Send message to Authors

Paper Short Abstract:

Grounded in decades of research with Indigenous Peoples in Canada and Peru, in this oral-visual narrative, we share ethical challenges, cultural protocols, and reciprocal methodological practices of researching across different worldviews, knowledge systems, languages and geographies as we work together to recuperate our human-damaged planet.

Paper Abstract:

With climate change the defining crisis of our time, there is a need to re-story modernity's ‘progress narrative’ that privileges mind over body-heart-spirit and human over non-human and more-than-human, while overlooking Indigenous knowledges and ways of being. There is an urgency to move beyond prescribed Western-centric paradigms by regenerating collaborative, collective, recuperative cross-species relationalities urgently needed for mutual survival. In our oral-visual narrative, we share learnings from decades of research with Indigenous communities in British Columbia, Canada and the upper Amazon of Peru who follow their original instructions, moving to the rhythms and sounds of the Earth’s beating heart, despite centuries of settler coloniality working to silence them, devalue their ancestral ecological wisdom, and desecrate their lands and cross-species relatives. Our research partnerships are guided and shaped by the Indigenous communities who are co-creators and co-narrators of the research. This honours their ancestral values of humility, compassion, gratitude, and kinship relationality, and respects their right to self-determination. To ensure that the Indigenous communities are primary beneficiaries of the research, we foreground narrativity-orality-performativity as equivalent epistemologies-evidentialities-processes to Western-centric models of knowledge generation, data collection, analysis/synthesis, and dissemination. This requires time for reflective co-constructed conversation and place for grounded collaboration, engaging community-specific forms of evaluation, relationality, and reciprocity. Hearing the global rallying cry to heal our planet, we re-learn together how to become ‘with’ the world as we re-generate ancestral ecological wisdoms that profoundly affect life and cycles of regeneration on Earth.