Queering

https://www.journalofglobalindigeneity.com/article/19438-queering-land-based-education-during-covid19

• Hunt and Holmes (2015) define queering as “a deconstructive practice focused on challenging normative knowledges, identities, behaviors, and spaces thereby unsettling power relations and taken-for-granted assumptions” (p. 156). As Indigenous educators, our ‘deconstructive practice’ applies both to what we teach (e.g., unpacking settler-colonial or Eurocentric constructs or understandings) and to how we teach (e.g., moving teaching and learning out of the classroom and onto the land). We also draw on thework ofHawaiian scholar Kalaniopua Young,who describes‘queering’ as an act of “transforming poison into medicine” (personal communication, January 18, 2019). From that, we understand queering as a ‘reconstructive practice’, one centred on the radical reclamation and reassertion of our “self-as-relationship” (Wilson, 2001, p. 91). This understanding of relationality –a recognition that, as Indigenous people, we are constitutedby, and responsible and accountable to our relationships with our ancestors, people here now, and future generations,with the lands, waters, and other living beings; with the forces that animate and sustain life,and with the ideas, theories and philosophies that influence our actions -is foundational for Indigenous land-based education.
• Hunt, S., & Holmes, C. (2015). Everyday decolonization: Living a decolonizing queer politics. Journal of Lesbian Studies, 19(2), 154-172. 10.1080/10894160.2015.970975
• Wilson, A., & Murray, J. (in press). Queering Indigenous land-based education. In Queering eco pedagogies: Sexualities, education and nature. Springer.