Unsettling Settlers’ Ideas of Land and Relearning Land with Indigenous Ways of Knowing in ECEfS

What does it mean to unsettle the settler? Elder Dr. Albert Marshal (2018) recently stated that a real need exists within education to find ways “to respect and balance the energies of different knowledge systems,” something he referred to as “knowledge gardening.” As four North American white settler early childhood scholars, we (re)story our understandings and evolving sense of land/place through listening, wondering, rejoicing, and learning to be affected by multiple land stories. Indigenous peoples and knowledge systems offer powerful counter-narratives to human–nature divides, human exceptionalism, and colonial hegemonic discourses that currently influence early childhood education for sustainability research and practices. We offer our stories (unsettlings) as inspiration to others, not as a recipe or method, but in the spirit of co-learning to fully recognize past–present perpetuation of colonization and as one way towards healing and learning to live together in a good way.