Layla Jonas:
I was like, “holy crap, this is cool that we’re being trusted to do this.” Because colonialism is a really heavy subject in my opinion, and to let a bunch of high schoolers basically have free-range on designing a board is pretty nice.

Alec Patton:
This is High Tech High Unboxed, I’m Alec Patton, and that was the voice of Layla Jonas. In that clip, Layla’s talking about the colonialism project, which paired the indigenous history of Canada with skateboard design, it took place four years ago, Layla was a senior at the time. I first heard about this project from an Instagram post from an indigenous owned Canadian skate company called Colonialism, the Instagram Post said the following, SAL Skate Shop was asked to present once again at the 2023 Edmonton CTS/CTF Teachers Conference. I wanted to know why a skate shop was presenting at a teacher’s conference, not once, but twice, so I looked it up and found out that SAL Skate Shop was actually a class at Salisbury Composite High School in Sherwood Park, just outside Edmonton, Canada, created by veteran teacher and lifelong skater Kristian Basaraba. This episode is about that class, and in particular the colonialism project.
One of the many things I love about this story is that this is Project-based learning at its most punk rock. Kristian doesn’t teach at a school that’s known for project-based learning, he didn’t do this as part of a larger initiative, he just had an awesome idea and he made it happen. Kristian’s teaching career started in a small town in the province of Alberta, Canada, he taught there for seven years, then got tired of the commute. He lived in the city of Edmonton, so he moved school to Salisbury Composite High School, just outside the city.

Kristian Basaraba:
They call it the mothership, “you’ve summoned to the mothership.” They see it as this place that all of the best teachers go, which we know that that’s not true, but a lot of people want to be at that school because it’s so big and has a good reputation.

Alec Patton:
Kristian taught at Salisbury, that is the mothership for eight years, then moved across the street to next step an outreach school.

Kristian Basaraba:
Because I would define outreach as the school for students that are at risk of not completing, but not only at risk youth, there was also students that we had who the traditional high school timetable just didn’t work because they were high level athletes and they were training for something.

Alec Patton:
Although next step was across the street from Salisbury, as far as reputation, it was basically the opposite of the mothership.

Kristian Basaraba:
Because at the time, that school didn’t really have a good reputation for students and or teachers, it was almost, if you’re not a very good teacher, you go to next step, or what do you want to deal with the next step students, they’re nothing but druggies and that sort of thing. And that got me excited because it’s kind of punk rock.

Alec Patton:
It’s at next step that things get interesting, it all starts in the staff room.

Kristian Basaraba:
And it was me literally sitting at my staff room table and we have our ATA, Alberta Teacher Association magazine, and it has articles and whatnot in there, and was an ad that I saw for social justice grants of upwards $1,500 of this organization, the Alberta Federation of Labor Education. All you had to do is proposal for some social justice topic, and they will give you a money. So I got this grant, so if I look at all of the other projects that I’ve done that have been grant funded, I always had this skeleton idea in my brain. So I want my students to create something generally artistic in the vein of skate culture, punk culture, fashion, those things that are of interest to me and I wanted them to work with someone that I knew who is really good at that.
And so that’s how I tend to model, it’s like, “I want students to work with this person, I’m going to use the grant money to pay for their time and then pay for supplies to get my students this kick ass or this RAD project,” which I think my mind is RAD, and hopefully the students think that. And so that was with the Street Art Project that my friend Adrian, how I met him was really through social media in Instagram, and so he had street art moniker, he called himself Think Item. And then it was through that and we became friends, he was doing some stuff with some bands and just struck up a friendship. And I just reached out and said, “I want to do this project with my students about street art, would you come in and work with them and do a number of workshops?” And he was, “yeah, totally.”
I wanted to do social justice and street art, so what my students had to do was pick a social justice issue and create some art. And so we started with an album cover, so I got these 12 inch by 12 inch pieces of wood, and that’s where Adrian started. He was teaching them how to make stencils, and we had spray paint, it was just students who weren’t really artistic per se, made these super RAD pieces of art. So we had these album covers, and then we transitioned into doing buttons with that image and then they did stickers that had this social justice message. And then they did t-shirts, so they had this portfolio of sorts around this one particular image in the workshops that they did. That art on the walls in my school, and I remember my principal saying to me, he’s like, “in all the years that I’ve been here, we’ve never had student artwork on the walls in our school.” And I was like, “that’s crazy to me,” and so I used that model.
Again, you talked about the protest song, so the protest song was like, “well, I want to do some music kind of thing,” and my friend is a musician. Well, I could say I’m a musician, I sing in a bad religion cover band called Dad Religion, he’s the bassist, so me and Brayden, his name is Brayden, we created really just a project where we looked at the history of protest songs, going back to Woody Guthrie, but then moving forward, looked at some of the hip hop stuff and stuff that Public Enemy did, and they brought their own flavor to it, I guess. And then we decided to just do ukuleles because they are simple, and Brayden, who was a music teacher as well, had access to a bunch of ukuleles. So we taught them just some chords and we used actually Woody Guthrie’s song as our basis.
And then they each wrote their own verse around an issue that they wanted to talk about, and one of the individuals in our band, which we ended up calling Morality Unit, which they came up with, which was super interesting actually. And they taught me something because the person that came up with that name, they were doing research for their part of the song and they wanted to write a verse about LGBTQ. And she brought forth this story that happened here in Edmonton where this unit of police officers raided these bathhouses and humiliated these people and arrested them and they were taking them to jail naked, I think there was beatings that happened. The police unit was called the Morality Unit, Orwellian use of language there for sure, and she’s like, “this is a really good band name,” she almost wanted to reclaim that.
Then we got stickers made up, we wrote the song, we went to Brayden’s house and recorded it, and then he did all his wizardry and then we did a little tour. We took the band on the road and we went to a bunch of elementaries that had us in our district, and I have a lot of friends who are teachers obviously, and just emailed them and said, “we got this little project, can we come and sing our song?” And so we did it in the gym for one, it had 300 students there, and then one was in the library with about a hundred students, so it was super cool to see. And the students that were part of that project and part of the band were generally, they were at the outreach students, dealt with anxiety, weren’t really accepted, but here they are performing in front of hundreds of students and they’re doing it well and they were proud of what they did, and so it was like that pride.
Same thing that I saw, there was a lot of pride that came out of the student artwork of those album covers. I also did another project for a different grant called The Poverty Awareness with Skateboards, and so that’s where the trickling of the skateboard piece comes in. All of those projects then funneled into the skateboard class, the skateboard class was really inspired by the school in Toronto called the Oasis Skateboard Factory. So that was founded by Craig Morrison, it was actually a program in Toronto at one point, and then it became a school, it’s own school, so they allow students to get high school credits and graduate through skateboard, designing their own brands and brand design and that sort of thing.

Alec Patton:
So it’s always this like a school, it’s like, “I’m a junior at the skate school,” is that how it was?

Kristian Basaraba:
Yeah, so it does now. They incorporate or integrate their English, for example, via their things that they have to do in terms of submitting business proposals, so that’s where they would get their English mark. But it is a school, it’s its own building, well, it’s not its own building, the fact that it’s actually inside a community center and that was also by design as well. He wanted it to be in a community center where it’s accessible and there’s a lot of various messages of having a school inside a community center for sure that conjures up the sense of community and building and whatnot.
I was always aware of being a skateboarder and being an educator kind of aware of this school and just thought it was really, really cool, and so I asked, I’m like, “can I use some professional development funds to go to Toronto for a week to go check out what they do at this school? And my principal said yes, and so I ended up going to Toronto, just hanging out with Craig for the week at the school. I went and checked out a few other alternative schools on what they did, but my focus was the work that Craig was doing.
When I came back, my principal actually got moved to a different school, and so it felt almost like that particular dream of trying to incorporate it thoroughly in next step wasn’t going to happen. And so I still had a really strong relationship to the principal at Salisbury, the big school, so I made the proposal to her, I said, “I went to this school, Oasis Skateboard Factory, this is what I want to do at your school.” Because I saw it as more of not a school-wide thing, but just a class.

Alec Patton:
Kristian designed the class, got it approved, and it went into the course catalog. And that’s how Layla Jonas, the student from the very beginning of this episode, found out about it. I asked her why she decided to sign up for a class called SAL Skate Shop.

Layla Jonas:
We didn’t have a lot of options at that school that I really enjoyed, so it was a new class being offered, and I was like, “that’s interesting.” And one of my friends was going to take it too, so we decided to take it together. None of us were into skateboarding either, so we’re like, “it seems like at class we could get good marks in probably,” so then we just decided to sign up for it because there was a lot of room.

Alec Patton:
Why did you think you would get good marks in it?

Layla Jonas:
Because there’s a first year program normally is not as strict.

Alec Patton:
This was not how things played out.

Layla Jonas:
No one in our class thought that we were going to get to do any of the stuff that we got to do. Everyone thought it was just going to be simple, easy stuff.

Alec Patton:
Do you remember the point that you were like, “wait, this is a different thing from what I thought it was?”

Layla Jonas:
I think it was when Kristian started talking about all the projects we were going to do. One of the very first ones was, we got to create our own skateboard, and that was a hard process. I still have my board somewhere and it’s peeling apart almost, that took a while, we made our [inaudible 00:12:17].

Alec Patton:
You literally out of wood made that deck?

Layla Jonas:
Yeah, and we got to paint them.

Alec Patton:
It was like once you were making a skateboard deck, it was like, “this is not as easy as we anticipated.”

Layla Jonas:
And it was a lot more fun too.

Alec Patton:
Why was it more fun?

Layla Jonas:
Kristian was a really good teacher, not a lot of teachers take that approach where they’re hands on and they try and get to know the students. Kristian really took a liking to my board, I painted a chicken nugget surfing on a wave of sweet and sour sauce.

Alec Patton:
Strong.

Layla Jonas:
Yeah, right. But then my one friend, she did a really cool artwork thing of koi fishes. So we have me, who’s not an artist, and then my best friend who is a really good artist. And Kristian encouraged all of it, he’s like, “it doesn’t matter if you’re an artist, you can still make it.”

Alec Patton:
Meanwhile, Kristian had got started on what would become the Colonialism project.

Kristian Basaraba:
Now I have this class and I still continued to apply for these grants, so I needed some new ideas. And so the Labor Education grant, that’s when the idea I had, is I wanted to do skateboards again, obviously being in the skateboard class, but I wanted to tackle Colonialism. So now what I’m going to do, or what I want to try to do is, I need to find someone to work with my students. And so I wanted them to work with an indigenous artist and I really wanted to explore the dark history that were Colonialism. It was just like this high idea of Canada’s dark history, I really modeled that project after what Michael Langan was doing at Colonialism Skateboards.

Alec Patton:
Michael Langan is an Anishinaabe Cree artist and skater from Cote First Nation and Peepeekisis First Nation, Treaty four Territory, his company Colonialism Skateboards inspired Kristian’s project.

Kristian Basaraba:
It’s like, here’s a board with a buffalo on it, but here’s also on his website the reason there’s a buffalo on it. Or if we look at the past datum, which is one of his first decks, here’s a picture of a past that an indigenous man needs to have in order to get off his reservation. That blows my mind that it’s on a skateboard, and then you can go to his site and see this description in his words and then there’s references there, it almost reads like an academic journal article with a visual of the skateboard.
I introduced my students to his brand, his idea, and that’s how I framed him like, “we’re going to tackle this, you’re going to tackle this as the youth of today, so how do we tackle that?” Well, one, I think I was quite naive in thinking it would be just so easy, it’s like, “well, I’m just going to call up a residential school survivor and have them come into my school and talk about their traumatic experience.” So looking back, I’m like, “man,” but it happened, and really that’s when I reached out to Joe and just said, “hey, man,” I didn’t know him, again, I just reached out in social media and I was aware of his story and I knew him, what he was doing.

Alec Patton:
The Joe who Kristian just mentioned is Joe Buffalo, a member of the Samson Cree Nation in Alberta, Canada, and a pro skater. You may have actually heard of Joe Buffalo already, even if you don’t pay attention to skateboarding, the New Yorker produced a documentary about his life a few years ago, it’s worth watching, there’s a link in the show notes.
As a kid, Joe Buffalo was sent to a residential school, these were boarding schools that indigenous children were forced to go to where they suffered extraordinary cruelty. According to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, at least 6,000 children died at the schools. Canada’s CBC news worked out that the odds of dying for children going to residential schools were higher than the odds of dying for Canadian serving in World War 2. And for some of the students in SAL Skate Shop, this wasn’t just national history, it was family history.

Kristian Basaraba:
Two of the students had their grandparents went to it as a residential school, so there was this deep familial meaning too, one really standout, well, both of those boards really stood out, but one, for example, her grandma attended residential school and she brought in a set of her grandma’s earrings that were all bead work, and she used that as inspiration to do her skate deck graphic. And her skate deck graphic is a headdress full of bead works that took her hours to do on this board with is little dots and POSCA pens, and it was really to honor her grandma. And so she would talk about how she had conversations with her grandma about her experience in a residential school, and to me, that was just super powerful.
Michel came in, Michel, who’s a friend of mine, she was an FNMI consultant, so First Nations Metis Inuit consultant, so that’s the acronym that they used at the time, and then it was like, “I want to do this project with my students with skateboards, can you help me with this grant proposal?” And so she helped me later like, “here, you can start with this starting with this foundational knowledge piece.” I’m like, “now I have to figure out who I can get into talk about the foundational knowledge piece,” and that’s her. She’s like, “I’ll do it,” and so she came in and kicked off the whole project.
And then I reached out to the artist JCat, and then said, “I’d really like you to work with my students, your art is really amazing,” and so he eventually agreed. And the same thing with Joe, I just reached out through social media, I said, “this is what I want to do, would you be willing to talk to my students about your story and your experience?” And the same thing, just we built a relationship, talked a few times, and then it all worked out.

Alec Patton:
I want to pause to make sure you understand what the Colonialism project was about. The basic concept was that students would do what Michael Langan does with Colonialism skateboards. They’re going to paint a graphic onto a skateboard deck, that is the piece of wood that you stand on that represents an aspect of indigenous history in Canada, and a company it with text that explains the significance of the image. To do that, students learned about indigenous history from Michel Blades Bird, the project also had its own artisan residence, John “Jcat” Cardinal of Whitefish Lake First Nations who shared his work with students and helped them design their graphics, and of course, there was the visit from Joe Buffalo.
You may be wondering how students who signed up for a class called SAL Skate Shop felt about getting extensive history lessons and whether any of them rebelled. I asked Kristian about that, he said there was some of that, of course, but Joe Buffalo’s visit really turned things around for those students.

Kristian Basaraba:
And then those students who are like, “well, why are we doing this?” Then when you bring in Joe and they’re like, “holy, this guy has some street cred, he’s a skater, skates for Colonial.” They start to kind of put the pieces together and they’re like, “holy shit, this is why we’re doing it.” And so the kids were like at the beginning of the workshop, “well, why are we doing this? We’re the first students to run up to Joe after he was done talking and hung out with him and started asking him questions.” And so that’s why Joe’s message and voice is so powerful.

Alec Patton:
For Layla, the guest speakers raised the stakes.

Layla Jonas:
If anything, it put a little pressure on the project because obviously, it was going to be seen by other people than just our classmates and our school.

Alec Patton:
Do you come from a indigenous background yourself?

Layla Jonas:
I do not.

Alec Patton:
Did that feel like uncomfortable to you?

Layla Jonas:
Honestly, not really, if anything, it was more so we weren’t taught a lot. The spectrum of being taught about indigenous peoples is very different throughout Canada. I know in some places they don’t learn until high school, some places don’t learn at all. I think the first time I learned it was in fifth grade, but from hearing stories from JCat, I realized that a lot of the things that are taught in our textbooks not only are wrong, but also they really skim over a lot, and we don’t get the full story.

Alec Patton:
For her skateboard deck, Layla focused on the highway of tears, she explained to me what that is.

Layla Jonas:
That is the stretch of highway that’s super, super known for being the main point of where indigenous women and girls have gone missing or murdered. I did intensive research on this project, and I found over 900 reports of people that have gone missing along this road.

Alec Patton:
Here’s what Layla’s board looked like.

Layla Jonas:
I kept it pretty simple, I just drew the highway points in the middle of the board, where it starts, where it ends at certain points along it, and then I did missing posters on the sides, and I did the exact year, and then I had the bloody hand print, that is a huge symbol for that group, and then No More Stolen Sisters, which is a huge slogan for that too.

Alec Patton:
We’ve got links to Layla’s board graphic and a few other students’ graphics in the show notes. Late in my interview with Kristian, I found out that he had a personal connection to this project that went back to his days as a teenage skater.

Kristian Basaraba:
I had a friend, one of my best friends in high school that I skateboarded with almost every single day, and I didn’t find out that he was indigenous until I was a teacher. Because I taught his sister at that adult school that I started out my first year where she came up to me and said, “you are friends with JV?” I was like, “yeah, I haven’t seen him,” because he actually ended up in jail for a bit, I’m like, “I haven’t seen him for years, how is he?” I was like, “how do you know JV? She’s like, “I’m his sister.” And in my brain I was like, okay, because you can see that she was indigenous, and he always told people that he was Lebanese.
And so here I grew up with one of my best friends who would never say he was indigenous, he was always Lebanese because people ask him, “well, why is your skin dark?” They are like, “I’m Lebanese.” I never even thought of it or never really questioned it, I didn’t really care, he was my best friend, we would hang out and we’d go skateboard and let’s go do kickflips, what does it matter to me? But then reflecting on this project, I’m like, “holy cow, man.”
And then now here I have a student bringing in her card that identifies her and she’s proud. She has her grandma’s earrings and she’s proud of this, and she’s making a piece of art on a skateboard deck honoring her grandma and listening to her grandma’s stories about attending a residential school and she’s proud. And then the students, there was a group of girls that worked together, and she was a part of this group, and all of their boards had this bead work because of these earrings that were brought in and they would spend meticulous hours doing these bead work on their boards, and so there was this collaboration connection piece.
And then the other side, there was another girl named Georgia, whose board was a very powerful image, and she was a really, really strong artist. And she actually was in my band, the Morality Unit Band, she was part of the protest song and she wanted to take the skateboard class, and she did this hand-painted board, it was so awesome. People would be around her and watching her do her art and they would be like, “you’re so good, that’s so awesome,” and there was just a lot of positivity in that class and she would help students if they wanted her to draw something, she would draw it for them and they would use it for their decks or that sort of thing. And so I guess that’s when I saw that too.
And then just it coming all together, so with the project, we had all the boards, and then it was a Friday, so I reached out to a local skate shop, and so I said, “I want to have this art exhibit of these boards in your shop, are you willing to do that?” And they’re like, “we can do that.” So I wanted to leave it up for a couple of weeks, and so we had to go and hang the boards up like you would. And so we went a Friday night, and Saturday was our opening of this exhibit, so we sent out a bunch of invitations to as many people as we can, educational leaders promoted it.
That Friday night, there was me and about five or six of the students just hanging out at the skate shop hanging up boards and stuff, and that was cool too. They were excited and then the next day, they all showed up and their parents came and their friends came, and so we had probably about a hundred people throughout that day come through the skate shop and see what they did, and they were all just there and just super proud of what they did. Those were those three moments, the work that Georgia was doing, what Sparrow did and what she inspired amongst her group, and then really just the culmination of that and then setting it up, all of that hard work was over.

Alec Patton:
Which deck was Georgia’s?

Kristian Basaraba:
Hers was the one with the students with their eyes with the red crossed out.

Alec Patton:
Yeah, that one was some returns.

Kristian Basaraba:
Yeah, that was the one that sold for about $340. We had an auction on eBay and hers garnered by far the most amount of money. It was just so awesome, it was also hard, with pictures, it’s really hard to really get the full effect, but it was just phenomenal, and she spent a lot of time that was all hand painted. And her grandpa attended a residential school as well, and so there was also some deeper meaning behind that for sure.

Alec Patton:
At the start of our interview, Layla told me it had been four years and people were still asking her about this project, I asked her why she thought that was.

Layla Jonas:
I think because it’s an interesting project for a high school to do. I had a lady reach out to me a few weeks ago about being featured in some magazine for Edmonton about this project, and I guess Kristian sent her my writeup for my board, which I don’t remember anything I put in that writeup, so it’ll be interesting when this magazine comes out. But she said she really enjoyed it and she liked the story and the idea of it, of why I chose the board. But I think it’s just because no one really would expect 15 to 17 year olds to pick such a hard subject because our own parents can’t even talk about this, our grandparents, they don’t talk about it. So for our generation to actually be speaking about this, I think it’s really important.

Alec Patton:
How did your parents respond to the project?

Layla Jonas:
They loved it, my grandma, she is very proud of me for it. Back in her day, she did a lot of protests for the union and stuff, so for me to be using my voice to speak out about it, she is very happy.

Alec Patton:
Layla wants to go to journalism, and she traces that back to SAL Skate Shop and the Colonialism Project.

Layla Jonas:
There wasn’t ever anything I was really passionate about before that class, I didn’t really like any of the other options, there wasn’t any class that I really enjoyed.

Alec Patton:
What did this class make you passionate about?

Layla Jonas:
Giving a voice, like being able to speak for people that can’t or that are too afraid, or even just people that don’t know how to express their words.

Alec Patton:
High Tech High Unboxed is hosted and edited by me, Alec Patton. Our theme music is by brother Herschel, huge thanks to Kristian and Layla for taking the time to talk. We dropped a lot of names and covered a lot of ground at this episode. You can find links to learn more about everyone and everything in the show notes, plus photos of some of the boards the students made. Layla’s and George’s boards are both there, thanks for listening.