing that we truly recognize our strength. In learning and evaluation work, the principle of niizh encourages us to embrace the “failures” as much as we do the “successes,” places of accord and discord, the generative space of moving between. The tectonic plates both break the earth and build mountains. Opposites generate new possibilities. Our learning and valuation stories must honor this multiplicity.
Niswi (three)

Niswi is the principle reflected in the tripartite framework of interdependence, mutual aid, and harmony. This framework has guided Anishinaabe people since time immemorial and too is a central principle of governance. The Anishinaabe believe that “harmony is the ultimate goal, achieved through synchronicity of interdependence and mutual aid, that comes naturally when all beings follow The Great Laws of Nature. It is important to note that within Anishinaabe epistemology, harmony refers not to a state without conflict, but rather to a state without disconnection.
In learning and evaluation this principle directs us to consider how our efforts are adding up to more than shifts in discrete issues or policy areas. Whereas Bezhig invites us to hold things in their totality, their essential oneness, Niswi is asking us to attend to the interactions of the different human systems.
In movement language, Niswi is about the relationship between issue areas. Niswi is embodied by Audre Lorde when she told a crowd “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” Niswi asked us to not just recognize the relationships between economic justice and intimate, partner-based violence but to learn how one movements strategies interact, impact, inform others.
Niswi asks learning and evaluation efforts to hold interdependence as the basis for guiding questions. How is what we are doing here affecting communities over there? How does expanded support for BIPOC artists affect the civic engagement of communities of color? How can our resourcing efforts deepen this connection?
Niiwin (four)

Niiwin is the principle of the four directions, the four seasons, and the four phases of life. It asks us to hold that the “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” as Martin Luther King, Jr. has so famously said. Along this arc are seasons, times when our justice efforts shift to be in harmony with the earth. Our spring efforts might be more tentative, surface like early spring shoots, testing for the right conditions to flourish. Our summer efforts might be bolder, more expansive, and assured by longer periods of sunlight. Our fall efforts might be when we see the fruits of our labor and significant progress made in the desired directions. And our winter efforts might be more reflective when we gather together to talk story and learn from one another, nudged inward by longer periods of darkness and the need for warmth.
Niiwin asks learning and evaluation efforts to hold this longer arc of time, to recognize the sprouting is essential for fruiting, that reflection is as important as action. Niiwin directs us to considers these seasons in relationship to each other. How did our early experiments support bolder actions? How did the time spent in learning and reflection affect our early experiments?
Returning to Sacred Reciprocity
Rooted learning and evaluation are reseeding the field, returning both to sacred reciprocity. It is an approach that honors these principles and provides a path to building collective wisdom in ways that can support harmonious governance and sacred oneness. How we learn is how we live, because we live in place and learning is sky, water, air, even this soft place behind our ear.