ABSTRACT
Sustainability may hold the potential to reconcile long-term interests of industrial-settler societies with Indigenous peoples, yet such reconciliation is not a given, nor will it be easily achieved. The meaning of sustainable development will have to be decolonized and indigenized to emerge as a shared ethical space between cultures. Such shared ethical spaces will unfold through processes of authentic intercultural dialogue and exchange, offering the possibility for new insights into human identity and purpose with emergent outcomes across cultures to address shared challenges of sustainability. This chapter provides an example of such dialogue ranging around themes of sustainability, reconciliation and ethics. The dialogue provides a reflective basis to draw foundational principles informing sustainability from an indigenized – in this case Piikani (Blackfoot) – perspective. Four broad axiological themes are drawn to help animate values for an indigenized approach to sustainability. These include: i) creation, relations and Ginmapiipitsin – the spirit of sanctified kindness for all; ii) natural law and ethics, framed in the axiom life is environment, environment is life; iii) insight into human identity, articulated in the axiom we are the land; and iv) cultural analogs for sustainability with shared purpose and self-determination for all.
