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Introduction
Indigenous and racialized communities’ environmental sustainability education in Canada challenge a complex web of marginalization and systematic discrimination, encompassing dispossession, socio-economic disparities, and disproportionate exposure to the adverse effects of climate change disasters, social injustices, and health challenges [9, 19, 36, 39, 40]. Rooted in the historical oppression of Indigenous peoples through colonization and the establishment of white settler reserves on First Nations territory, Canada is now undergoing a paradigm shift towards environmental sustainability, emphasizing the integration of Indigenous pedagogy, practices, and worldviews into environmental sustainability education [18]. However, despite these efforts, Indigenous peoples continue to face discrimination and encounter systemic barriers in environmental sustainability education, hindering their academic achievement and exacerbating issues of exclusion, disengagement, mental well-being, and cultural and linguistic erosion [8, 20]. This highlights the urgent need to prioritize Indigenous land-based environmental sustainability education, ensuring culturally sensitive teaching approaches and curricula that reflect Indigenous perspectives, values, and knowledge systems.
Rethinking environmental sustainability learning practice through land-based learning is a necessary shift that challenges the settler-colonial frameworks that have long defined environmental education in Canada [12, 13]. Indigenous scholars such as Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang [41] argue that sustainability discourses often reproduce colonial logics by privileging colonial approaches that fail to acknowledge Indigenous sovereignty and relational responsibilities to the land. Similarly, Megan Bang and Ananda Marin [27] emphasize the need to move beyond colonial environmental education and towards Indigenous land-based epistemologies that recognize land as life rather than a resource to be managed. Lees et al. [26] further critique the ways in which mainstream sustainability education undermined Indigenous land-based knowledge systems and argue for the necessity of land-based pedagogies that center Indigenous histories, languages, and practices. These scholars call for an educational paradigm that centres Indigenous land relations, not only as a means of creating sustainability but also as a way of reinforcing Indigenous sovereignty, self-determination, and intergenerational knowledge transfer.
For Indigenous communities in Canada, land-based learning is critical to reclaiming relationships with the land that have been disrupted by colonial dispossession, environmental racism, and systemic educational inequities [12, 13]. Calderon [7] highlights how Western environmental education often separated education from the land, more importantly from Indigenous historical, cultural, and spiritual dimensions, making it imperative to restore land-based teachings that sustain...