The stories are the people and the land: three educators respond to environmental teachings in Indigenous children’s literature

Abstract

This article explores how Indigenous Canadian children’s literature might challenge adult and child readers to consider different meanings and worldviews of the environment as a land‐based value system. As three teacher educators from elementary and university classrooms, we use reader‐response theory to explore a collection of rich alternative narratives of Indigenous land‐based knowledge systems available in the work of Indigenous authors and illustrators of children’s literature. Our study considers how Indigenous picture books might serve to decolonize environmental consciousness through offering accessible and immersive Indigenous stories of the land. As we respond to and analyze these picture books, we work from a prior commitment to decolonization as a critical self‐reflexive political process in which one’s colonized beliefs are explicitly pinpointed, challenged and countered by Indigenous worldviews and perspectives.

Keywords:

• Aboriginal
• Indigenous
• decolonization
• picture books
• reader response
• critical literacy
• Indigenous children’s literature