This chapter tests those Indigenous directions and artistic visions of learning environments with close readings of local-level expressions of religious and cultural learning. Anchored in Huejotzingo and Calpan, but contextualized with valley-wide initiatives, the chapter exposees Indigenous contributions to learning environments in ethno-spatial analysis. Artwork and architecture developments from 1550s are exemplified as local interpretations of Christianity and local traditions beyond European prescriptions. The chapter argues for a multicultural reading of the lessons imparted in church courtyards, showing how place-based pedagogy and preexisting modes of learning could have informed convent-goers’ takeaways. Instead of wholly Christian convents were partial and un-wholistic pedagogical expressions, ripe for Burkhart’s slippages. Practice and place-based observances could cause a survivance of local history and Indigenous knowledge to persist, working effectively alongside the dogmatic reading of church art. Here, the overarching vision of learning emerges with critical visual and material culture studies of biblical figures, placements, enjambments, and reassessments of Indigenous sources that may have offered some friction in design choices of architects of the perfect classrooms of colonialism.

The gold rush in the 1890s and the discovery of oil in 1920 prompted the Canadian government to negotiate treaties 8 and 11 with the Dene and Gwich’in. With the arrival of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, these treaties formalized colonial control over the Yukon and Northwest Territories. Medicine, hospitals, and healthcare were promised as part of treaty negotiations, but the infrastructure of care erected in this period was underfunded and racially contingent, prioritizing settlers and sojourners. Sanitary infrastructure appeared as a necessary response to the surge of newcomers in search of gold in the Yukon. Otherwise, healthcare for Indigenous northerners was designed around the objectives of the Christian missions upon whom the government depended to deliver its treaty promises.