Disrupting Colonial Environmental Research and Teaching, Yarn by Yarn

Abstract

Global environmental justice policies and practices repeatedly violate Indigenous peoples and their homelands, even when seeking to form respectful partnerships, by presuming to be the authority on environmental issues. Securing Indigenous environmental rights requires addressing the work of environment-based schools in universities, which qualify the professionals who broker environmental justice policies and data through uninterrupted cycles of studentship and scholarship predicated on colonial knowledge authority. Teaching and learning through such epistemological supremacy waysides Indigenous knowledge as supplementary at best, rather than central environmental authority and science. This article documents a collective of Indigenous and non-Indigenous students and scholars who have spent 5 years operationalizing Indigenous rights agendas within our multi-disciplinary environmental school by creating and nourishing an autonomous decolonial teaching and learning Circle. By centering Indigenous leadership in environmental studies research and teaching, we have created space, solidarity, and resources to encourage a different standard within the school. Engaging a Wiradjuri/wiradyuri intellectual tradition of metanarrative led by wiradyuri scholars, we draw on the Country to help conceptualize, characterize, and analyze the relationship between the academic institution and the Circle as interpenetrative spaces that shape, open up, and close off Indigenous self-determination and decolonial research, teaching, and learning. By scoping out the bilabang (water body/the institutional space), we articulate how some of the Circle’s discrete walang walang (rocks/actions) have formed yulang (ripples/decolonial advancements and outcomes). Lastly, we contemplate how the Circle’s walang walang and yulang have given members detailed information about the bilabang that facilitate collective endurance and inform staunch, Indigenous-determined futures. Show more