This paper is authored by Bawaka Country, acknowledging Country’s ability to teach and share. Country is homeland and place. Country is everything and the relationships that bring everything to life. Country is knowledge. This paper is shaped and enabled by songspirals. Songspirals are sung and cried by Yolŋu people in north east Arnhem Land, Australia, to awaken Country, to make and remake the life-giving connections between people and place.

The Goŋ-gurtha songspiral leads this paper, showing us how a Yolŋu Country-led pedagogy centres Country’s active agency by learning through, with, and as Country. This pedagogy shares with us the ongoing connections within and between generations to ensure that knowledge remains strong and that sharing is done the right way, according to Yolŋu Rom, Law/Lore. This learning is predicated on relationality and responsibility. It is a more-than-human learning in which human knowing is decentred and Country is knowledgeable. It is a learning which recognises and respects its limits and it is a learning in which the ongoing sovereignty of Yolŋu people is front and centre.

The past two decades have seen a proliferation of Indigenous philosophy in environmental education. Much of this anti and decolonial work has made significant advances in deconstructing western modernist subjectivities; re-embedding and re-situating Indigenous and western relational epistemologies into human-earth relationality, including critical inquiry into questions of positionality, power-knowledge and human and more-than-human agency. Less articulated, however is the potential of these practices to address large scale and interrelated global challenges associated with climate and cultural-ecological crisis which coincide with the intensification of late capitalism, colonialism, and white supremacism. Relatedly, at global levels human rights approaches to planetary wellbeing continue to predominate and prominent international agreements such as UNDRIP, SDG, IPCCC and the Global Compact for Migration remain siloed from one another. Providing a broad sketch of these themes I then propose a whakapapa or kinship-based approach to life as laying the conceptual foundation for three regenerative place-based strategies which I subsequently introduce. Each strategy treats contemporary global challenges as interconnected and positions Indigenous knowledges and lifeways as playing a crucial role in addressing these. Moving from Indigenous philosophy in environmental education to broad intersectoral action, these strategies also make the interconnections between individual, collectivist, and structural approaches to Indigenous-led intergenerational resilience as one means to support our collective action toward healing human-environmental relations.

Home to nine Tribal Nations, the northeastern corner of Oklahoma (US) is a place of immense resilience, cultural beauty and attachment to place. Horrifically, however, this same area is also home to massive environmental assaults that have occurred as a result of decades of lead and zinc mining. The improperly managed mine waste that has accumulated since the late 1800s now severely contaminates the water, land and air, having adverse impacts on the health of the ecosystem and the local human community alike. Leading the fight for cleanup and support of place and people since 1997 is the non-profit organisation called Local Environmental Action Demanded (LEAD Agency). One of LEAD’s primary tools for education and advocacy has been leading toxic tours across these harmed lands and waters. This contribution draws upon the nearly three decades of toxic tours that Rebecca and Earl have led by sharing key stories and experiences of important sites visited along the way, offering a snapshot of toxic tour experience. Drawing on Indigenous storywork and autoethnographic methodologies, this contribution aims to spotlight the potential of Indigenous-led toxic tours for helping to (re)connect people — both locals and visitors — to place and a responsibility of stewardship.

Drawing on posthumanist and new materialism theorising, we take the concept of resonance for an a/r/tographic ‘walk’ to know, be and do differently, to challenge human-centric separatist ways that have resulted in our current socioecological crises. Beginning with Ingold’s knotty thinking, we identify the notion of resonance as a node for exploring and thinking about interactions in the world. Guided by Barad’s proposition of entangling ethico-onto-epistemic ways, our a/r/tographic thought experiments find resonances that echo through bodies, through connections as nature, through deep-time and modern spaces to notice and attend to intraactions within the ecological collective. Through art-full, thought-full scholartistic enquiry, we explore diffractive encounters to consider resonance as a conceptual tool for tuning into and harmonising with the entanglements of body–mind–space–time–matter. We pose this exploration of resonance as the start of a knotty theory conversation for shifting into a new ‘common world’ knowing, being and doing.

We argue that to face climate change, all education, from kindergarten to tertiary, needs to be underpinned by environmental education. Moreover, as a site of reframing, education when coupled with philosophy is a possible site of influencing societal reframing in order to re-examine our relations to nature or our natural environment. However, we contend that as philosophy has been largely absent from curricula, it is vital to redress this issue. Further, the environment cannot be viewed simply as subject matter for study but, reconceptualised in the Indigenous sense as Place. Only in this way can we overcome the human-nature divide. We conclude that educators must look for what Plumwood calls ‘experiences that do not fit the dominant story’ to disrupt an important link in the chain of climate change by developing ‘traitorous identities’ able to challenge the dominant culture.