The Long View
Where we're aiming
The Long Term – Upcoming Programs
Over the next few years, we're putting together a trilogy of wilderness canoe expeditions tracing some of the most historically significant routes in Canada. Major travel corridors for Indigenous peoples for thousands of years, and significant fur trade routes for hundreds, these are a few of the trails that made the country. Put together, the three journeys form the historical fur trade route from Montreal to Norway House, just north of Lake Winnipeg, an epic wilderness journey of equal parts challenge and philosophical importance. More than just a canoe trip, we will engage in the history of the (back)country (its land, water, living beings (including people), and wild places). As a country formed from rather than in spite of its geography, these routes are an indelible part of Canada's foundation and thus its future. To understand this country and, more importantly, one's place in it, is to come to know, via direct engagement, our relationship to its land.
We're formalizing our long-term aims
Our Compass Council is working on formalizing the long-term aims of the Headwaters Wilderness Program. Much of it can be found within our philosophy, but in terms of material goals, in the long run we hope for our programs to be fully funded, such that anyone who desires can participate free of charge, while still maintaining our high level of investment in the quality of our programs and the support we provide our staff. We also aim to have a physical home – a welcoming, wild place where those engaged and interested in both thinking about and practicing the forefront of educational philosophy and pedagogy can come to be together. An Academy, in the Platonic sense: an educational community aimed toward the achievement of life lived toward the good.
All are welcome to reach out if you'd like chat about long-term aims and material processes to achieve them.
"A canoeing expedition, which demands much more than [a short day of "canoeing"], is also much more rewarding. It involves a starting rather than a parting. Although it assumes the breaking of ties, its purpose is not to destroy the past, but to a lay a foundation for the future. From now on, every living act will be built on this step, which will serve as a base long after the return of the expedition, and until the next one."
~ Pierre E. Trudeau,
Exhaustion and Fulfilment: The Ascetic in a Canoe, 1944