Three Texts, to Restore and to Return: Centring Refusal in Indigenous Thinking

This essay builds on other work in political theological circles that seeks to understand what refusal means for our political and practical theologies, by exploring three pieces of writing by contemporary indigenous thinkers, working from varied spaces. Each of the three articles approaches refusal in different ways. This essay highlights: restoration, being-with or love, and hope. Each approach raises questions for theological thinking and education on how we might dismantle the ways in which we currently produce knowledge. Refusal raises important and generative questions and turns us to a radical rethinking of the epistemic frameworks that underpin education systems. It also encourages the fostering of creativity and reciprocity in how we approach theological work and hierarchies of power within higher education.