This paper is authored by Bawaka Country, acknowledging Country’s ability to teach and share. Country is homeland and place. Country is everything and the relationships that bring everything to life. Country is knowledge. This paper is shaped and enabled by songspirals. Songspirals are sung and cried by Yolŋu people in north east Arnhem Land, Australia, to awaken Country, to make and remake the life-giving connections between people and place.

The Goŋ-gurtha songspiral leads this paper, showing us how a Yolŋu Country-led pedagogy centres Country’s active agency by learning through, with, and as Country. This pedagogy shares with us the ongoing connections within and between generations to ensure that knowledge remains strong and that sharing is done the right way, according to Yolŋu Rom, Law/Lore. This learning is predicated on relationality and responsibility. It is a more-than-human learning in which human knowing is decentred and Country is knowledgeable. It is a learning which recognises and respects its limits and it is a learning in which the ongoing sovereignty of Yolŋu people is front and centre.

What would it be like to learn to live in and experience a world of sentient beings rather than inert objects? How can we learn to awarely participate in a world of communication and interaction, in which trees, crows and rivers may grace us with a response to our attention and our call? How do we learn not just to know this intellectually but ‘proved upon our pulses’, as John Keats put it. As artist and writer, we reflect on the contribution our practices can have to the ecological crisis of our times, drawing on living cosmos panpsychism and examples from our practice.

Art is as old as human culture. For most of the time, art was part of an exchange between humans and the cosmic order. Art was meant as a gift to nourish the fecundity of life. Art was communication with ancestral creational powers — the invocation of a poetic space from which creation entered the material realm. This paper explores art as a way of tapping into the invisible forces of reality. I argue that humans can experience these forces as aliveness (joy/desire to give) and can transmit them by poetic creation. Through art, humans have a capacity to nourish life, in parallel to how natural productivity unfolds from the unseen into the embodied domain. This capacity is a source of artistic creation. It is a crucial means to participate in a life-giving cosmos. Although the Western understanding of art is far from this attitude, art has remained the domain where aliveness is accommodated not with empirical, but with imaginational means. In the current global crisis of life, it is crucial to remember the potential of art not only to relate but to contribute to aliveness. Programs in environmental education should build on the direct perception and expressive imagination of aliveness.

The past two decades have seen a proliferation of Indigenous philosophy in environmental education. Much of this anti and decolonial work has made significant advances in deconstructing western modernist subjectivities; re-embedding and re-situating Indigenous and western relational epistemologies into human-earth relationality, including critical inquiry into questions of positionality, power-knowledge and human and more-than-human agency. Less articulated, however is the potential of these practices to address large scale and interrelated global challenges associated with climate and cultural-ecological crisis which coincide with the intensification of late capitalism, colonialism, and white supremacism. Relatedly, at global levels human rights approaches to planetary wellbeing continue to predominate and prominent international agreements such as UNDRIP, SDG, IPCCC and the Global Compact for Migration remain siloed from one another. Providing a broad sketch of these themes I then propose a whakapapa or kinship-based approach to life as laying the conceptual foundation for three regenerative place-based strategies which I subsequently introduce. Each strategy treats contemporary global challenges as interconnected and positions Indigenous knowledges and lifeways as playing a crucial role in addressing these. Moving from Indigenous philosophy in environmental education to broad intersectoral action, these strategies also make the interconnections between individual, collectivist, and structural approaches to Indigenous-led intergenerational resilience as one means to support our collective action toward healing human-environmental relations.

Within this paper we explore the process and outcomes of a year-long exchange that investigates how active learning can emerge through collective place-based storying. Beginning with Country as our guide, we shared, responded, yarned, listened and revisited one another’s contributions. Using the “threads” of an extended email exchange and online yarning sessions, we wove together this collaborative work to present findings generated from the creative practice of storying and sharing knowledge. This work required ongoing openness to vulnerability; we resisted the urge to remain silent and risked being wrong. Our responses, and the writing styles reflecting them, incorporate both academic and creative approaches. As we negotiated connection to Country and place through collective storying, six key themes emerged: Country and personal sites of significance, honouring children and childhood, relationality, the significance of sensory engagement, the significance of vulnerability, and acknowledging Earth violence. This collaborative paper explores a practical approach, grounded in kindness, to negotiating connections to Country and place. We reflect on how we carefully nurtured the conditions that enabled the work to occur, sharing our experiences to help guide others navigating their own collective research practices.

In this paper, we draw on the ontology and epistemology of the local Kasena ethnic group in Northern Ghana to explore Early Childhood Environmental Education. The study, taking place in Boania Primary School, drew on the concept of two-eyed seeing, where both western and Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies were taught. In this way, Indigenous Ecological Knowledge was integrated into the Early Childhood Environmental Education programme for the Kindergarten two classroom environmental studies topics. Two Indigenous Elders led the integration of local knowledge into environmental studies topics by visiting the school to teach the children through taking them outdoors for learning activities. After this, in-depth interviews were held with the teacher, Indigenous Elders, and nine children regarding their experiences. The purpose of the study was to explore how Indigenous Ecological Knowledges can help instil in children positive environmental attitudes and values, while also connecting them to nature and offering them a more relational understanding of human to nature relationships. Based on the Indigenous cultural framework of respect, reciprocity, and responsibility towards nature, the findings show that the integration of Indigenous Ecological Knowledge into environmental education has the potential to improve our relationships with the environment.

This paper presents a learning journey about deepening capacity for teaching with Place through relational learning and shares three pedagogical ingredients that are integral in enacting more ethical, decolonial place pedagogies. We are three women, educators working in community and teacher education with interests in environmental education, decoloniality and indigeneity. We write from the position of people whose ancestry is not Indigenous to the places we were born, nor those where we live now. We bring diverse experiences, voices, bodies and memories of Place into productive conversations as we think and write together about how we are learning with Place, and our response-abilities for enacting regenerative place pedagogies. We situate our emergent and relational inquiry within our experiences and encounters with Place in solidarity with the call for the sharing of stories that “explore knowing and being as relational practices” (Bawaka Country et al.). Our paper is premised on the understanding that our ethical commitment to decoloniality involves learning to live and learn with and love the places we are now, and prioritising Indigenous philosophies, scholarship and ways of knowing Place throughout our education practices.

In a Kimberley place-based cultural story, Dangaba is a woman whose Country holds poison gas. Her story shows the importance of cultural ways of understanding and caring for Country, especially hazardous places. The authors contrast this with a corporate story of fossil fuel, illustrating the divergent discourses and approaches to place. Indigenous and local peoples and their knowledge, cultures, laws, philosophies and practices are vitally important to Indigenous lifeways and livelihoods, and critically significant to the long-term health and well-being of people and place in our locality, region and world. We call for storying and narratives from the pluriverse of sociocultural voices to be a meaningful part of environmental education and to be implemented in multiple places of learning. To know how to hear, understand and apply the learnings from place-based story is to know how to move beyond a normalised worldview of separation, alienation, individualism, infinite growth, consumption, extraction, commodification and craving. To know how to see, feel, describe and reflect upon experience, concepts and practice is to find ways to move towards radical generosity, mutuality of becoming, embodied kinship, wisdom, humility and respect.

Home to nine Tribal Nations, the northeastern corner of Oklahoma (US) is a place of immense resilience, cultural beauty and attachment to place. Horrifically, however, this same area is also home to massive environmental assaults that have occurred as a result of decades of lead and zinc mining. The improperly managed mine waste that has accumulated since the late 1800s now severely contaminates the water, land and air, having adverse impacts on the health of the ecosystem and the local human community alike. Leading the fight for cleanup and support of place and people since 1997 is the non-profit organisation called Local Environmental Action Demanded (LEAD Agency). One of LEAD’s primary tools for education and advocacy has been leading toxic tours across these harmed lands and waters. This contribution draws upon the nearly three decades of toxic tours that Rebecca and Earl have led by sharing key stories and experiences of important sites visited along the way, offering a snapshot of toxic tour experience. Drawing on Indigenous storywork and autoethnographic methodologies, this contribution aims to spotlight the potential of Indigenous-led toxic tours for helping to (re)connect people — both locals and visitors — to place and a responsibility of stewardship.

Economic development and environmental development have been long-lasting debates between capitalists and environmentalists. It is also seen as a debate around modernization with globalization at one end and environmental justice at the other end. Our society today is moving rapidly toward development and increased industrial revolutions and globalization. Indigenous communities in Ogoniland are also experiencing such development due to multinationals’ exploration of crude oil in their communities. The exploration of oil has caused environmental, socioeconomic, health and political problems in indigenous communities in Ogoniland. These issues require a depth of understanding from all sectors (public, government and corporate sectors) to address them. Hence, through textual analysis and interviews from the government and environmental social movement organizations, this paper presents the types of environmental educatiSon programs carried out in indigenous communities in Ogoniland to address environmental issues and other socioeconomic issues due to oil exploration. These environmental education programs in indigenous communities contribute to environmental policy creation, the development of environmental curricula and pragmatic actions toward mitigating environmental degradation and socioeconomic issues in indigenous communities. Thus, revealing the significance of indigenous knowledge and practices in addressing contemporary environmental issues.