Living Water / Living Justice: Intergenerational Memory and Water in Winnipeg by Jacob Carson

This interdisciplinary, multimodal place-based unit for a Grade 12 Global Issues (40S) &/or ELA 40S class invites students to explore the politics of water in Winnipeg by engaging with histories of colonization, memory, infrastructure, and Indigenous resistance. Students will move between walking-based inquiry, reflective and research-based writing, photography, mapping, and collaborative curation. Drawing from Adele Perry’s Aqueduct, the unit places water justice at the center of larger questions about global rights, conflict, land dispossession, and ongoing colonial structures in Canada.

This project builds on learners prior Global Issues work addressing human rights violations, the history of displacement, and justice-focused storytelling. Here, students confront the paradox of a city that relies on water piped in from a First Nation (Shoal Lake 40) long denied access to the same resource. They learn to “read” infrastructure, think about water as a right rather than a commodity, and produce creative responses grounded in personal and collective memory.

Crucially, the project is grounded in the resilience and lived realities of learners, many of whom have faced profound adversity. The work invites their own stories to matter: their neighborhoods, their struggles, their relationship to water and land.

This approach aligns with Young & Ferguson’s call for writing as a pleasurable, purposeful, and identity-affirming practice, and Watt & Honeyford’s emphasis on critical, relational, and place-conscious pedagogies.

What Students Will Do

1. Walk, Observe, Reflect

   Visit local water sites, take notes and photos, and reflect on place, memory, and emotion.

2. Write from Experience and Imagination

   Create poems, narratives, and speculative pieces rooted in personal and ecological

   connections to water.

3. Engage in Critical Conversations

   Read and discuss texts on water, land, and justice by thinkers like Perry, Simpson, and

   Kimmerer.

4. Collaborate and Share Feedback

   Workshop writing in small groups using relational, supportive feedback methods.

5. Curate and Publish Multimodal Work

   Combine writing and visuals into a zine or public exhibit on water justice.

6. Reflect on Learning and Justice

   Assess personal growth as writers and thinkers and consider how water connects to systems of power and care.