Learning with the Land: Dr. Cher Hill Recognized for Community-Engaged Research in the Fraser Watershed

Q: What does receiving the Emerging Community-Engaged Researcher Award mean to you, particularly in relation to your current land-centred, community-engaged research?

A: It is an incredible honour to receive the CERi award and to be recognized by my colleagues and community collaborators. University – Community collaborations are vital in framing research questions and guiding projects to ensure that expertise and resources are mobilized in ways that best serve community needs. They are also super important in creating trans-systemic knowledge that enables us to better respond to complex problems, including the polycrisis of capitalism, colonization, and eco-side. Community-engaged scholarly work was hit hard by the budget cuts at universities across Canada. It is wonderful that SFU continues to acknowledge and encourage community-engaged research through the CERi Awards.

I am enterally grateful for long time collaborators, Elder Rick Bailey (Katzie Nation), and teacher Neva Whintors, as well as many other educators, knowledge keepers and artists who have contributed to our projects over the years. Together we work to take action to care for salmon and their waterways, strengthen human-land relations, and engage learners in the complexities and complicities of settler colonialism. 

Q: Your research brings together Elders, artists educators, and students to explore the impacts of colonization on the Fraser watershed and to care for Salmon as family. How do these relationships shape the way learning happens in this work, both on the land and with the people involved?

A: Our project began five years ago with Elder Rick Bailey’s vision that we would teach children to care for salmon like family. We worked collaboratively to develop new pedagogical approaches, while simultaneously studying our process. Students are students are typically deeply moved and become incredibly committed to helping the salmon. when Elder Rick shares how salmon are not coming home due to overfishing, fish farms, development, and global warming, and that this breaks his heart because salmon are his family.

By learning the oral history through local knowledge keepers, educators can create pedagogical experiences that better honour what it means to be living on these lands and engage students in important ways. We have witnessed how students become enlivened when they feel connected to something greater than themselves and can be of service to others, including salmon. Providing opportunities for students to learn directly from Elders, to witness what is occurring on these lands, and to work with artists to express their place-based connections shapes their learning in profound ways.

Working with teacher Neva Whintors has been incredibly important for advancing this scholarship. She draws on her pedagogical expertise in social emotional learning to provide wholistic learning experiences, encouraging children to attend not only to what they know, but what they feel, when they are in the forest. This shift creates opportunities for enhancing human-forest relations. Together, we hold space for the voices of children and support them in listening to the land and taking action to care for salmon like family.

Q: What impacts have you seen emerge through this research, and how do you see the Faculty of Education contributing to broader conversations around reconciliation and community-engaged learning?

A: Working collaboratively with knowledge keepers, teachers and artists to develop generative pedagogical approaches to relational land-centred learning has not only contributed to the scholarship on environmental education (Hill, et al., 2023; 2024; 2025), but also contributed to a sustained culture shift within the school in which students, teachers, and parents were more mindful of the laws of these lands since time in memorial, more aware of colonial harms and local environmental issues, and more inclined to take action to advocate and care for the land.

Over a four-year period, we have witnessed children self-initiate various projects to care for salmon including initiating a stream clean up, removing over 50 tires from a local waterway, and patrolling storm drains on the school grounds for anything they believed that could hurt salmon. Importantly some of these activities continued for four years later and involved children who never worked with Elder Rick, indicating a cultural shift within the school.

In a subsequent project in collaboration with Dr. Ching-Chiu Lin, we witnessed the respect and sense of responsibility the children had for salmon transfer to another species (tadpoles), when they observed their pond drying up due to unseasonably warm weather. The students connected the impact of global warming on salmon to what they were observing with the tadpoles. The children then called upon experts like Elder Rick to help guide their work to raise awareness about global warming through a film festival.

In a beautiful act of reciprocity, they used the festival as a vehicle to raise funds to support the work Elder Rick’s nation (Katzie) is doing to restore waterways in their territories. Notably, the children received the 2025 Graeme Loader Community Panda Award from World Wildlife Fund Canada for the ‘How to Love a Forest’ Film Festival that evolved out of the research project.

There are many ways that the Faculty of Education contributes to conversations about transformative reconciliation. Through community-engaged research guided by knowledge keepers, we can work together to enact and study the impact of projects that advance Truth and Recolonization and Indigenous Sovereignty. The Indigenous Education and Reconciliation Council (IERC) and the Office of Indigenous Education provide much support, guidance, and inspirations for faculty to consider how their scholarship can centre Indigenous knowledges, renew human-land relations, engage learners in the complexities and complicities of settler colonialism, and lay the foundation for healing the disconnections caused by colonial harms.