When IndigeSTEAM first started out, we researched the medicine wheel, and for each quadrant, we found our first inspirations: Wisdom and Logic, Illumination and Enlightenment, Trust and Innocence, and Introspection and Insight. The colours here represent the peoples of the world (white, yellow, red
and black) and our goal of inclusion and diversity.
Our first logo shared the logos of the three founding organizations paired to the appropriate quadrant: Wisdom for the Community program – First Light Initiative; Illumination for GAIA – the mentoring organization; and Innocence for Power to Choose – the youth program. From that, flowed our Insight into our name ‘IndigeSTEAM’.
As IndigeSTEAM grew, the choice of retiring the old logos of the founders was made, along with the new names of Pathways for Choice and Partners in Community better reflecting how those two programs were growing from their roots.
IndigeSTEAM’s thoughts about how we interpret the four directions of our Medicine Wheel
First, we acknowledge the other directions of up to the sky and Creator, down to Mother Earth and that we (and every youth, parent, board member, staff, adult member or volunteer) are center to the Wheel and we need to have them all in balance. IndigeSTEAM cannot work without all of these aspects.
As we reflected further, we included concepts from a medicine wheel variant created by Dr. Michelle Hogue, Métis, chemist, and Associate Professor in the Faculty of Indigenous Studies at the University of Lethbridge. Dr. Hogue was one of the first mentor/presenter at a Power to Choose summer camp.Â
Her Medicine Wheel is slightly different, but there are similar concepts and ideas at play:
- White: the Spring season; the question or idea; What do we want to know; Hypothesis
- Yellow: the Summer season; Experiential learning; experiments, data collection; How?
- Red: the Autumn season; Harvest, Understanding; Analysis, answering questions; What?
- Black: the Winter season; Resting, incubation; Understanding the results; Conclusion – what do we know; Why?
ReferenceHogue M. Let’s do it first and talk about it later: rethinking post‑secondary science teaching for Aboriginal learners [Internet]. 2014. doi:https://doi.org/10.37119/ojs2014.v19i3.154