Datta is a really powerful writer, in an unassuming way. Much of his work is quite humble and the content is easy to comprehend. His paper on the community garden first interested me simply because of the environmental and local community connection it had but I soon found much more.

Firstly, his discussion of his own identity of an Indigenous Bengali man was eye-opening. Indigenous people all over the world face difficulties, but they also have great community and culture that we can learn from. Somehow hearing about his past opened my eyes beyond the story of the ‘annihilated and limping’ indigenous cultures living on life-support to look at the actual culture and people as a whole unto themselves.

Not to say that Canadian FNIM people are not struggling or that there are no impacts today, but rather that there are two stories happening here. One of the assault on FNIM communities and culture, and the second the story of those FNIM communities and cultures independent of outsiders’ interference. 

His work also expanded my concept of ‘research’ by introducing me to the Participatory Action Research method which sets out to understand the supposedly ‘unquantifiable’. He sought to see sustainability through the lenses of the community gardeners. Datta did this by engaging and sharing in cultural stories, activities, music, and foods at the garden including sharing his own. I was impressed by how much he was able to learn about or ‘find out’ about sustainability and cross-cultural connection through this endeavor.

I personally surprised by how much more invested I felt in the paper just because it was local to me. In a way it relieved me of the burden of interpolating it to my experiences. I wasn’t stuck thinking ‘would that even work here?’, ‘that’s impossible because of our local environmental limitations’ and ‘Saskatchewan isn’t interested in these topics’ that I normally do with other social or environmental papers. But there really is wonderful things all around us at all times of year.

So often in both biology and education I’ve felt some options were not accessible to me because we don’t have enough people, we don’t have a warm enough climate, or some other thing but apparently that’s not true. This allow gave me the impetus to reassess some of my assumptions of my own life and home.

I think that following the strict definitions of ‘experts’, ‘knowledge’ and ‘truth’ that I’ve been brought up I limit both myself and my future students. Datta’s research does not fit into that model exactly, though it is still quite academically rigorous, and yet I learned so much from it. I’m excited to broaden my learning horizons to new people and to catch up on all that I’ve been missing.