Indigenous traditions offer us a deeply embedded legacy of ecological wisdom and spiritual insight across a vast range of cultural settings. At the most elemental level, this legacy involves practices around connecting with, and honoring, the land and its particular cultural rituals, stories, and cosmologies, all of which seek to open up and sustain a way of life that pay due attention to the often magical interrelations of embodied living beings, their immediate environments, and the broader cosmic context in which they are nested. The meaning and message of these traditions are not abstract, distant, and intellectual, but experiential and affective – suggestions of ways to live fully, with genuine devotion to the particularities of life. In many cases, the power of these traditions is not so much about specific, spelled-out doctrines and dogmas, but about a way of life that accounts for local knowledge, sensory acuity, deep listening, nonlinear understanding, and meaningful relationship-building.

See also: intergenerational trauma, spiritual practice, cultural appropriation, black geographies, indigenous realities