Social Work For Land Back: Environmental Social Work, Decolonization, Reconciliation, and Indigenous Self-Determination

Abstract

Using an anti-colonial Indigenist research framework, through two sharing circles and eleven one-on-one conversations, social work educators, practitioners, and students were asked: How can social workers in Canada who value sustainability and the environment come to understand Land Back as the most rational response to the climate crisis through social work education and practice? The study highlights examples of how social work’s pursuit of sustainable and ecological practice can support settler solidarity, Indigenous sovereignty, decolonization, and Indigenous land reparations. Four overarching guiding tenets for Social Working for Land Back were identified: compassion, relationality, solidarity with all our relations, (un)(re)learning, and cultural humility. Through pedagogical and practice reflections, collaborators urge social workers to re-imagine settler futurities, consider abolitionist social work, mobilize, unite, and implement incremental changes to transform the current systems while building alternative systems centring ceremony, rest, care, peace, prayer, the next seven generations, and ecological economic structures.