Institutional educational systems have tended to focus on Mind, through cognitive outcomes – and possibly Body, through physical education, and subjects that teach a physical skill, such as woodworking. That is, fifty percent of who we are, that is, our Spirit and Heart, is not being recognized and nurtured in the institutional educational system.

I believe that a lot of this reductionistic, compartmentalized approach stems from the seventeenth century. Rene Descartes, the philosopher sometimes referred to as the founding father of modern medicine made a turf deal with the Pope. He needed human bodies for dissection, and promised that he wouldn’t have anything to do with the soul, the mind, or the emotions. These became the purview of the church. This deal heralded the Cartesian era, or Cartesian thought, which is dominated by reductionistic methodology, which attempts to understand life by examining the tiniest pieces of it, and then extrapolating from these pieces to overarching surmises about the whole (Pert). Native Peoples on this continent did not know about Cartesian thought and still saw the four parts as an inseparable whole.

In compiling the research for the work that I did with the ONLC, I came up with a possible solution to the restrictive definition that MTCU had for literacy. A long-time friend, Diane Hill, Mohawk, Six Nations of the Grand River Territory had been part of a teaching team with the First Nations Technical Institute (FNTI). This teaching team had been using the Medicine Wheel as a model for education. This is sometimes referred to as the Wheel of Life.

Aboriginal traditional teachings tell us that we are Spirit, Heart, Mind, and Body (Hill). To have a life of balance, we must recognize and nurture all four parts of ourselves. That is, I suggest that Aboriginal literacy is about recognizing the symbols that come to us through Spirit, Heart, Mind, and Body, interpreting them and acting upon them for the improvement of the quality of our lives.

Through this research, I have developed an appreciation for some further work that the FNTI teaching team had done – postulating learning outcomes for each of: