Environmental counter-narratives of Mapuche and Māori primary school children

Scholars working from decolonial perspectives examine how processes of colonisation have marginalised local and contextualised knowledges in favour of dominant, usually Western, monological claims to ‘Truth'. These monological truths are characterised by binaries of separation such as nature/culture, adult/child and human/environment which subjugate non-binary ways of knowing. Around the world, children’s, and particularly indigenous children’s, environmental knowledges are rendered incomplete and non-scientific within processes of State-sanctioned monocultural formal education. Decolonial scholars argue that this subjugation lies at the heart of humans’ destructive ecological practices and the current crisis of sustainability.  In this thesis I explore the environmental narratives of two groups of indigenous primary school children in Chile and Aotearoa New Zealand in an effort to contribute to decolonial research and explore counter-narratives. I use a Critical Pedagogies of Place analytical lens to understand how concepts of cultural decolonisation and ecological reinhabitation were represented within the children’s audio-visual environmental narratives and consider how these counter-narratives may help us to practice more creative and inclusive 'border thinking' to address environmental problems.