Land education: Indigenous, post-colonial, and decolonizing perspectives on place and environmental education research

Abstract

This editorial introduces a special issue of Environmental Education Research titled ‘Land education: Indigenous, post-colonial, and decolonizing perspectives on place and environmental education research.’ The editorial begins with an overview of each of the nine articles in the issue and their contributions to land and environmental education, before outlining features of land education in more detail. ‘Key considerations’ of land education are discussed, including: Land and settler colonialism, Land and Indigenous cosmologies, Land and Indigenous agency and resistance, and The significance of naming. The editorial engages the question ‘Why land education?’ by drawing distinctions between land education and current forms of place-based education. It closes with a discussion of modes and methods of land education research.

Keywords:

• land education
• settler colonialism
• place-based education
• environmental education
• indigenous perspectives on land and place

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Erratum

Acknowledgment

We extend our deeply felt thanks to Alan Reid and Claire Drake, to the editorial board, to all of the participating authors, to all of our reviewers, to all of those who spread word about this special issue, and to all of those who have taught us that it’s about the land, it’s about the land, it’s about the land.

Notes

1. Multicultural settler societies may consider Indigenous peoples to be just another ethnic or race group, which now successfully folded into the multicultural fabric, should expect no pre-existing or special rights at all.

2. To punctuate a prior point, one of the contributions of settler colonial studies is the interruption of the binary of ‘settler’ and ‘Indigenous,’ by also theorizing the perspectives and structural locations of (descendants of) chattel slaves (Tuck and Yang 2012; Wilderson 2010; Wolfe 2006), arrivants, and migrant workers (Byrd 2011; Patel 2012), and others living in settler colonial nation-states.

3. In contrast, Indigenous futurity forecloses settler colonialism and settler epistemologies. This does not mean that Indigenous futurity forecloses living on Indigenous land by non-Indigenous peoples. That is to say that Indigenous futurity does not require the erasure of now-settlers in the ways that settler futurity requires of Indigenous peoples (see also Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández 2013).

4. Tuck and Yang (2012) have cautioned against deploying the term ‘decolonization’ without specific attention to the repatriation of Indigenous land, recognition of Indigenous sovereignty, and abolition of slavery in all forms in the US nation-state. Decolonization is not a metaphor that can be applied to social justice projects that do not result in changes in land distribution, use, and especially relationships. Following Fanon (1968), Tuck and Yang emphasize that decolonization is always a historical process, specific to land and place.