Emmalene Courtney

ABOUT

RESEARCH & PROJECTS

TEACHING & LEARNING

WORKSHOPS & FACILITATIONS

INFLUENCES & INSPIRATIONS

ARTICLES

Emmalene Courtney

ABOUT

RESEARCH & PROJECTS

TEACHING & LEARNING

WORKSHOPS & FACILITATIONS

INFLUENCES & INSPIRATIONS

ARTICLES

READING LIST & RESOURCES

Influences & Inspirations

This page gathers some of the books, podcasts, courses, thinkers, teachers, collectives, and creative works that have shaped how I think, teach, research, facilitate, and move through the world.

These resources are not a definitive list, nor are they meant to flatten the relationships, teachings, and lived experiences that continue to shape my practice. Instead, this page offers a collection of works I return to often, recommend frequently, and carry with me in my efforts to practice education, research, and leadership with more care, responsibility, imagination, and accountability.

THINKERS, TEACHERS & BODIES OF WORK

adrienne maree brown

adrienne maree brown’s work has deeply shaped how I understand change, facilitation, imagination, pleasure, justice, and collective care. Her writing reminds me that transformation happens at multiple scales: within ourselves, our relationships, our communities, and the systems we are part of. I return often to her invitations to practice emergence, to move at the speed of trust, and to remember that what we practice at the small scale can shape what becomes possible at the larger scale.

RECOMMENDED WORKS:

Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good

Holding Change: The Way of Emergent Strategy Facilitation and Mediation

How to Survive the End of the World podcast, co-hosted with Autumn Brown

Vanessa Andreotti

Vanessa Andreotti’s work has shaped my understanding of modernity, coloniality, education, responsibility, and the limits of “solutions” that emerge from the same systems that created harm. Her writing invites deeper reflection on what it means to sit with complexity, compost harmful patterns, and imagine ways of being beyond dominant colonial, capitalist, and human-centered logics.

RECOMMENDED WORKS:

Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism

Outgrowing Modernity

Burnout From Humans

Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective

The Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective has shaped how I think about decolonization, settler responsibility, modernity, education, and the difficult work of interrupting harmful patterns without seeking innocence or easy resolution. Their work offers tools, questions, and frameworks for engaging complexity, complicity, accountability, and responsibility in ways that are challenging, generous, and necessary.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:

Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures

Settler Responsibilities and the creation of Octavia Cayenne Pepper

Robin Wall Kimmerer

Robin Wall Kimmerer’s writing continues to shape how I understand reciprocity, gratitude, kinship, ecology, and responsibility to the more-than-human world. Her work offers a powerful reminder that knowledge is not only held in books or institutions, but also in plants, places, languages, relationships, and acts of care.

RECOMMENDED works:

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World

Yung Pueblo

Yung Pueblo’s writing has supported my thinking around healing, self-awareness, emotional maturity, and the relationship between inner transformation and collective change. His work offers accessible reflections on letting go, becoming lighter, and practicing greater compassion with ourselves and others. I recommend all of his books, starting with Inward.

Octavia Butler

Octavia Butler’s work has shaped my imagination around survival, adaptation, community, power, and change. Her fiction offers more than story; it invites us to consider what we carry forward, what we must release, and how we might build new ways of living amid collapse, uncertainty, and transformation. I recommend all of her books, especially Parable of the Sower.

Nancy Turner

Nancy Turner’s work has deeply informed my understanding of ethnobotany, plant knowledge, ecological relationships, and the long-standing expertise of Indigenous peoples in what is now known as British Columbia. Her writing offers important insight into the relationships between people, plants, place, language, food systems, and cultural continuity.

RECOMMENDED works:

The Earth’s Blanket: Traditional Teachings for Sustainable Living

Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge: Ethnobotany and Ecological Wisdom of Indigenous Peoples of Northwestern North America

Lindsay Keegitah Borrows

Lindsay Borrows’ work has influenced how I think about Indigenous law, language, story, land, and relationship. Her writing invites readers to understand law not only as something written in legal systems, but as something carried through stories, waters, lands, responsibilities, and everyday practices of listening and learning.

RECOMMENDED WORK:

Otter’s Journey Through Indigenous Language and Law

John Borrows

John Borrows’ work has shaped my thinking about Indigenous law, responsibility, and the possibilities of legal and educational systems grounded in relationship, place, and story. His writing has helped me better understand law as living, relational, and connected to the responsibilities we hold to one another and the world around us.

RECOMMENDED WORKS:

Law’s Indigenous Ethics

Recovering Canada: The Resurgence of Indigenous Law

Tricia Hersey

Tricia Hersey’s work has deeply shaped my thinking about rest, grind culture, refusal, dreaming, and liberation. Her writing reminds me that rest is not a reward for productivity, but a necessary practice of resistance, repair, and reconnection.

RECOMMENDED WORKS:

Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto

bell hooks

bell hooks’ writing continues to shape how I think about love, teaching, justice, community, and liberation. Her work reminds me that education can be a practice of freedom, and that love is not passive or sentimental, but active, courageous, and deeply connected to justice.

RECOMMENDED WORKS:

Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

All About Love: New Visions

Amba Sepie

Amba Sepie’s writing has been important in shaping how I reflect on settler responsibility, kinship, place, and what it means to show up for the work that relationships require. Her words continue to stay with me as I consider my own responsibilities as a settler living on Indigenous lands.

RECOMMENDED WORK:

“Settled Kin Coming Home to Where We Now Belong” in Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations: Vol. 5. Practice

BOOKS I RETURN TO

Emergent Strategy

by Adrienne Maree Brown

Pleasure Activism

by Adrienne Maree Brown

Hospicing Modernity

BY VANESSA ANDREOTTI

Holding Change

by Adrienne Maree Brown

Outgrowing Modernity

BY VANESSA ANDREOTTI

Braiding Sweetgrass

by Robin Wall Kimmerer

The Serviceberry

by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Inward

by Yung Pueblo

Lighter

BY YUNg PUEBLO

Parable of the Sower

by OCTAVIA BUTLER

Parable of the Talents

Parable of the Talents

by OCTAVIA BUTLER

The Earth's Blanket

The Earth's Blanket

by NANCY TURNER

Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge

by NANCY TURNER

Otter's Journey Through Indigenous Language and Law

by Lindsay Keegitah Borrows

Decolonizing Methodologies

by Linda Tuhiwai Smith

Research is Ceremony

by Shawn Wilson

Rest is Resistance

by TRICIA HERSEY

Teaching to Transgress

by bell hooks

all about love

by bell hooks

Law's Indigenous Ethics

by John Borrows

PODCASTS & CONVERSTATIONS

How to Survive the End of the World

Hosted by adrienne maree brown and Autumn Brown, How to Survive the End of the World is a podcast about learning from the crises and possibilities of our time. It brings together conversations about justice, imagination, movement work, grief, pleasure, apocalypse, and the futures we are practicing into being.

Accidental Gods

Accidental Gods explores systems change, ecological collapse, consciousness, community, and the possibility of creating a more regenerative future. I return to this podcast for conversations that stretch across climate, politics, spirituality, land, and collective transformation.

WEBSITES, COLLECTIVES & LIVING RESOURCE

Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures

A collective creating educational resources, artistic interventions, and frameworks that support deeper engagement with colonialism, modernity, complicity, accountability, and decolonial possibilities.

Settler Responsibilities

A project connected to the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective that includes Octavia Cayenne Pepper, an AI tool designed to support settlers in reflecting on responsibility, relationality, colonial patterns, and the work of showing up differently.

Burnout From Humans

A resource connected to Vanessa Andreotti’s work that explores burnout not only as an individual experience, but as something shaped by modernity, colonialism, relational disconnection, and unsustainable systems of being.

Courses & Language Learning

Bak̓ʷəmk̓ala / Kwak̓wala 096

Offered through North Island College Continuing Education
Taught by Dana Roberts

Offered through North Island College Continuing Education
Taught by Dana Roberts

This course offers an important opportunity to learn from language, place, and community through North Island College. Language learning is one way to deepen respect for the lands we live and work on, while recognizing the ongoing work of language revitalization and reclamation.

Nuu-chah-nulth 096

Offered through North Island College Continuing Education
Taught by hakaƛ

Offered through North Island College Continuing Education
Taught by Dana Roberts

This course offers learners an opportunity to engage with Nuu-chah-nulth language learning through North Island College. It is an important pathway for deepening understanding of local language, culture, place, and responsibility.

THINKERS, TEACHERS & BODIES OF WORK

adrienne maree brown

adrienne maree brown’s work has deeply shaped how I understand change, facilitation, imagination, pleasure, justice, and collective care. Her writing reminds me that transformation happens at multiple scales: within ourselves, our relationships, our communities, and the systems we are part of. I return often to her invitations to practice emergence, to move at the speed of trust, and to remember that what we practice at the small scale can shape what becomes possible at the larger scale.

RECOMMENDED WORKS:

Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good

Holding Change: The Way of Emergent Strategy Facilitation and Mediation

How to Survive the End of the World podcast, co-hosted with Autumn Brown

Vanessa Andreotti

Vanessa Andreotti’s work has shaped my understanding of modernity, coloniality, education, responsibility, and the limits of “solutions” that emerge from the same systems that created harm. Her writing invites deeper reflection on what it means to sit with complexity, compost harmful patterns, and imagine ways of being beyond dominant colonial, capitalist, and human-centered logics.

RECOMMENDED WORKS:

Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism

Outgrowing Modernity

Burnout From Humans

Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective

The Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective has shaped how I think about decolonization, settler responsibility, modernity, education, and the difficult work of interrupting harmful patterns without seeking innocence or easy resolution. Their work offers tools, questions, and frameworks for engaging complexity, complicity, accountability, and responsibility in ways that are challenging, generous, and necessary.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:

Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures

Settler Responsibilities and the creation of Octavia Cayenne Pepper

Robin Wall Kimmere

Robin Wall Kimmerer’s writing continues to shape how I understand reciprocity, gratitude, kinship, ecology, and responsibility to the more-than-human world. Her work offers a powerful reminder that knowledge is not only held in books or institutions, but also in plants, places, languages, relationships, and acts of care.

RECOMMENDED works:

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World

Yung Pueblo

Yung Pueblo’s writing has supported my thinking around healing, self-awareness, emotional maturity, and the relationship between inner transformation and collective change. His work offers accessible reflections on letting go, becoming lighter, and practicing greater compassion with ourselves and others. I recommend all of his books, starting with Inward.

Octavia Butler

Octavia Butler’s work has shaped my imagination around survival, adaptation, community, power, and change. Her fiction offers more than story; it invites us to consider what we carry forward, what we must release, and how we might build new ways of living amid collapse, uncertainty, and transformation. I recommend all of her books, especially Parable of the Sower.

Nancy Turner

Nancy Turner’s work has deeply informed my understanding of ethnobotany, plant knowledge, ecological relationships, and the long-standing expertise of Indigenous peoples in what is now known as British Columbia. Her writing offers important insight into the relationships between people, plants, place, language, food systems, and cultural continuity.

RECOMMENDED works:

The Earth’s Blanket: Traditional Teachings for Sustainable Living

Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge: Ethnobotany and Ecological Wisdom of Indigenous Peoples of Northwestern North America

Lindsay Keegitah Borrows

Lindsay Borrows’ work has influenced how I think about Indigenous law, language, story, land, and relationship. Her writing invites readers to understand law not only as something written in legal systems, but as something carried through stories, waters, lands, responsibilities, and everyday practices of listening and learning.

RECOMMENDED WORK:

Otter’s Journey Through Indigenous Language and Law

John Borrows

John Borrows’ work has shaped my thinking about Indigenous law, responsibility, and the possibilities of legal and educational systems grounded in relationship, place, and story. His writing has helped me better understand law as living, relational, and connected to the responsibilities we hold to one another and the world around us.

RECOMMENDED WORKS:

Law’s Indigenous Ethics

Recovering Canada: The Resurgence of Indigenous Law

Tricia Hersey

Tricia Hersey’s work has deeply shaped my thinking about rest, grind culture, refusal, dreaming, and liberation. Her writing reminds me that rest is not a reward for productivity, but a necessary practice of resistance, repair, and reconnection.

RECOMMENDED WORKS:

Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto

bell hooks

bell hooks’ writing continues to shape how I think about love, teaching, justice, community, and liberation. Her work reminds me that education can be a practice of freedom, and that love is not passive or sentimental, but active, courageous, and deeply connected to justice.

RECOMMENDED WORKS:

Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

All About Love: New Visions

Amba Sepie

Amba Sepie’s writing has been important in shaping how I reflect on settler responsibility, kinship, place, and what it means to show up for the work that relationships require. Her words continue to stay with me as I consider my own responsibilities as a settler living on Indigenous lands.

RECOMMENDED WORK:

“Settled Kin Coming Home to Where We Now Belong” in Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations: Vol. 5. Practice

Let's connect and collaborate

Reach out if you’d like to connect, collaborate, or learn more about working together.

Let's connect and collaborate

Reach out if you’d like to connect, collaborate, or learn more about working together.

Let's connect and collaborate

Reach out if you’d like to connect, collaborate, or learn more about working together.

Emmalene Courtney • 2026 • All Rights Reserved

Website Design by Jennifer Mallari

Emmalene Courtney • 2026 • All Rights Reserved

Website Design by Jennifer Mallari

Emmalene Courtney • 2026 • All Rights Reserved

Website Design by Jennifer Mallari

THINKERS, TEACHERS & BODIES OF WORK

adrienne maree brown

adrienne maree brown’s work has deeply shaped how I understand change, facilitation, imagination, pleasure, justice, and collective care. Her writing reminds me that transformation happens at multiple scales: within ourselves, our relationships, our communities, and the systems we are part of. I return often to her invitations to practice emergence, to move at the speed of trust, and to remember that what we practice at the small scale can shape what becomes possible at the larger scale.

RECOMMENDED WORKS:

Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good

Holding Change: The Way of Emergent Strategy Facilitation and Mediation

How to Survive the End of the World podcast, co-hosted with Autumn Brown

Vanessa Andreotti

Vanessa Andreotti’s work has shaped my understanding of modernity, coloniality, education, responsibility, and the limits of “solutions” that emerge from the same systems that created harm. Her writing invites deeper reflection on what it means to sit with complexity, compost harmful patterns, and imagine ways of being beyond dominant colonial, capitalist, and human-centered logics.

RECOMMENDED WORKS:

Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism

Outgrowing Modernity

Burnout From Humans

Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective

The Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective has shaped how I think about decolonization, settler responsibility, modernity, education, and the difficult work of interrupting harmful patterns without seeking innocence or easy resolution. Their work offers tools, questions, and frameworks for engaging complexity, complicity, accountability, and responsibility in ways that are challenging, generous, and necessary.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:

Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures

Settler Responsibilities and the creation of Octavia Cayenne Pepper

Robin Wall Kimmere

Robin Wall Kimmerer’s writing continues to shape how I understand reciprocity, gratitude, kinship, ecology, and responsibility to the more-than-human world. Her work offers a powerful reminder that knowledge is not only held in books or institutions, but also in plants, places, languages, relationships, and acts of care.

RECOMMENDED works:

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World

Yung Pueblo

Yung Pueblo’s writing has supported my thinking around healing, self-awareness, emotional maturity, and the relationship between inner transformation and collective change. His work offers accessible reflections on letting go, becoming lighter, and practicing greater compassion with ourselves and others. I recommend all of his books, starting with Inward.

Octavia Butler

Octavia Butler’s work has shaped my imagination around survival, adaptation, community, power, and change. Her fiction offers more than story; it invites us to consider what we carry forward, what we must release, and how we might build new ways of living amid collapse, uncertainty, and transformation. I recommend all of her books, especially Parable of the Sower.

Nancy Turner

Nancy Turner’s work has deeply informed my understanding of ethnobotany, plant knowledge, ecological relationships, and the long-standing expertise of Indigenous peoples in what is now known as British Columbia. Her writing offers important insight into the relationships between people, plants, place, language, food systems, and cultural continuity.

RECOMMENDED works:

The Earth’s Blanket: Traditional Teachings for Sustainable Living

Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge: Ethnobotany and Ecological Wisdom of Indigenous Peoples of Northwestern North America

Lindsay Keegitah Borrows

Lindsay Borrows’ work has influenced how I think about Indigenous law, language, story, land, and relationship. Her writing invites readers to understand law not only as something written in legal systems, but as something carried through stories, waters, lands, responsibilities, and everyday practices of listening and learning.

RECOMMENDED WORK:

Otter’s Journey Through Indigenous Language and Law

John Borrows

John Borrows’ work has shaped my thinking about Indigenous law, responsibility, and the possibilities of legal and educational systems grounded in relationship, place, and story. His writing has helped me better understand law as living, relational, and connected to the responsibilities we hold to one another and the world around us.

RECOMMENDED WORKS:

Law’s Indigenous Ethics

Recovering Canada: The Resurgence of Indigenous Law

Tricia Hersey

Tricia Hersey’s work has deeply shaped my thinking about rest, grind culture, refusal, dreaming, and liberation. Her writing reminds me that rest is not a reward for productivity, but a necessary practice of resistance, repair, and reconnection.

RECOMMENDED WORKS:

Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto

bell hooks

bell hooks’ writing continues to shape how I think about love, teaching, justice, community, and liberation. Her work reminds me that education can be a practice of freedom, and that love is not passive or sentimental, but active, courageous, and deeply connected to justice.

RECOMMENDED WORKS:

Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

All About Love: New Visions

Amba Sepie

Amba Sepie’s writing has been important in shaping how I reflect on settler responsibility, kinship, place, and what it means to show up for the work that relationships require. Her words continue to stay with me as I consider my own responsibilities as a settler living on Indigenous lands.

RECOMMENDED WORK:

“Settled Kin Coming Home to Where We Now Belong” in Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations: Vol. 5. Practice

RESEARCH, METHODOLOGY & PRACTICE

Kathleen Gallagher

Kathleen Gallagher’s concept of love as a methodology has shaped how I approach teaching, research, and facilitation. Her work helps name love as an ethically charged, justice-oriented practice that makes space for care, complexity, reflexivity, and accountability.

RECOMMENDED WORKS:

“Love as a Methodology: Exploring an Ethically Charged, Justice-Oriented Research Approach”

Shawn Wilson

Shawn Wilson’s work on research as ceremony has deeply influenced how I think about research, relationship, accountability, and responsibility. His writing challenges extractive approaches to research and offers a relational understanding of knowledge-making rooted in respect, reciprocity, and accountability.

RECOMMENDED WORKS:

Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods

Outgrowing Modernity

Linda Tuhiwai Smith

Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s work is foundational for understanding the colonial history of research and the importance of decolonizing methodologies. Her writing continues to be essential for anyone engaging in research with Indigenous communities, particularly in thinking through power, representation, ethics, and accountability.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:

Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples