4.1.3. Promoting Etuaptmumk/Two-Eyed Seeing

"Two-eyed seeing" described in the literature review section was another factor that was deemed important by participants. Sara found this notion a useful tool in her role as a non-Indigenous educator:

As a non-Indigenous educator, how do I present the unique strengths of both Indigenous and Western knowledge, rather than centering Western knowledge or inauthentically blending the two, in my education? I learned the first steps to this are truth and relationships.

Etuaptmumk/Two-Eyed Seeing in environmental education, a field based on the land, first and foremost means acknowledging truth. The truth in the context of the United States is that, wherever we teach, we are teaching on lands Indigenous Peoples have lived on and had deep connections with since time immemorial [77]. One way we acknowledged this in class was the class practice of beginning each meeting with a land acknowledgement to center the Indigenous communities, their history, and current presence on the land we were all zooming in from. For me, reading Decolonizing Methodologies by Linda Tuhiwai Smith [19] and listening to All My Relations with Matika Wilbur, Dr. Adrienne Keene, and Desi Small Rodriguez [48,58,68,69] were also foundational to understanding historical and current injustices, as well as how Indigenous-colonizer relations and knowledge systems inform harmful practices in Environmental Education to this day.

Finally, I learned that practicing Etuapmumk/Two-Eyed Seeing in Environmental Education also requires centering Indigenous connection to landscapes through Indigenous voices, themselves. Centering Indigenous voices means establishing relationships with Indigenous culture bearers who can present knowledge in a firsthand, culturally appropriate manner; relationships that are built for the longterm based on respect and Indigenous sovereignty of cultural material. Dr. Linda Tuhiwai Smith explains what such a relationship might look like beautifully, in that " ... for many researchers the purpose for the relationship is the project, not the relationship, whereas I think for Indigenous communities, they come at the relationship as that is the purpose. You get the relationship right, you build the

relationship, and then you can do many projects. Not just a single project ... It's never about a single project or a single purpose." [78]

Jennie and Emily do not use the term "two-eyed seeing," they instead talk of a "hybrid third space"' in the context of classroom practices. A hybrid third space could be considered similar to "two-eyed seeing" because it is a space that entertains "both/and" notions [79]. "In our hybrid third space ... everyone is continuously adding to their knowledge systems through various media. My journey broadening mine" (Jennie).

In our classroom Zoom space, we began the lifelong process of developing a set of skills to build another space—a "hybrid third space" [79] cited in [75], as described by Jean, our professor, where both Indigenous and Western knowledge systems are recognized as legitimate and powerful ways of engaging with the world. As is so beautifully discussed by June, we learned early on that the goal of this course was not to "blend" Indigenous and Western knowledge, particularly because this blending tends to occur within a Western knowledge framework [8,18,60]. Instead, in this third space, "sharing our stories with each other as participants in the learning process (educators and learners) allows us to understand each other's socio-cultural contexts and contributes to the process of decolonization and inhabitation" ([75], p. 123).(Emily)

4.1.4. Indigenous Ways of Teaching and Learning: Importance of Storytelling

The application of Indigenous ways of teaching and learning, such as storytelling, was helpful for participants. Sal explains:

In learning from Indigenous Peoples whose languages, values, stories and ways of living are intricately rooted in the land, I became acutely aware of the disconnection embedded in the settler colonialism of my own communities. As guest speaker, an Abenaki Elder pointed out, even the English language upholds this paradigm. "English is a language of nouns—of things—it's a good language to place values, commodify, put things in boxes, hierarchies—for business (Elder, paraphrased from personal communication, 10 February 2021). Rasmussen & Akulukjuk contrast English, a language of economics and money, with Indigenous languages, which tend to be more interactive with and descriptive of the environment [14].

My goal in taking the course had been to learn how to navigate being an interpretive park ranger in places where Indigenous Peoples have been forcefully removed from the land and whose cultures have often been appropriated for the benefit of White tourists. I wanted to find out how to incorporate more inclusive storytelling, management and decision making. Insights that emerged from this course helped me work towards a better understanding, but they were not in the form of a neat how-to list. Just as the Indigenous knowledge systems we learned about tended towards a holistic, relational perspective rather than isolated components, I came to understand that how people engage with others in their professional lives emerges from a broader way of understanding and interacting with the world ... Storytelling is an important way of passing along knowledge for the Indigenous Peoples we learned from, and is also core to my work in park interpretation. Kimmerer [18] asks, "What happens when we truly become native to a place, when we finally make a home? Where are the stories that lead the way?" ([18], p. 207). The Indigenous voices we listened to throughout this course reinforced that the stories we tell from the past shape our present and future. Stories that emerge from the land, including from those who have stewarded it for millennia—heard through our minds and our hearts—may be enough to change our own and our communities' values and relationship with the land.
