When mathematics has spirit: Aki Chike Win

This paper is an examination of the way mathematics, and STEM, arises through stories of teaching and learning on, with, and alongside Land. It emerges from research, undertaken in different Nations (Cree, Dene, Metis, Mi'kmaw, Naskapi, Canada), that considers what locally meaningful K-12 STEM teaching and learning might look like in Indigenous contexts. The paper reflects our research process. Each story is followed by a conversation that surfaces elements of how mathematics, language, learning, and different ways of knowing, being, and doing circulate together and emerge in relation to Land and all relations living within it. We frame the work in ethical relationality to open a space where Indigenous and Western knowledges might co-exist, attending to ongoing tensions in the work between ways of knowing, being, and doing of different people and peoples/nations, between perspectives and experiences of indigenous and non-indigenous participants, between languages, while still creating spaces where we might move closer together through iterative processes of collective learning. This exploration provides insight into how and when we might remember that mathematics has spirit, how quantity and pattern live in various contexts, when numbers might be inadequate for a context, and how all these ideas can meaningfully inform mathematics teaching and learning via relationships between language, mathematics and learners. We seek a mathematics that resists abstraction as extraction and instead lives and enspirits teaching and learning through relationships.