Regeneration time: ancient wisdom for planetary wellbeing

Abstract

In these regenerative times prompted by the Anthropocene, Aboriginal voices are situated to draw on ancient wisdom for local learning and to share information across the globe as ecological imperative for planetary wellbeing. In this paper, postqualitative research foregrounds the sentient nature of life as ancestral power and brings the vitality of co-becoming as our places into active engagement. It enables coloniality to surface and reveals how it sits in our places and lives, in plain sight but unnoticed because of its so-called common sense. Postqualitative research relates with ancient knowledges in foregrounding Country’s animacy and presence, revealing the essence of time as non-linear, cyclical and perpetual. In this way, we are places, weather and climate, not separate. Postqualitative research also relates with ancient knowledge in illustrating Country as agentic and time as multiple, free of constraint and directly involved in our everyday. Country is active witness in the lives of Aboriginal peoples, here always. This is a strong basis for decolonisation. We all have a responsibility to listen, to help create a new direction for the future in the present time.

Deepening our capacity for teaching with Place

“…Living relationally and respectfully with Place requires us to pay close and careful attention to the worlds we are part of, to kin (Kimmerer, 2015) and places, and to respond as part of these worlds (Poelina et al, 2020). These understandings are part of enacting regenerative place relations, of co-becoming with place (Bawaka Country et al, 2018; Poelina et al, 2022), and can and should be informing our place pedagogies. The rapid acceleration of damage to the planet wrought by colonialism continues now, in modernity, to destroy present/future (Paradies, 2020).…”

“…This brings home that the marks on the land, and much else, will outlast us – humans are ephemeral in this landscape. We reflect on notions of deep time and the long now: a rich dimension of being, which is always already rippled and textured with the future (Poelina et al, 2022). In this view pasts, presents and futures are nested and folded together, encircling linear time (Paradies, 2020).…”

Humility. Listen. Respect: Three values underpinning Indigenous (environmental) education sovereignty

“…Environmental education in Australia may be the oldest in the world (Poelina et al 2022). Indigenous peoples in the country now known as Australia have always been practising education on/from/as Country, very successfully.…”

“…Waiting time requires reflection, questions, and challenges, of self and others human and non-human within our environment. Living together as we and not me , means we consider every living being to be part of the whole environmental living system (Poelina et al 2022). …”

“…However, this approach fails to take into account that, from an Indigenous perspective and certainly evident in the opening quote by Potawatomi scholar Kyle Powys Whyte, the environment is all around us, in us, and in our relations with human and more-than-human entities (Whyte 2019). As Nyikina Warrwa scholar Anne Poelina with colleagues (2022, 406) insist, “living in a deep relationship with Country, with non-human kin is a lifelong environmental values and ethics-based educational process.” Therefore, perhaps a reframing of environmental education is needed to one that is “learning on/from/as Country” in recognition that everywhere we learn, we are learning “on Country,” that we are Country.…”