Indigenizing environmental sustainability curriculum and pedagogy: confronting our global ecological crisis via Indigenous sustainabilities

This Point for Departure highlights why higher education institutions (HEIs) should integrate Indigenous perspectives in their course offerings, campus management, and scholarly production. Much of HEI's sustainability focus today disproportionately focuses on climate change, which we argue is because its purported solutions actually serve to reinforce, business-as-usual industrial growth. The alternative paradigm to long-term sustainability we propose that HEIs should work to implement is to restructure their curriculum and pedagogy to incorporate what we refer to as Indigenous sustainabilities. In short, we call for academics to integrate Indigenous perspectives and place-based knowledges into their courses, research agenda, and service work in lieu of, or at least in addition to, the current Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) paradigms that often narrowly focus on how HEI are reducing their carbon emissions via so-called ‘clean’ energy, at the expense of addressing other equally, if not more, concerning threats to a healthy biosphere.