Isivivane stones and the Shawnigan Journey

I thought I would start with some reflections from a group of students that I have worked with in South Africa with one of our Chapel guests today, Dr. Geordie Ractliffe, who runs a non-profit in Cape Town that helps young people living in poverty to enjoy the sense of wonder and beauty of learning through experience that all of you have access to here at Shawnigan.

 

We would take a group of these students to a nature reserve and immerse them in a context they may never have experienced before. For some of you, a similar experience that you could relate to may be your first Nordic skiing lesson next term, or it could be the carving experience with Brad Assu on Quadra Island.

 

One of our students wrote at the end of our Cape Town program, “I have noticed that I am a different person to the one I was in the past.” This idea that an experience can change how you think about yourself and the world that surrounds you is a core part of why I think experiential learning is so powerful. 

 

In South Africa, in many of our indigenous communities, and in indigenous communities around the world, ancestral spirits are venerated and considered to be part of people's daily lives. They are believed to act as benevolent guides, mentors, and protectors. And natural spaces are widely believed to be sacred places where ancestors communicate with their living descendants.

 

This is partly why one of the most powerful experiences I have had with these groups of students has been when one of the students on the hike I was leading turned to me and said, “I have never felt closer to my grandmother than now. I know she is dead, but I can feel her spirit here. The feeling of being listened to and visible to her is stronger here in the quietness of this place than at home in my location (the township that he lived in).”

 

South Africa, a country where I have spent a large part of my life, has a long history of colonization and oppression of the indigenous groups that lived across Southern Africa for centuries before the arrival of European colonists. The opportunities that experiential education has presented for the boys I teach at Hilton College to unpack, learn and reflect on this past have been life changing. Hilton is a school very similar to Shawnigan in its structure and facilities, in its fees and in the families who send their children to school there. 

 

In any case, the opportunities for us to work directly with the local communities who were removed from the land that the school was founded on over 150 years ago, to learn about their ways of life and what was lost, and to try and build in their cultural and knowledge practices into our school has been really powerful.

 

One small example of this takes place in Hilton’s Grade 10 year when every August every single Grade 10 – all 120 of them – takes part in a 16-day, 260km journey where they walk from the school gates through the surrounding landscape, changing to mountain bikes and kayaks where needed. Each pupil carries everything they need for the full 16 days – food, bedding, water, tents, everything – and walks in their house groups, around 15 or 16 boys per group. Beyond the hardship and camaraderie that they experience, there are two major pieces of indigenous experiential learnings that we use: one is daily reflection in the form of a journal that each boy carries with him and then receives again at the end of Grade 12, and the other more profound experience is their joining together to contribute to the Hilton isivivane.

 

In Zulu culture, the local indigenous South African community that is most numerous in the province where Hilton is located, an isivivane is a pile of rocks created by passing travelers who would pick up a stone, spit on it and place it on the pile of stones they are passing. This act would pay respect to their ancestors, ensure their safe journey forward, both physical and metaphorical, and act as a beacon for future travellers in the ways that an inuksuk can in the Arctic. Every Hilton boy returns from their Grade 10 journey through the entrance they departed, picks up a stone and adds it to the isivivane, contributing their story to the ones that came before them and communicating a message to every member of the school community watching their return. 

 

So, what does any of this have to do with Shawnigan? Well, in the 10 months that my family and I have spent here, I have witnessed the Shawnigan “isivivane traditions.” In other words, the “stones” that all of you place in front of the community to celebrate your experiences, to reflect on your common ideals and to show kindness to one another. From the electric atmosphere of the Stag Café, to surviving Emiliano and Dani’s cooking on the West Coast Trail, to being rescued multiple times by the Snow Angels at Ski Week, the Shawnigan Journey – your Shawnigan Journey – is defined by the experiences you have here.  And so, in the spirit of the First Nations Principles of Learning that we are celebrating today, take the opportunity to embrace every experience you can here at Shawnigan, to share the stories of that experience with one another, to see each other, and by doing so, growing bigger as individuals but also as one Shawnigan community.