VISITING JEAN
Learning to Listen on Colonized Land
About the Project
Visiting Jean is equal parts about the life of settler-elder, activist, and journalist Jean Koning (1922-2024) and about the practice of visiting. The project’s subtitle, Learning to Listen on Colonized Land, reflects Jean’s most urgent teaching: “If there is one message I want to get across before I die,” she shared in 2015, “it is that we white settlers need to learn to listen to First Peoples.” Jean spent more than a half century working in solidarity with Indigenous communities, at a time when few white people were.
In the final decade of her life, Jean was integral to Aging Activisms. While she was part of many of our events and projects, this work reflects on our quiet, ongoing, and dynamic practices of visiting Jean. Visiting, as part of our research and beyond, involved countless cups of tea together, over which we shared stories, laughs, tears, and revelations. It also involved major life transitions: a move into assisted living, an archive of life works, and a goodbye at a palliative bed. We have come to understand that visiting is an emotionally and ethically complex way of co-creating knowledge, rooted in anticapitalist and decolonial ways of being together, often across generations.
In 2025-26, we created a beautiful chapbook and pop-up installation about our work with Jean. A collaboration between May Chazan, Ziysah von Bieberstein, Jillian Ackert, Jenn Cole, Emma Langley, and Alex Hodson, we are happy offer this project here in digital format. We are grateful to colleagues at Concordia University, the Aging in Data Partnership Grant, for their support.
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In honour of Jean Koning
1922-2024
“This is not easy to do ‘briefly’ after 90+ years of ‘bio!’ I could introduce myself as I do in the Ojibwe language when I’m with my Anishinaabe friends: My name is Jean Koning. I was born in Windsor, Ontario. I now live in Peterborough, Ontario. I am a white woman. I have walked with Ojibwe people for many years. I am learning to speak Ojibwe. Beyond that, I have been a wife, mother of three, and I have 11 grands and five great-grands, with more on the way, I understand (happily!) My husband was an Anglican priest who served in Manitoulin Island, where we met “Indians” for the first time in 1966, and where I began to stand in solidarity with the First Peoples, eventually serving with Project North, later Aboriginal Rights Coalition (now a branch of KAIROS). I worked closely with Aboriginal Anglican Church people throughout southwestern Ontario, as well as Traditional First Peoples. As a member of the Kawartha Truth & Reconciliation Support Group, I have begun to understand just how prophetic those words have been, as I continue to learn, and benefit from, what they mean to me in my life journey.”
- Jean Koning, 2015, in preparation for Aging Activisms’ inaugural symposium
“Visiting… is a sharing of oneself through story, through principled and respectful consensual reciprocity with another living being.”
- Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, “Land as Pedagogy”
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Check out our digital chapbook,
Visiting Jean: Learning to Listen on Colonized Land (2025)
Click the chapters titles below to view and read.
Excerpt from the chapbook:
Jean was a prolific and powerful “sender,” as she liked to say. She wrote and spoke to all who could be persuaded to listen. I hope this book has offered a glimpse into Jean’s “beautiful life,” to quote Emma’s song title.
I hope that it has honoured the intangible gifts so many of us have received through the intergenerational magic of radical visiting: slow time, deep care, grief, joy, meaningful friendship, mutual learning, and true reciprocity.
I hope it has inspired knowing smiles and small surprises for those who knew and loved Jean; and has offered those who may not have crossed paths with Jean a chance to listen.
Visiting with Jean reminded me often of the importance of visiting our elders—whether our connections are through blood or through community; whether we can visit over tea or only in our imaginations. I hope you may be as inspired as I was to listen carefully with an embodied knowledge that we are here on colonized land.
- May Chazan
About the Project's Cover Art
I was lucky enough to grow up in the bush in my home territory in the Kiji Sibi watershed. My Nan and her brothers and sisters went to Mattawa Day School. As a queer, neurodivergent, mixed ancestry Algonquin anishinaabekwe coming into activist and scholarly work with May and Ziysah, I experienced Indigenous people being put first in gatherings. In visits with Elders, scholars, artists, knowledge holders and changemakers in Michi Saagig territory, we entered into ceremony together with smudge, words, prayers, laughter and food. I never got to work with Jean in these spaces, but when I met her at the Aging Activisms book launch in 2018, her legacy was well known to me: beloved, an advocate for Indigenous people, fierce and funny, dedicated to visiting and contributing to the archive of settler-allyship in a time where this is desperately needed.
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We met one another and I complimented her on her bright red shoes. Mine were also red. Kinship in intergenerational fashion! In this artwork, I circled my hand, tracing a tree ring, abstractly, allowing my gestures to follow the shapes of time as I thought about intergenerational relationships and knowledge sharing. I used oranges to foreground those who have survived residential school and the children who didn’t. I brought pink—a bright spot of levity for Jean’s heart and bold shoes—to meet the orange hues in an act of responsive visiting.
-Jenn Cole
For Jean
Click the image to listen to the song
"One Beautiful Life: A Song for Jean", written and recorded by Emma Langley, 2025.
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Click the image to listen to the poem "February", written and performed by Ziysah von Bieberstein, 2024.
Jean's Journey with Aging Activisms
Jean's Journey, by Alex Hodson, is an illustration that chronicles some of Jean's formal involvement with Aging Activisms throughout the years. Scroll down to read more about each of Jean's stops along the path.
Some of Jean’s Formal Involvement in the Aging Activisms Research Community from 2015 to 2023
2015: Jean attended our inaugural symposium
2015: I interviewed Jean as part a collaboration between Aging Activisms and the Trent Centre for Aging and Society (TCAS)
2015: Jean was a guest on Aging Radically, a Trent Radio show hosted by two Aging Activisms research assistants, Maddy McNabb and Melissa Baldwin, archived on the Aging Activisms website
2016-17: Jean, May and Emma Langley undertook extensive life history and archiving project as Jean prepared to move into assisted living.
2016: Jean participated in a research workshop in conjunction with May’s undergraduate class
2018: Jean reviewed Emma’s thesis and attended their defense
2018: Jean published a piece in an Aging Activisms book and attended our community book launch
2022: Jean participated in our Zoom focus groups on imagining futures, during lockdown
2023: Jean and Ziysah recorded Jean speaking to the youth in our Youth Stories workshop
2023: Jean attended Aging Activisms library installation and community dinner
Meet Jean
The following audio and video are courtesy of Ziysah von Bieberstein, who recorded these while visiting Jean. While these were not formally part of Aging Activisms research, we are grateful to be able to share these recordings, with the permission of Jean and her children.
