**1. Introduction**

The interest in Indigenous knowledge systems (IKS) in the environmental education (EE; we follow the UNESCO Tbilisi [1] definition of environmental education: a "learning process that increases people's knowledge and awareness about the environment and its associated challenges, develops the necessary skills and expertise to address the challenges, and fosters attitudes, motivations, and commitments to make informed decisions and take responsible action") field continues to grow. While the number of publications is on the rise (e.g., [2–16]), decolonial educators are looking for ways to teach IKS in an ethical and respectful manner. Our course on IKS focused on the interface between Euro-American knowledge systems and IKS. Recognizing that IKS are not regarded as valid and valuable in their own right (e.g., [11–19]), the course was upfront with privileging Indigenous ways of knowing and being. Additionally, there was a deliberate attempt to embody Indigenous worldviews, such as relationality, i.e., conceptualizing knowledge as holistic, cyclic and dependent upon relationships and connections to living and non-living beings and entities. Within this worldview, people are part of the environment; engage in multiple ways of knowing, including through spirituality; and view the land as sacred [11,13,19–23]. Thus, participants were encouraged to go beyond print-based formats traditionally preferred in Euro-American-based academia for their projects to consider additional formats that

**Citation:** Kayira, J.; Lobdell, S.; Gagnon, N.; Healy, J.; Hertz, S.; McHone, E.; Schuttenberg, E. Responsibilities to Decolonize Environmental Education: A Co-Learning Journey for Graduate Students and Instructors. *Societies* **2022**, *12*, 96. https://doi.org/ 10.3390/soc12040096

Academic Editor: Gregor Wolbring

Received: 3 April 2022 Accepted: 14 June 2022 Published: 22 June 2022

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were not only meaningful to them but aligned with Indigenous worldviews. The idea of relationality including people as part of the environment is a longstanding Indigenous worldview (e.g., [21,22]), although it has lately emerged in the Eurocentric philosophy of posthumanism, which argues that the more-than-human beings (animals, plants and the non-human elements of the natural world) have power and agency [24] and calls for interconnections [25]. Details on the course aims and content are described in Section 3 of the paper.

We journeyed together tackling difficult ethical questions around cultural appropriation. What we found helpful was the application of decolonization factors; in particular, the course embodied centering programs in Indigenous philosophies of education, privileging Indigenous voices, engaging Elders as experts, promoting Etuaptmumk/two-eyed seeing, and employing Indigenous ways of teaching and learning. We acknowledge that decolonial EE is a life-long journey, not a destination, and that we should not aim for perfectionism since this notion is rooted in White supremacy [26]. We will make mistakes on this journey, but we need to learn from those mistakes and keep going. In this paper, we use an autoethnographic framing to share our reflections on the course. We start with a review of literature on decolonizing EE, followed by a description of how we learned together, themes from participants' reflections, discussion and conclusion.
