Abstract
It is well understood that the climate crisis and global racial injustice are inextricably linked and tied to the practices of colonisation and the enduring imperial project of education. This chapter draws on a research project called "Reading Climate: School English, Indigenous Writing and Sustainability" which seeks to support teachers in Australia to address the imperative for critical approaches to climate education and racial justice across the curriculum. This chapter draws in the insights of Indigenous writers and Indigenous speculative stories, which, as Cherokee scholar Sandra Muse Isaacs notes, can always be understood as climate fiction. We explore the ways that critical literacy, as a justice pedagogy that traditionally pivots on Western binaries, might be productively unsettled and expanded by reading practices that foreground Indigenous relationality and Indigenous futurism. To do this we juxtapose two events: the 2023 Voice to Parliament referendum and our team's international symposium centralising Indigenous writers' voices in dialogue with questions of climate action. In concert, these two events embody the crises and potential futures of critical literacy in Australia today. Reflecting on these events clarifies the issues facing anti-colonial relational reading practices for teacher professional learning at the intersection of literacy, social justice, and climate education.