Our Project

Ottawa, our country's capital, is home to a richly diverse community. This reality makes Ottawa great. However, it can also make it difficult for Canadian citizens, residents, and newcomers to know where to start when looking for a community. For the winter 2025 Latin America and the Caribbean class, we endeavoured to inspire our students to explore this diversity through ethnographic interviews. Recording the stories and experiences of Ottawa's Latin American and Caribbean residents and the surrounding areas. Over thirteen weeks, our students interviewed friends, family, and Ottawa's Latin American and Caribbean community members. Our ultimate goal is to create an archive of stories that the Latin community can access at any time, preserving knowledge and promoting their cultures. We invite you to browse the stories collected by our students, listen to the audio recording, and read transcripts and biographies of those interviewed.

The Wisdom Mural

(Photo taken by Taylor Paterson, Taken on March 19th 2025)

The Wisdom Mural is one piece in a larger creative project called the Community Engagement Murals, headed by Claudia Salguero, a Colombian-Canadian artist in Ottawa, Ontario. Claudia's goal throughout this project was to engage with local communities, connect to Indigenous knowledge worldwide, and encourage viewers to connect and be one with 'Mother Nature.' Community members painted the Wisdom Mural in smaller panels before installing it at 1365 Bank St in Ottawa. Beyond the engagement with the community to paint, Claudia hosted a round table in January 2021, meeting with Algonquin, Inuit, Métis, Afro-Caribbean, Latin American, Asian, African, and Oceanian knowledge keepers based in Ottawa to discuss the mural design. The final design takes heavily from Canadian Indigenous philosophies regarding the earth; Claudia articulates this on her website, stating, "Their teachings invite us to connect and to be one with Mother Nature in a conscious way, to see her as the source of life, and to appreciate her unlimited gifts. To understand that we are a part of her and she is a part of us." (https://www.claudiasalguero.com/the-wisdom-mural)

The message of this mural inspires us as we work to build Anthroharvest. It speaks to the beauty that comes from bringing together cultures globally while encouraging us to look at the community around us, seeking local knowledge keepers from all different walks of life to help inform how we explore the world around us.