Women Weaver-of-Worlds Earth-Based Mythopoesis in Restorative Indigenous Narratives

Kin relationality and ecological belonging: a cultural psychology of Indigenous transcendence

“…These self-transcendent frameworks are transmitted and strengthened through several cultural processes, including intergenerationally. Within these practices of relating and interconnecting are woven ideas of belonging to group identity in developing life stories (Celidwen, 2021). Thus, narratives are vessels for integrating prosociality into the culture through practices that extend care and ideas of personhood to landscapes and bodies of water, much as those that protect vulnerable populations (Lokensgard, 2018;Dudgeon and Bray, 2019;Burns et al, 2021;Celidwen, 2022a).…”

“…Thus, everyday interactions express the shared experiences with embedded principles providing insight, inspiration, and motivation. As Indigenous identities are strongly connected to their natural territories, stories integrate changing aspects of everyday environmental occurrences and cycles (Celidwen, 2021).…”

“…Both forms of knowing constitute science within culturally specific practices of rigorous observation, analysis, and evaluation that encourage and advance learning, discovery, and comprehension of the world. These ways of knowing, scholars in different disciplines have observed, emerge from context-and culturally-specific interests and concerns (Medin et al, 2013;Larsen et al, 2017;Bang et al, 2018;Gone, 2021;Celidwen, 2023).…”

“…Within this model of relationality, living beings and natural phenomena share a familial identity of interdependence and mutuality that conceives relationships as continuously influenced, adapted, developed, and organized from interactions (Gratani et al, 2016;Nalau et al, 2018;Celidwen, 2020b). Such relational systems are believed to replicate in life systems (Cajete and Little Bear, 2000;Ramos, 2012;Redvers et al, 2020;Goodchild, 2021;Celidwen, 2022b).…”

“…Ecological belonging centers upon the conceptualization of the Indigenous self-construal-or perception of one's identity-as belonging to a responsive collective ecosystem. Thus, ecological belonging is grounded in a collective identity based on what has been called a planetary group-consciousness (Cajete and Little Bear, 2000;Nelson and Shilling, 2018;Redvers et al, 2022;Celidwen, 2022b;Celidwen et al, 2023). Within the value system of ecological belonging an individual's identity is constituted in relation to the natural environment (Brennan and Ungunmerr-Baumann, 1989;Cajete, 2009;Mann, 2016;Celidwen, 2020b,c)-including spaces not customarily defined as untamed, like urban environments.…”