Saskatoon

9/2/2014

I just spent a fantastic week in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. It was my first time to this Canadian province and I loved it. The town was lovely and is known as the City of Bridges because of its 8 crossings over the South Saskatchewan River. Its greater metropolitan area has about 300,000 inhabitants and is rich with First Nations history. The surrounding prairies are gorgeous and the people were very open and welcoming.

I was invited to Saskatoon to participate in a research project at the University of Saskatchewan which has 21,000 students. Dr. MJ Barrett, a student of mine who is a professor in the School of Environment and Sustainability, is heading this research. The project goals are to 1. Address the human-nature disconnect and facilitate reconnection, 2. Generate bridges between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples and their ways of knowing, and 3. To facilitate public dialog on the place of telepathic animal-human communication in animal care and wellbeing, wildlife rehabilitation and management, veterinary care, and so on. Eventually this information will also be used to address complex environmental issues.

Dr. Barrett and I were interviewed on TV during a morning news show. Three and a half minutes just fly by in an interview! That evening we held a public panel at the University to discuss animal communication and the research project. MJ and I were joined on the panel by Joseph Naytowhow, a Cree storyteller and knowledge keeper who is also on the research team. More than 70 people attended our presentation and many did not want to leave when it was over.

The next two days were spent teaching an expanded How to Communicate with Animals workshop. It was sponsored by the University but held at a tribal friendship center in downtown Saskatoon. The class filled up easily and everyone that attended did very well. It was very exciting for me to have three Cree elders attend and share some of their wisdom as well. One participant brought a little bat for us to talk with!

Some of the research team

Our research team met for a full day of brainstorming and reflection on the workshop and panel discussion. The team includes several professors from various departments at the University, three Cree Elders who are delightful, Deborah Erickson, a student of mine who just got her PhD with a dissertation about telepathic interspecies communication, several graduate students, and myself.

I am very excited to see animal communication research coming into academia. There is so much misunderstanding about this field and I am certain that fostering this skill will heal our human disconnection with nature and bring about great changes in the way we view our world and our place in it.

Can you imagine a world, where a major component of researching or solving complex environmental and wildlife issues is talking directly to nature? Doesn’t that make perfect sense to go right to the source? I can’t wait to see where this project goes and the many shifts it will create. The times they are a changing………..