ABSTRACT
This chapter is part of an ongoing effort to unsettle the dominance of cognitive developmental and individual humanist perspectives in understanding young children’s learning, particularly in relation to the natural world. It presents three of the orientations that have emerged in this work that the people see as generating affirmative shifts in children's water relations: decentering the developing child, activating decolonial cartographies, and refiguring Indigenous presences. Refiguring presences then is difficult, risky, yet necessary work within persistent conditions of settler colonialism that normalize Indigenous erasure. The chapter stores some of the ways in which activating relational affect between children, place stories, sacred songs, water's live-liness, drawings and more can work in ways that challenge settler colonial ways of relating to the more-than-human world.
