Grief 👉🏾 injustice 👉🏾 Country 👉🏾 Healing 👉🏾 Wellbeing 👉🏾 Responsibility 👉🏾 Hope

What does it mean to grieve Country, while contributing to care for it?

For many Indigenous peoples, climate change is not a distant or future threat. It is something we are already living and adapting with - through rising seas, changing seasons, damaged ecosystems, loss of species, erosion of cultural places and the disruption of relationships with Country, culture and community.

But alongside this grief is another story: Country is healing.

Country has its own ways of responding, regeneration and adapting. Where we pay attention, Country reminds us that healing is not linear. It is relational. It requires care, reciprocity, patience and collective responsibility.

This keynote explores the interaction of grief, healing and climate injustice through an Indigenous lens. It takes what happens when we acknowledge the grief of environmental and cultural loss without allowing grief to become paralysis. How might grief become a pathway to deeper connection, action and responsibility?

Drawing on lived experience, community, Country and the realities facing Indigenous communities on the frontline of climate change, the keynote will reflect on what it means to move forward on the face of adversity - not leaving grief behind but by carrying it differently.

At its heart, this is an invitation to rethink wellbeing. Our wellbeing cannot be separated from the wellbeing of Country. Healing ourselves, healing community and healing Country are interconnected.