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Connect with Mi’kmaw Moons—A Two-Eyed Seeing Project

Dave Chapman (RASC Halifax Centre) & Cathy LeBlanc (Acadia First Nations)

June 16th, 2020, 7:00 p.m. EDT (convert to your time zone)

The Mi’kmaw Moons Project is a volunteer collaboration by RASC Fellow Dave Chapman (Dartmouth, Nova Scotia) and Mi’kmaw cultural interpreter Cathy LeBlanc (Newcombville, Nova Scotia) that began in 2013 and continues today (see biographies and project summary below). The aim of the project is to educate all Canadians in the lunar time-keeping practices of indigenous people (especially the Mi’kmaq) by presenting traditional teachings alongside our understanding of the Moon’s celestial motion according to conventional (i.e. western) astronomy, using an approach known as Two-Eyed Seeing[1]. The project has created a Facebook page (www.facebook.com/www.MikmawMoons), a multitude of oral presentations in various formats, the publication of an award-winning article in the Griffith Observer magazine (reprinted in JRASC 111(1), February 2017 , and a series of language videos. Cathy and David presented the banquet presentation “One Moon—Two Eyes” at the 2015 RASC General Assembly in Halifax, Nova Scotia The next steps for the project may include an educational children’s book and a planetarium show.

Biographies

Dave Chapman is a graduate of University of Ottawa (B.Sc., 1975) and University of British Columbia (M.Sc., 1977). He worked for 31 years as a Defence Scientist. He is a Life Member (since 1986) of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, and was the editor of the RASC Observer’s Handbook (2012–2016 editions). The RASC awarded him the Simon Newcomb Award in 1986, the Service Award in 2015, and the Fellowship Award in 2020. He has been an amateur astronomer for over half a century.

Cathy Jean LeBlanc is a graduate of St. Thomas University (B.A., 2002). She is a Mi’kmaw cultural interpreter (10 years with Parks Canada), an artist, and a member of the Big Drum group Women of the Shore. Cathy currently works for the South Shore Regional School Board as a Child and Youth Care Practitioner.

[1] Two-Eyed Seeing is a guiding principle introduced by Mi’kmaw Elder Albert Marshall in 2004. It refers to learning to see from one eye with the strengths of Indigenous knowledge and ways of knowing, and from the other eye with the strengths of Western knowledges and ways of knowing, and learning to use both these eyes together, for the benefit of all (see www.integrativescience.ca/Principles/TwoEyedSeeing).

Join us for this livestream on our YouTube page.

 

 

 

Online

June 16, 2020