ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to unsettle taken-for-granted familiarities of nature as a site to enhance children’s learning experiences. It considers how restorying the particular place and the “things” in it, through material–discursive relations and Indigenous relationalities, might be a productive move toward refiguring presences and countering the “continual colonial mapping and erasing of Indigenous presence” in encounters with so-called natural places. The chapter explores how refiguring presences might be useful as relational, situated, and noninnocent storying practices that unsettle taken-for-granted ways of seeing and provoke different ways of relating to everyday encounters with the forest. It also considers how interruptive stories, which attend to the inherent vibrancies, tensions, and contestations of place, might be put to work as an anticolonial practice. The chapter examines how knowledge making, through foregrounding more-than-human worlds, might bring into view multiple stories of this particular situated mountain forest: stories that act toward relational and anticolonial early childhood nature pedagogies.
