Storying Indigenous (Life)Worlds: An Introduction

Without stories, we have no way of connecting what it means to be human with the pathway of our existence. They connect us through time and space. However, some stories—often those held and nurtured by Indigenous peoples—have been dimmed by powerful colonial interests, which attempt to erase our responsibilities to both humans and nonhumans, allowing injustice to go unchecked and unrecognized.

So, stories are more than just stories—they constitute a narrative structure with a beginning, middle, and an end, whose bits and pieces might fill knowledge gaps in understanding. In this Special Issue, we reflect upon stories as meaning-making and world-making practices that teach, heal, restore, remember, and resist. In this way, the contributors of this Special Issue call attention to the much longer tradition of stories and storytelling focusing on a particular location, meaning, or history within Indigenous cultures. Furthermore, they bring into sharp focus the ways in which settler and colonial storytelling erases and explains away the Indigenous perspectives and meanings of Indigenous (life)worlds.

In this edited volume, we have gathered together narratives about story making, storytelling, and story working from across the Americas, Turtle Island (North America), and Abya Yala (Latin America). Contributing authors to this issue are Choctaw, Kanaka, Mescalero Apache, Latinx, Nottoway, Passamaquaddy, Penobscot, Wounaan, and Xicana (in alphabetical order) and bring to bear their Indigenous experiences, knowledges, academic training, and perspectives with implications for storying Indigenous life(worlds). The five articles in this volume center on relational and Indigenous storytelling methods and ethics that challenge fundamental ideas and narratives of place, knowledge, and authority in academia and in dominant settler/colonial society at large. While this collection of Indigenous storied narratives is about resisting colonial story-making, story-taking, and world-making practices, it is also filled with practical and methodological ways of reclaiming, restor(y)ing, and revitalizing Indigenous places, history, and lifeways.

Indigenous storytelling is central to knowing, learning, and teaching about the world and reality (Iseke 2013). As Kovach has written, “Stories remind us of who we are and of our belonging. Stories hold within them knowledges while simultaneously signifying relationships…” (Kovach 2009, p. 94). Rito Ismare Peña and colleagues (Wounaan and Latinx) write in this Special Issue that the “ancestor’s stories (jöoingarm nem hĩgk’aa^W) are the way we know our being, who we are, how to be in the world” (Ismare Peña et al. 2021, p. 7). Story, as an indigenous practice, is understood to sustain communities, validate experiences and epistemologies, and nurture relationships and the sharing of knowledges (Iseke 2013).

Indigenous storytelling is ancient and yet remains a vital and vibrant practice for the continuation of Indigenous cultures and self-determined futures in the unfolding of our contemporary times. Critical Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars further demonstrate the importance of storytelling for Indigenous lifeways and futures (Sakakibara 2020). Daigle et al. (2019) recently suggested that the role of Indigenous storytelling is critical to community resilience as it helps community members survive and thrive in times of environmental change and transformation. Calls for the engagement of Indigenous storytelling in redressing planetary environmental crises are increasingly common in crisis domains, such as conservation and climate change (Fernández-Llamazares and Cabeza 2018)—often in ways that take Indigenous stories out of context and can possibly harm the story traditions from which they come. Thus, it is imperative to caution against neocolonial appropriations of story taking that have and may again occur when Indigenous knowledge and stories are viewed as a panacea to the dilemmas caused by the capitalist–colonial–industrial triad.

Indigenous storytelling operates across relational, epistemological, and ontological planes as a meaning-making and world-making practice that informs culturally specific ways of being, surviving, and thriving. Jamaican writer and cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter’s reflections on storytelling suggest that the role of this practice “is to elaborate the genre-specific (and/or cultural-specific) orders of “truth” through which we know reality, from a perspective of the no less genre specific who that we already are” (Wynter and McKittrick 2015, p. 32). Storytelling is thus a social (read: communal) practice of being, becoming, and belonging—a communal-renewing way of meaning making and world making according to the specificities of the culture that practices it.

Indigenous storytelling is relational: it emerges from relations with ourselves, with human and nonhuman others, with ancestors and yet-to-be kin, and with land and place. As such, considerable attention has been paid to the principle of good relations within the corpus of Indigenous storytelling literature. In her intervention to take “Storywork” seriously, Q’um Q’um Xiiem/Jo-Anne Archibald brilliantly orients us towards a storytelling practice enacted from the seven principles of respect, responsibility, reciprocity, reverence, holism, interrelatedness, and synergy (Archibald 2008). Recentering these Indigenous ethics in the pedagogical and epistemological dimensions of storytelling illuminates the culturally distinct character of Indigenous storytelling and story making.

The papers of this collection offer relational wisdoms with human and nonhuman kin, lands, waters, ancestors, and places. They collectively emphasize Indigenous stories’ enabling of particular understandings of place, “[r]ecognizing land and water as relatives with agency, animacy, and deserving of respect, nurturing and protection…” (Jernigan and Roach 2021, p. 2). Attention to land-based relations is closely aligned with our conceptualization of the term Indigenous. As a basic definition, this term refers to peoples “with ancestral and often spiritual ties to a particular land, and whose ancestors held that land prior to colonization by outside powers, and whose nations remain submerged within the states created by those powers” (Sundberg 2014; Shaw et al. 2006, p. 268). We adopt this elastic definition of “Indigenous” to allow for recognizing the varied names and labels ascribed to those oppressed in the modernity/coloniality equation, including Natives, Indigenous, autochthonous, tribal peoples, peasants, forest dwellers, and ethnic minorities (Tuhiwai Smith 2005). And yet, while this definition is intentionally broad, we emphasize Indigenous people as “people of a place” with ancestral-land-based connections (Tuck et al. 2014, p. 9). Importantly, Indigenous connections to land refers “not just to the materiality of land, but also it’s ‘spiritual, emotional, and intellectual aspects’” (Ibid). Distinct ways of being and becoming with land and Earth relatives—including plants and animals, as well as geologic, terrestrial, and aquatic (air, water, soil, fire) beings—is consistent with many Indigenous ontologies and worldviews. As Shawn Wilson reiterates in Research is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods,

“Identity for Indigenous peoples is grounded in their relationships with the land, and their ancestors who have returned to the land and with future generations who will come into being on the land. Rather than viewing ourselves as being in relationship with other people or things, we are the relationships that we hold and are part of”.

(Wilson 2008, p. 80)

Indigenous (Life)worlds, as referred to in the title of this introduction, is strategically bracketed in recognition of this distinct relational way of being. Inquiry into Indigenous lifeways requires attending to a web of relations, ecologies, and practices that are composed of both life and nonlife actants, beings, and “things.” The bracketing is thus intended to disrupt the binary of life vs nonlife inherent in Western/colonial notions of life and the privilege of the “living” in representations of worlds and world making.

• De/Anticolonial Storytelling and Indigenous Restor(y)ing

Storytelling is an ancient practice, yet in the last few centuries, storytelling has played a pivotal though complicated role in global imperialism and colonial encounters. Archibald reminds us that a critical tool for colonization was scientific research, in which Indigenous story taking and story making played a vital part: “Colonial Western research of our traditional stories and research stories of our peoples was used to define, destroy, and deter the valuing of Indigenous knowledge, people and practices. With an objective facade of research, and an assumed position of racial superiority […] on the part of the researcher, the story takers and story makers usually misrepresented, misappropriated and misused our Indigenous stories” (Archibald et al. 2019, p. 5).

Colonial story taking and story making are imperial practices that colonize Indigenous, ethnic, and racialized worlds through the design and force of a single story, or what critical race theorist Gloria Ladson-Billings (1998, p. 18) calls “master scripting.” Colonial storying practices, or master scripting, “silences multiple voices and perspectives, primarily legitimizing dominant, white, upper-class male voicings as the “standard” knowledge”: as the single story (Swartz 1992 in Ladson-Billings 1998, p. 18). “Other” stories are thus silenced by a single, dominant story unless they can be disempowered as “irrational” and/or misrepresented.

While the coloniality of knowing and being is an ongoing struggle today, importantly, some Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars are calling attention to recent power shifts, suggesting that “research and researchers have begun to change,” as there has been greater inclusion of Indigenous peoples in the research process, and such scientific research is becoming more visible and beneficial to communities (Wilson 2008, p. 15). Indeed, interventions are being made to disrupt the ongoing history of colonial (territorial and epistemic) occupation through the decolonization of academia and its ontological, epistemological, methodological, and axiological totalizing grip. Pedagogies such as the Mi’kmaw-based “Two-Eyed Seeing”, or Etuaptmumk, are being utilized in science education programs, such as the Wabanaki Youth in Science (WaYS) Program (Carr et al. 2017) and fisheries management research (Reid et al. 2021). Indigenous research methodologies have engendered positive changes in many projects benefiting Indigenous peoples (see McGreavy et al. 2021) and have made it possible for Indigenous peoples to “correct” and claim cultural heritage items using traditional knowledge labels in both physical and digital archive spaces (Anderson 2018; Anderson and Christen 2019). We recognize these interventions/transformations as coming from thinkers and activists in myriad critical research fields, including, but not limited to, Native and Indigenous studies, de/postcolonial studies, and ethnic and critical race studies, as well as from communities’ voices and activism beyond academia.

Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies (Smith 1999) and Jo-Anne Archibald’s Indigenous Storywork (Archibald 2008) represent two Indigenous interventions in research practices that recognize and respond to the exclusive dominant “story” that emerges from Western scientific and Eurocentric traditions. Smith describes decolonizing research as a practice that “aspires to re-cover, re-cognize, re-create, re-present and “re-search back” by using our own ontological and epistemological constructs” (Archibald et al. 2019, p. 4). Indigenous storywork, as coined by Archibald, is considered a genre of decolonizing and indigenizing storytelling practices (Archibald et al. 2019, p. 7). As a decolonial practice, Indigenous storywork seeks to rectify colonial damage and reclaim indigenous capacities to story-talk, story-listen, story-learn, and story-teach.

As a decolonial methodology, storytelling is a practice that contests and challenges colonial meaning making and world making—those which are intertwined with “objective” and extractive ways of knowing “other” humans, nonhumans, and natures. Yet storywork, according to Archibald et al. (2019), is not only a means of contesting and deconstructing colonial narratives and empires; Indigenous storywork moves beyond critique and “educates and heals the heart, mind, body and spirit, weaving new synergies for transformational change through deep interrelational understanding of story, people and place” (Archibald et al. 2019, p. 8). The stories and storywork reflected in the collection of articles in the Special Issue serve as illuminating examples of the varying forms rectifying colonial damage, reclaiming Indigenous capacitates, and restor(y)ing Indigenous life(worlds) may take across the specificities of their uniquely situated geographies and histories.

• Overview of the Articles

The aim of this Genealogy Special Issue is to bring together critically engaged scholarship from Indigenous peoples, with Indigenous collaborators, and for the decolonization and liberation of Indigenous ecologies and (life)worlds. Storytelling Indigenous (life)worlds and webs of meaning in a variety of relational, experiential, and embodied ways, such as those the authors of this Special Issue engage in, serves to disrupt settler- and extractive-colonial narratives and worlding practices and provides stories that compose more livable, sustainable, and just worlds. In what follows, we briefly outline each of the five, Indigenous-authored articles of this collection and reflect upon their synergistic contributions to the theory and practice of storytelling.

The first article of the Special Issue offers readers a conceptual Indigenous storytelling framework composed of storying ethics, storying methods, storying ruptures, and storying interventions. Author Doreen Martinez leads us through powerful storied accounts that animate the framework and call our attention to the elements, premises, and practices distinctive to, and distinguishing of, Indigenous storywork. The framework presented in this paper centers storying as it speaks of the epistemic power of storying from relational nature-based immersions. As Martinez writes, “Indigenous storying is embraced, practiced, and comprehended as a sensory system, as in sense modality, integral to epistemological tenets of Indigeneity. The storying connects the heart mind, the head mind, that hears the storm people, the four legged and winged ones, that smells, tastes and knows lessons and living” (Martinez 2021, this issue, p. 2).

Throughout the article, Martinez reminds us that storytelling is a serious practice—“it must be grounded and pursued responsibly as it is our past, present and future of our very existence” (Martinez 2021, this issue, p. 2). Weaving together Indigenous wisdoms and experiences—from her own Mescalero Apache stories to those of the Maasai, Maori, Zapatista, and other Indigenous and Native peoples—Martinez brings forth a plurality of Indigenous consciousness to bear on the meaning and practice of her Indigenous storytelling framework. In this way, the paper stages a decolonial intervention in expected Western methodological approaches and carries out an Indigenous (re)claiming and (re)covering of shared storytelling protocols, performances, teaching, representations, and traditions that are meaningful and important across a diverse range of Indigenous life(worlds).

Beginning our article review with Martinez’s paper allows us to describe the following four articles individually and in connection with the Indigenous storytelling framework she provides. As each of the four articles that follow present a unique perspective on land-based epistemic struggles with implications for Indigenous storytelling, the articles are themselves examples of Indigenous ethics and methodologies, as well as decolonial and anticolonial storytelling ruptures and interventions from particular epistemic and material locations.

The second article of the collection is titled “In conversation with the Ancestors: Indigenizing Archeological Narratives at Acadia National Park, Maine”, by Bonnie Newsom (Penobscot), Natalie Dana Lolar (Passamaquoddy and Penobscot), and Isaac St. John (Maliseet). Written by three Wabanaki (the multinational confederacy term for the Maliseet, Micmac, Passamaquoddy, Abenaki, and Penobscot Nations) archaeologists, it centers “an archaeological story on relationality between contemporary and past Indigenous peoples” and reframes an ongoing myth in Maine archaeology regarding the “Red Paint People” (so-called because of their practice of including powdered hematite or red ochre in the graves of the deceased) who supposedly occupied what is now Maine from between 5000 and 3800 years ago. By using Wabanaki languages and integrating community voices in carrying out their study, the authors offer an alternative, and Wabanaki-centered, model for storying Indigenous heritage.

Guided by Indigenous archaeological theories and each individual authors’ experience, the authors reframe the criticality of managing cultural heritage in the context of Acadia National Park. Offering stories of connection, relationality, and responsibility, the authors propose an archaeological practice that mobilizes the Wabanaki language and interpretation. This practice looks for opportunities for Wabanaki community connections to the material past, (in part) healing the wounds of disconnection inflicted by extractive colonial orientations in archaeology.

The third paper in the Special Issue, “is the story of a story based on stories”. This seven-author team, led by Rito Ismare Peña and composed of five Wounaan authors and two Euro-American/Latinx authors, storytell their collective process in the production of a multimodal illustrated children’s storybook that revives, honors, and respects Wounaan lifeworlds. The digital audio and print children’s book is itself a political intervention, a decolonial storying practice and the art of Indigenous futuring. Articulating the implications of coloniality across the Wounaan world, the authors state that “the Wounaan world has changed a lot…some practices have already been forgotten, even the forms, the words, the meaning of words… already today’s youth have forgotten” (Ismare Peña et al. 2021, this issue, p. 1). From this location of the colonial erasure of the culture and language of the original peoples of Panama, this book becomes more than just a children’s story; rather, it is an instrument bringing forward Wounaan wisdoms—revealing how birds teach and communicate the past, present, and future to Wounaan youth, whose traditional knowledges have been stymied after three-generations of dominant Spanish language and national government education.

The authors’ intercultural and interlinguistic storying project is reflexively opened-up in this article, focusing attention on the sequence and politics of relationship building, project design, and funding obligations of the co-storying effort. Storying across Wounaan meu, Spanish and English, and navigating intercultural and interethnic terrain, the authors reflect on the process of storying the multisensorial entangled relationality—the conviviality—that is foundational to Wounaan life maach durr^W. The book project is the outcome of the authors’ collective desire to make materials that are relevant for Wounaan children despite various colonial, capitalist, and demographic changes that are slowly erasing Wounaan language, knowledge, and ways of being.

The fourth paper in this collection is Kacey Jernigan (Chactaw) and Beth Roach’s (Nottoway) article, which stories the creation story of a collaborative digital storytelling (DST) project framed within Land Back activism. Throughout the article, Jernigan and Roach reflect on their own Indigenous relational accounts of place and space as infused with stories, memories, and the agency of geologic beings, revealing living political histories layered into the fabric of Virginia lands and waters. By (re)storying the Indigenous creation stories of place, such as the Monacan story of Mohomony, or The Natural Bridge, the authors disrupt settled narratives of place and space. Recognizing land and water as relatives with agency, animacy, and deserving of respect, this article offers readers a method with which to make visible Indigenous peoples’ stories and relationships to spaces, places, and other beings.

Jernigan and Roach’s reflexive and relational storied account of collaborative digital storywork attends to the messy details and processes of relationship building between a Virginia state university and Tribal citizens and offers readers a “sort of spatial ordering” of the relationships between place, space, actors, and other beings that become entangled in this Indigenous digital storytelling practice. In this way, this article not only poses an Indigenous challenge to settler renderings of place and space in the Virginia landscape, but also challenges settled knowledges within academia—inviting scholars to “(re)consider conceptualizations of what counts as theory, as research, as data, as analytical methods, or as a research paper” (Jernigan and Roach 2021, this issue, p. 4).

In the fifth and final article of the Special Issue, Keahialaka Waika’alul Ioane (Kanaka) stories the Big Island resistance throughout the period of the “Hawaiian renaissance” (1970s–1990s) to today. As a daughter of this legacy, Ioane is deeply connected to the stories of Big Island resistance. In her own words, her political Indigenous storywork is also a personal storytelling responsibility “to account for the aloha ‘āina career of my father, Keli’i ‘Uncle Skippy’ Ioane Jr. and how his career was inspired by the Big Island Resistance” (Ioane 2022, this issue, p. 3). Engaging in conversation with her father, a Kanaka resistance leader and resistance musician, Ioane’s account weaves together a collaborative, kin-based storying that reclaims political histories and geographies from continued settler-colonial encroachment.

As the state of Hawaii writes over Kanaka’s history of the land, mapping over the legacies of “aloha ‘aina” with visions of the “American dream” and a promise to develop Hawai’i as a land for extreme capital, Ioane’s storying stands in resistance to the erasure of her Kanaka lifeways and restor(y)s Indigenous relations to place. Ioane takes up “aloha ‘aina”—a concept of the traditional Hawaiian worldview that means to have a deep love of the land—as an epistemological tool to restory six land movements as “Wahi Pana Aloha ‘Aina” (WPAA) or “storied places of resistance.” Storying WPAA, Ioane describes places such as Pu’uhonia ‘o Pu’uhuluhulu not only within the context of a single story or single place, but as a part of a bigger story of the PKO (Protect Kaho’olawe ‘Ohana) and the Hawaiian renaissance of the late 1970’s.” The power of Ioane’s storywork is that it is both a political, land-based resistance and is also deeply personal. Ioane grounds her storytelling of Big Island resistance in her own living legacy; she tells the history of aloha ‘aina and the battle to reclaim Hawaiian identity and sovereignty from the wisdoms of her youth: “growing up with my father’s lyrics…” (Ioane 2022, this issue, p. 7). Ioane’s relational and ethical approach to storytelling echoes Indigenous methodologies written about elsewhere and effectively disrupts the “neutral,” impartial, and colonial modes of story making and world making that are still practiced in American education and political institutions today.

• Key Contributions of the Collection: Rupture, Restor(y)ing, and Relationality

When considering the collection of articles in this Special Issue, Storying Indigenous Life(worlds), certain recurrent themes emerge. While their individual contributions to the literature on storytelling are numerous and diverse, when taken together, we suggest that the insights from the authors of this collective coalesce around central themes of rupture, restor(y)ing, and relationality.

Rupture as a central thread woven throughout the papers is centered in Martinez’s article with her reflection of an informal interview and conversation with a Navajo woman, Jane, who survived the experiences and traumas of boarding school. Instead of storying the expected outcomes of disciplined and docile Indianness as a result of the process of education-based forced assimilation, Martinez attends to the ways in which Jane’s Indigenous story ruptures the settler colonialism script, as Jane remarks: “[t]hey made me bold and brazen”. (Martinez 2021, p. 8). As a powerful example of storytelling as rupture, Martinez narrates how this story disrupts the mission of boarding schools to settle Indians into morality, manners, and civility. Indigenous storying is thus what makes possible the lines of flight away from the “master script” or the single, dominant story and its expected outcomes and foreclosed futures. These discursive departures allow for an ethical–political storying practice that not only ruptures the canonical (colonial) narratives but also allows acts of reclaiming and restor(y)ing Indigenous pasts, places, and futures.

While holding conversation with the ancestors, Bonnie Newsom, Natalie Dana Lolar, and Isaac St. John (this issue) bring into sharp relief the practice of and need for Indigenous restor(y)ing that begins with the rupturing of settled archeological narratives of Indigenous pasts. In this article, this team of Indigenous archeologists disrupt the Eurocentric “Red Paint People” myth that has been imposed upon the Wabanaki people by scientific knowledge claims. This archeological myth and its varied interpretations “are products of racialized knowledge constituted and reconstituted by those who seek to maintain control over the narrative”—a settled narrative that authorizes archeologists (and other legitimized knowers) to map the pasts of “Others” to validate Eurocentric claims to territory (Newsom et al. 2021, this issue, p. 3). Drawing out the dominant archeological narrative that is imposed upon their ancestors, the authors go against the settled interpretations of the “Red Paint People” through an Indigenous methodology of renarrating and restor(y)ing that brings indigeneity to bear on Eurocentric archeological interpretations of Indigenous pasts using Indigenous language and relationality.

Indigenous research that ruptures and restores is part of a larger movement of decolonizing research institutions and practice, as Jernigan and Roach (this issue) also demonstrate. From a similar decolonial commitment and a method of rupture and restor(y)ing, Jernigan and Roach offer insights into the art of decolonizing settler narratives through their focus on Indigenous space and place. Aligning with the Land Back Movement, justice for these scholars is not only about reclaiming of space and place “but the stories, memories, meaning, ceremony and connections with and within space and place” (Jernigan and Roach 2021, pp. 1–2). Again, beginning with moments of rupture in which Jernigan and Roach narrate the erasure of the Monacan people and their stories from the grounds of the University of Virginia, and the Natural Bridge geologic site, these authors assert the imperative for reclaiming and restor(y)ing Indigenous space and place through creative (digital) and relational practices that make visible Indigenous relations with land and waters. While storytelling as a decolonial method is a shared focus across the papers of this Special Issue, the authors each enter the project from diverse place-based locations and temporalities.

Offering methodological insights into a practice of decolonial digital storytelling, as a method of reclaiming and restor(y)ing Indigenous futures, is at the heart of the article authored by Peña and colleagues (Ismare Peña et al. 2021, this issue). Restor(y)ing for these authors, though still a decolonial practice, looks less to a critique of the past of the Wounaan peoples of Panama, and instead is specifically focused on Wounaan future, that is, on the Wounaan youth and their education. Restor(y)ing Wounaan futurity is a commitment to maintaining the viable life(worlds) of the Indigenous peoples of Panama through a practice that begins again at the point of rupture—an escape route out of the master colonial script that dominates the formal education of Wounaan children. Breaking with the Spanish-colonial education programs, the team of seven authors re-stor(y) Wounaan life(worlds) for the youth by way of the creation of a children’s multimodal illustrated story book narrated in their Indigenous language and told from their own Indigenous worldviews.

Finally, we move to our last collective theme: relationality. Relationality is integral throughout all the papers in the Special Issue and as such, it is not a standalone theme; rather, there is no Indigenous storytelling without relationality. Relationality, as we wrote early in this introduction, is a central tenet of what it means to be Indigenous. While we could write at length on the ways each author carefully stories their relations to land and water, to kin, to ancestors, to birds and plant relatives, and to future generations, we turn to the courageous story authored by Keahi Ioane (2022, this issue) in what is her first academic article offering. Ioane’s article breaths a powerful and intimate breath of life into the Indigenous struggle for land, storying the case of the Kananka peoples’ resistance on the Big Island of Hawaii. Standing in her inherited legacy, Ioane takes up “aloha ‘aina”—a concept of the traditional Hawaiian worldview, meaning to have a deep love of the land—with implications for reclaiming and restor(y)ing her ancestral homelands from settler colonialism. Grounded in her own Indigenous stories and worldview, Ioane’s restor(y)ing practice is a dance with the Kanaka language, her own father’s Kanaka musical lyrics, and her own voice, all coalescing to story the Big Island resistance and her people’s ongoing struggle for their land and for their own stories, which can restor(y) their land-based relations.

Storytelling reflects our relations, and storytelling enacts our relations: relations with ourselves and others, lands, waters, ancestors, plants, animals, and kin. As Jernigan and Roach state in this issue, and as the collection of papers demonstrate, “[w]e are working to rebuild and renew these relations as we struggle together for decolonization and the resurgence of Indigenous culture and the return of Indigenous lands” (Jernigan and Roach 2021, p. 1). What this collection of articles clearly illustrates, therefore, is the importance of Indigenous storytelling as a powerful teaching, healing, and restoring practice for decolonial possibilities and Indigenous futurity.