Etuaptmumk (Two-Eyed Seeing) in Nature’s Way-Our Way: braiding physical literacy and risky play through Indigenous games, activities, cultural connections, and traditional teachings

The purpose of this article is to explore the guiding principles of Etuaptmumk (Two-Eyed Seeing) that underpins an initiative that is focused on physical literacy and risky play, called Nature’s Way-Our Way. Nature’s Way-Our Way is a culturally rooted, interdisciplinary, and community-based initiative designed to enhance, implement, and evaluate physical literacy and land-based learning resources in nine Indigenous including First Nations and Métis (distinctive peoples encompassing Indigenous and European heritage) and non-Indigenous early childhood education centers in Saskatchewan, Canada. Seeking to strengthen the bonds between preschool aged children, their families, and early childhood educators, Nature’s Way-Our Way focuses on the development of physical literacy and risky play through Indigenous games, activities, cultural connections, and traditional teachings; for example, stories and storytelling as well as opportunities for cultural renewal through land-based learning. Importantly, this initiative is positioned to advance reconciliation in Canada, in response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (2015) calls for federal, provincial, territorial, and Indigenous governments; specifically, Call to Action number 12, which seeks to “develop culturally appropriate early childhood education programs for Aboriginal families” (p. 152) and Call to Action number 89, which seeks to “promote physical activity as a fundamental element of health and well-being” (p. 299).

The Nature’s Way-Our Way research team comprised First Nations, Métis, and settler individuals; including academic researchers and community-based Elders and Knowledge Keepers from the Ho-Chunk, also known as Winnebago, Tribe in Nebraska, the USA; the Kickapoo Tribe in Oklahoma, USA; the Nakoda (Assiniboine First Nation) in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba in Canada and Montana and Dakota, USA; the Cega’kin (Carry the Kettle First Nation) in Saskatchewan, Canada; and the Muskoday First Nation in Saskatchewan, Canada. We understand settler is a loaded term, and it is not our intent to obscure the many different routes that non-Indigenous people have taken to call Canada home, all intensely complicated and fraught with vast differences in resources and privilege. We also do not intend to reify categories and place ourselves, or others, into neat and fixed identity boxes; however, settler is the best word we currently have to describe white and western privileges (Liboiron, 2021). Moreover, while the Indigenous community context in Nature’s Way-Our Way encompasses linguistic groups of Nêhiyawak (Plains Cree First Nation in Saskatchewan, Canada), Nahkawininiwak (Saulteaux First Nation that covers Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia, Canada), Nakota (Assiniboine First Nation that covers Montana and Dakota, USA, and Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, Canada), Dakota (Sioux First Nation that covers Minnesota, South Dakota and North Dakota, USA, and Manitoba and Saskatchewan, Canada), Lakota (Western Sioux First Nation that covers North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Minnesota, and Montana, USA, and Manitoba and Saskatchewan, Canada), and Denesuline (Dene or Chipewyan First Nation that covers Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and the Northwest Territories, Canada; Office of the Treaty Commissioner, 2018), we emphasize there is no one Indigenous definition, cosmology, or metaphysics. As Tyson Yunkaporta (2020) claims, “an Indigenous person is a member of a community retaining memories of life lived sustainably on a land base, as part of that land base” (p. 36).

While diverse in our backgrounds, the Nature’s Way-Our Way research team collaborates through guiding principles of Etuaptmumk as conceived by Dr Albert Marshall, an Elder from the Moose Clan of the Mi’kmaw First Nation located in Unama’ki, Nova Scotia, Canada, in 2004. Etuaptmumk is meaningful and relevant to Nature’s Way-Our Way because it provides the flexibility and malleability for co-created and co-implicated approaches to research. For example, within the broader scope of research design, the Nature’s Way-Our Way team adopts Etuaptmumk to entangle mixed methods research from western perspectives (Creswell, 2021) with Indigenous research methods (Colbourne et al., 2020; Kovach, 2009; Wilson, 2008; Yunkaporta, 2020). In this instance, we braid surveys and stories that measure and share family, educator, and children’s experiences of, and capacity for, physical literacy and risky play with knowing derived through story, ceremony, and land. Following this, Nature’s Way-Our Way is focused on the protective effects of culture, drawing on evidence that Indigenous cultural connectedness can function as a determinant of physical activity, health, and wellness (Anderson et al., 2016; Ironside et al., 2020). Practically, this means gathering and cobbling together input from diverse groups of people collaborating in Nature’s Way-Our Way, including Indigenous and non-Indigenous research team members, early childhood educators, families, and preschool aged children; while also ethically committing to settler obligations and responsibilities to enact good relations with Indigenous governed research and principles of ownership, control, access, and possession (First Nations Information Governance Centre, 2014) with, and for, Indigenous communities (Iwama et al., 2009; Wilson, 2008). By good relations, we are referring to grounded, lived, embodied, and embedded practices of knowing, being, thinking, doing, and feeling that cultivates, maintains, and sustains affirmative relationships with others (TallBear, 2014); and to account for our relations when they are not good (Liboiron, 2021).

The concept of physical literacy has colonial beginnings, originating in 1884 when American Army Captain, Edward Maquire, described the physicality of an Indigenous culture to possess a movement quality embedded within a specific social context (Cairney, Kiez, et al., 2019). Physical literacy-type practices were later adopted in the 1920s by American educators in response to mechanistic developments inherent in the modernization era that worked to affect upon the physical preparedness of army recruits. Then, in 1993, physical literacy was reinvigorated in Britain by Margaret Whitehead in response to the widespread unease related to the inactivity of the general population and a growing dissatisfaction with school-based Physical Education programs (Whitehead, 2010, 2019). With philosophical underpinnings of monism, existentialism, and phenomenology, Whitehead suggests that physical literacy aims to embrace a more integrated approach in response to pervasive western binary logics set in mind and body, human and nature, and reason and emotion dualisms. Rejecting the idea that the body is a mechanistic tool, physical literacy enacts an embodied integration with the world through sense-making and perceptions as set within the lived experience (Durden-Myers et al., 2020). This means that principles of physical literacy work to displace a single-minded focus on the development of movement competency in children, or body as object, to consider the fundamental centrality of embodiment in the human existence across multiple and diverse movement contexts well beyond sport and school physical education and across the lifespan to optimize learning and flourishing through movement (Durden-Myers et al., 2018; Robinson et al., 2018). More recently, Whitehead and the International Physical Literacy Association have championed physical literacy as the “motivation, confidence, physical competence, knowledge, and understanding to value and take responsibility for engagement in physical activities for life” (Physical Literacy, 2022, para. 3). For Canadian movement, scholars and practitioners, the definition of physical literacy also includes affective dimensions, which relates to motivation and confidence; behavioral dimensions, which relates to engagement in physical activities; cognitive dimensions, which relates to knowledge and understanding; and physical dimensions, which relates to physical competence. Although it should be noted that Whitehead did not recognize the inclusion of the behavioral dimension (Robinson et al., 2018). Although physical literacy may present differently within a variety of contexts, overall, a physical literacy-enriched experience should support movement opportunities that develop one’s competence, confidence, motivation, and active participation.

Focusing on intrinsic valuation of movement, there is emerging evidence that suggests physical literacy may promote lifelong advocacy for physical activity, wholistic health, and wellness, with literature highlighting the importance of targeting physical literacy during the early years to mitigate serious long-term effects of movement deprivation on child development (Belanger et al., 2018; Bremer et al., 2020; Dudley et al., 2017). As Dean Dudley and colleagues (2017) noted,

If the fundamentals of physical literacy have been established and nurtured in these earlier stages, individuals should engage in physical activity as a regular aspect of their lifestyles during adulthood . . . we need individuals by this [adult] life phase to appreciate the intrinsic value of physical activity, as well as its contribution to health and well-being. (p. 446)

Evidence of physical literacy promoting the intrinsic value of physical activity to act as a necessary determinant of health and wellness was also established by Daniel Robinson and colleagues (2018) and John Cairney, Kiez, et al. (2019), with Cairney et al. stating, “It is becoming clear that if PL [physical literacy] is in reality a gateway to increasing PA [physical activity], then it follows that PL must also be a necessary determinant of health via its impact on PA” (p. 372).

Similar narratives are also taken up in interdisciplinary scholarship that calls for risky play to be embedded within early childhood activities to promote physical activity, and thus, support children’s health and wellness (Brussoni et al., 2012, 2015; Milteer et al., 2012; Sando et al., 2021; Sandseter, 2007; Sandseter & Kennair, 2011). Heeding this call, and appreciating the scope for physical literacy to exist within an iterative relationship with risky play, Nature’s Way-Our Way also focuses on risky play through locomotor activities like skipping, running, climbing, galloping, jumping, hopping, rolling, sliding, and leaping; stability activities like balancing, hanging or dangling, stretching, bending, turning, and twisting; and manipulative and object control activities like stick handling and ball catching and throwing.

Risky play is a pedagogical strategy that helps children test limits, develop perceptual motor capacity, and respond to dangerous environments and activities in appropriate ways (Herrington & Brussoni, 2015; Pellegrini, 2021). Risky play in Nature’s Way-Our Way draws on Ellen Beate Hansen Sandseter’s (2007, 2009) original definitions of risky play, as further developed by Johan Sando and colleagues (2021) to promote opportunities to play with great heights that initiates a danger of falling; play with high speeds that initiates a danger of collision; play with dangerous tools, for example, ropes and sticks that initiate a danger of cuts and bruises; play near dangerous elements, for example, bodies of water; play on structures that are muddy, wet, icy, or snowy; play through rough and tumble activities that initiate a danger of harm to each other through wrestling, fighting, fencing with sticks; play in which the child might disappear or get lost; and play with impact, for example, crashing into objects.

It should be noted that risky play has potentially different connotations for a child than for an adult. For example, play with great heights for a child does not mean standing on the side of a cliff but might simply mean standing on a chair; or play in which the child might disappear or get lost might mean playing in a fort under a table, not necessarily fending for themselves in the middle of the woods. Similar to the focus of physical literacy that strives to promote autonomous, confident movers, risky play focuses on child-centered agency that encourages child autonomy to make appropriate decisions for their own safety and the safety of others. As such, risky play is set within a strengths based approach to movement, in which adult interventions offer opportunities for appropriate risky play through affirmative and encouraging language and responses; rather than deficit-based and constraining language and responses that foreclose the conditions of possibility for risky play. Building on the innate strengths and resilience of preschool aged children, educators, and families, a strength-based approach to risky play in Nature’s Way-Our Way is focused on priorities of creating social change set in affirmative movement patterns with the world. This is particularly relevant in Indigenous Knowledges, as the body is understood as the basis of relationships through sensing, thinking, acting, and being that is grounded in creative and relational participation with nature (Cajete, 2000).

Engaging with scholarly work intersecting Indigenous Ways of Knowing and Being with physical literacy (Dubnewick et al., 2018; Fraser-Thomas et al., 2017; Milko, 2020; Nesdoly et al., 2021; Paul et al., 2019) and risky play (Bauer & Giles, 2018; Gerlach et al., 2019), Nature’s Way-Our Way adopts Etuaptmumk to promote physical activity, health, and wellness that is grounded in the voices of Indigenous peoples (Lavallée, 2007; Lavallée & Lévesque, 2013; Strachan et al., 2018). Yet, there is scant evidence in the literature that addresses the Indigenous Knowledges, physical literacy, and risky play nexus within Early Childhood Education contexts; particularly through an Etuaptmumk approach. To address this gap in the literature, Nature’s Way-Our Way actualizes physical literacy and risky play rooted in Indigenous games, activities, cultural connections, and traditional teachings, and opportunities for land-based learning through guiding principles of Etuaptmumk.

As a method of learning to see from one eye, the strengths of Indigenous Knowledges, and from the other eye the strengths of western knowledge, Etuaptmumk recognizes that both Indigenous Knowledges and western knowledge are distinct and whole in and of themselves but uses them together for the benefit of all (Bartlett et al., 2012; Iwama et al., 2009). Symbolizing the guiding principles behind Etuaptmumk, the late Mi’kmaw Chief of the Acadia First Nation, Nova Scotia, Charles Labrador evoked the idea of Trees Holding Hands. As Chief Labrador explained, “Go into the forest, you see the birch, pine, maple. Look underground and all those trees are holding hands. We as people have to do the same” (Institute for Integrative Science and Health, n.d., para 3). As Lee-Anne Broadhead and Sean Howard (2021) commented, “Two-Eyed Seeing offers the Western eye a chance to look at itself—and the world around it—afresh” (p. 17). In this way, the purpose of Etuaptmumk is to generate a relational process that brings two scientific traditions together to create a transcendent, transcultural third, ethical, space of research (Broadhead and Howard, 2021; Ermine, 2007).

To actualize the potential of Etuaptmumk, however, is not without western responsibilities and obligations that acknowledge the shared condition of colonialism (Donald, 2009). This shared condition is one that calls for different responsibilities and obligations within land-specific relations to evaluate biased dialogues and purposeful and ignorant misrepresentations of Indigenous cosmologies, as derived from, and further contributing to, structures of the settler state (Belcourt, 2015; TallBear et al., 2020). It is also important to highlight that Indigenous Knowledges are derived from entirely different epistemological and cosmological foundations to that of western knowledge, meaning the two cannot necessarily be combined or absorbed into western epistemologies (Tuck et al., 2014). For example, the colonial imaginary that sets humans apart from land is vastly different from Indigenous perspectives that situate humans as a part of land, in which land has its own agency (Wildcat, 2005). Furthermore, as a proper noun, Indigenous Knowledges are emplaced and situated within specific cultural and land-based contexts, whereas western knowledge is typically taken up as generic and universal. Importantly, given the pervasive and dominant nature of western knowledge, there is risk that this form of knowledge works to co-opt and reappropriate Indigenous Knowledges (Liboiron, 2021).

In critical consideration of these tensions, Nature’s Way-Our Way’s approach to Etuaptmumk does not intend to blur or blend these two diverse, contrasting, and often conflicting worldviews; nor does it attempt to equalize perspectives within balanced harmony and turntaking (Hall et al., 2015). Rather, our research team seeks to activate the most appropriate lens through critical considerations of the Four Rs of research with Indigenous peoples which include respect, reciprocity, responsibility, and relevance (Canadian Institute of Health Research et al., 2018; Kirkness & Barnhardt, 2001; Snow et al., 2016). Here, we take up practices of Indigenous métissage through land and story-based approaches to curriculum informed by relationality to work with affirmative differences between different human cultures in holding “together the ambiguous, layered, complex, and conflictual character of Aboriginal and Canadian relations without the need to deny, assimilate, hybridize, or conclude” (Donald, 2012, p. 536). For example, respect is taken up through Indigenous métissage as we work with different ontologies, epistemologies, cosmologies, methodologies, and ethics between Indigenous Knowledges and western knowledge; moving away from difference between categories, boundaries, and borders as oppositional and dualistic to position difference in affirmative ethics, in that through difference, the other comes into being (Braidotti, 2009). Reciprocity is taken up through Indigenous métissage, in which we activate a shared give and take of power within the research team, and between the research team and the communities, initiating conversations that explore the shared expectations of individuals in the research team and between the research team and communities. Responsibility is taken up through Indigenous métissage, in which we address the impact of research on individuals and communities through accountability of the research team to maintain research relationships into the future. While the type and form of collaboration might change shape as the research progresses and transforms into new projects and initiatives, we are always responsible to the network of relationships because without the integrity of the relationships holding the initiative together, the focus point of inquiry loses meaning and context. And relevance is taken up through Indigenous métissage, in which we ensure the research being conducted within communities meets the priorities and needs of that community, in which we depart from a colonial and universalizing one-size-fits-all approach, to address the contextualized, emplaced, and situated needs and strengths of any given community.

Led by Indigenous Elders and Knowledge Keepers, the Nature’s Way-Our Way research team co-created 10 physical literacy-enriched resources to braid physical literacy and risky play through Indigenous games, activities, cultural connections, and traditional teachings. To begin, Indigenous Elders and Knowledge Keepers in the Nature’s Way-Our Way team proposed 10 Indigenous games and activities, also including an Indigenous story to accompany the games and activities (Figure 1). This approach to stories and storytelling highlights one of the contrasting worldviews in Indigenous Knowledge and western knowledge, in that for Indigenous peoples, stories are a living being engrained with their own agency; and thus, storytelling is an embodied and interconnected form of knowledge sharing that enacts living knowledge rooted in animate (Cajete, 2000; Garroutte & Westcott, 2013; Wilson, 2008). This stands in contrast to western knowledge that typically view stories as an instrumental tool for research and as a passive object of study awaiting cultural representation (Rosiek et al., 2020). Addressing the specific movement nuances within the 10 Indigenous games and activities, the Nature’s Way-Our Way team then looked for openings to overlay elements of physical literacy; focusing on the concurrent development of movement confidence, competence, motivation, and active participation with the cultivation of feelings of belonging, cultural connectedness, autonomy of movement, and positive challenges differentiated for diverse learning needs and strengths of diverse children.

In many ways, there is a natural synergy between the monistic and wholistic philosophical underpinnings of physical literacy with the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual interconnectedness of Indigenous wholistic health and wellness (Doucette et al., 2004; Lavallée, 2007; Toulouse, 2021). While physical literacy has been critiqued for its over-emphasis on movement competencies (Robinson et al., 2018), emerging physical literacy scholarship reinstates the embodied nature of movement across multiple contexts as a move to displace an over-emphasis on the mechanical techniques of movement (Cairney, Dudley, et al., 2019; Dudley et al., 2017; Durden-Myers et al., 2018, 2020; Kriellaars et al., 2019). Through a focus on embodied movement practices, Nature’s Way-Our Way seeks to draw out contextualized, emplaced, and situated stories that show how movement does relationships (Land & Danis, 2016; Riley & Proctor, 2022); relationships with self, physical activity, health, wellness, each other, and broader worldly ecologies.

Indigenous métissage in practice is also evident in Nature’s Way-Our Way land-based learning resources (Figure 2), in which seven Activity Cards were co-created with two Métis early childhood educators and a Nêhinawak (Swampy Cree First Nation that covers northern Manitoba and eastern Saskatchewan, Canada) and Métis land-based educator. The land-based learning resources follow the seven Sacred Teachings, the four Nêhiyawak Directions, and the Saskatchewan Government’s Essential Learning Experiences (Four Directions Teachings, 2012; Government of Saskatchewan, 2015). The land-based learning resources adopt traditional Indigenous forms of learning that are intimately connected to relational reciprocity with land (Battiste, 2010; Coulthard, 2014; Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario, 2020) and wholistic health and wellness associated with the Indigenous Medicine Wheel’s focus on physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual wellness; while also considering western knowledge as presented in provincial early learning frameworks for young children’s physical, socio-emotional, intellectual, and spiritual development.

In this article, we have discussed the anticolonial praxis in Nature’s Way-Our Way, and how this initiative braids physical literacy and risky play through Indigenous games, activities, cultural connections, and traditional teachings to promote wholistic health and wellness, and cultural renewal for Indigenous preschool aged children, their families, and educators. Following the guiding principles of Etuaptmumk, the Nature’s Way-Our Way research team seeks to generate a third, ethical space of research that draws from the strengths of both Indigenous Knowledges and western knowledge (Ermine, 2007). We do this through practices of Indigenous métissage that hold together the diverse, contrasting, and often conflicting aspects of Indigenous Knowledges and western knowledge in activating and actualizing ethics and politics of affirmative difference between knowledge systems (Donald, 2012). This means that forms of Indigenous Knowledges and western knowledge are not blurred or diluted together through a one-plus-one logic (Whatmore, 2002), but rather, attention turns to the border culture of the in-between (Fine, 1998; Jones & Jenkins, 2008). The border culture does not separate extremes down the middle, inevitably silencing and denying the middle space and subsequently reifying categories and their hierarchical positions within power differentials. Rather, working in the third, ethical, and middle space creates an assemblage of heterogenous relations that promotes a rich and fluid dialogue between diverse epistemic worlds within the research team and between the research team and Early Childhood Education Centres.

While the dialogues within this third, middle space can be fraught with tensions and contradictions, it is the tensions and contradictions that work to proliferate new patterns of knowing, being, thinking doing, and feeling in generating new stories, assemblages, and worldings. For example, so far, the Nature’s Way-Our Way initiative has been well-received by the Early Childhood Education Centres that we have begun collaboration with; yet this not without many, and sometimes challenging, learnings derived from the contextualized, emplaced, and situated stories of each center. As such, one of the most crucial findings thus far, has been the importance to focus on the relationships within the Nature’s Way-Our Way network of collaborators that includes the social relationships with people and material relationships with land and place. This is not to suggest a focus on content and outcomes is not important nor a worthwhile pursuit, especially since aims and objectives of Nature’s Way-Our Way are to promote physical activity, health, and wellness among Early Childhood Education communities; but rather, a focus on relationships reemphasizes the role of processes and journeys in achieving outcomes through adaptive, flexible, and relationally malleable ways.

Continuing our collaborative relationships with Early Childhood Education Centres across Saskatchewan, next steps in Nature’s Way-Our Way will be to learn about Indigenous games and activities from the situated contexts of families and educators. Creating revitalized educational opportunities for Indigenous preschool aged children, their families, and early childhood educators, the goal here is to generate a comprehensive range of culturally rooted and co-created resources that can be shared among the network of Early Childhood Education Centres within Nature’s Way-Our Way and beyond.

Writing from Treaty 6 Territory, the traditional Indigenous territory of the Cree, Saulteaux Dakota, Lakota, Dene, and Métis, the authors pay their deepest respects to the many First Nations and Métis peoples whose footsteps have marked these lands for generations. They give thanks to the Elders and Knowledge Keepers, those with them today, and those who are no longer with them, for their stewardship and teachings. And may they all continue to walk together toward Truth and Reconciliation. They also acknowledge the early learning centers they have worked with in the past, and the Elders who have guided them in this work, Kathleen Wahpepah and Tim Eashappie. They also extend their heartfelt gratitude to Knowledge Keeper, Erica Stevenson, for her expertise, support, guidance, and mentorship as a community-based practitioner in this research project.