Walk with us. We’d like to take you to our favourite spot here in Toronto’s High Park, just north of the shores of Lake Ontario. This 400-acre urban pleasure park is brimming with people running, biking, playing and picnicking. But it is not just a pretty refuge from the bustle of city life. It is a space where you can tune in to hear the plants and trees singing, where you can feel the sheer effort they exert holding the earth down and the sky up. The majestic oaks that thrive in Toronto’s High Park today are remnants of the ancient black oak savannahs that stretched out across these lands for millennia. These remarkable ecologies, with their wide open canopies, tall grasses and wildflowers, took root in the sandy soils left in the wake of retreating glaciers and ancient lakes.

But this landscape is not just sculpted by glaciers, wind, water, animals, and plants. An oak savannah is always in transition, always on its way to becoming forest. It needs fire to thrive. This land was shaped by Indigenous people who used fire to keep the savannah open for hunting, farming and dwelling. The Wendat, the Anishinaabe, the Haudenosaunee, and most recently the Mississaugas of the Credit River stewarded these lands by lighting fires to keep the grasslands open for hunting, farming, and community life. The 250-year-old trees that are thriving and dying here today remember that time. They remember a time before colonization. They remember the fires. They remember their people.

How can we learn how to pay attention to this remarkable land which is both in-the-making and coming undone? What modes of attention can help us pay attention to the naturalcultural happenings of this remarkable urban landscape? How can we tune in to this ancient ecology situated in the middle of a large city? How can we learn to keep pace with the rhythms and tempos of its compositions and decompositions? With the ephemeral and enduring improvisations taking shape among the plants, trees, insects, birds, animals, and people?

High Park’s oak savannahs have been stewarded by Toronto’s Urban Forestry team for over twenty years without the inclusion of Indigenous people. In 2019 a group of Indigenous Elders, knowledge keepers, and community members and leaders have come together to form Toronto’s Indigenous Land Stewardship Circle, a collective that is advocating for restoring Indigenous stewardship to High Park’s oak savannahs and lands across the city.