Hillarie, you mentioned ...
>>How do individual activities (like this one) lead to community building?? ... how do we move beyond this to actually building a community
... & I've been thinking about that all morning. I think to answer such questions we have to re-visit the even more obtuse questions: "Why are we trying to "build a community" in this course, anyway?" and "How will we know when we *have* built a community? What will it look like, feel like, how will things be different once we have this elusive community in place?" Your idea about grounding this activity within indigenous ways of knowing sounds like a good starting point.
I will continue to ponder this but would sure welcome other thoughts on this.