“Then the Nettle People won’t be lonely”: Indigenous ways of knowing, kin relations, and climate change education

Tackling global issues like climate change through US education means looking to Indigenous peoples for best practices regarding caring for the natural world. This talk will be about relationships between human and plant communities, situated in Indigenous knowledge systems. I consider how supporting these relationships in an Indigenous STEAM program can open possibilities for different climate futures.

Nikki McDaid Barry (Shoshone-Bannock) is a doctoral candidate in the Learning Sciences at Northwestern University and an incoming assistant professor at UCLA’s School of Education and Information Sciences. Her work broadly focuses on learning environments at the intersection of land-based education and Indigenous resurgence. She is currently working to understand the ways that Indigenous youth in a land-based learning environment (Dr. Megan Bang’s ISTEAM program) recognize the personhood of more-than-human beings and how this influences the ways youth engage in socio-ecological decision making. She is also conducting research on how Indigenous and non-Indigenous people conceptualize their closeness with nature and define environmental problems. Nikki earned her M.A. in Teaching from Pacific University and her B.S. in Sociology from Northeastern University. She also is a parent of two young children with one on the way and a former middle school and high school teacher.