I am not a camper: confessions of an indigenous urban environmental educator

Abstract

In this article, I share with the reader my journey into environmental education, and how I came to understand that even an urbanite like me has something to offer. I look to the work of Indigenous scholars to frame the ways in which Indigenous pedagogies, combined with environmental, place-based, and land-based pedagogies, form a matrix of criticality that reveals layer upon layer of colonial stratigraphy and shines a light on the tensions between Western and Indigenous ontologies when it comes to how we think about and relate to the land. Building on insights from humour studies, I offer three teaching vignettes to ground my discussion and to illuminate the power of humour in pedagogical practice.