Abstract
This chapter shares how land-based storytelling has impacted our personal and professional lives as Black land-based educators and scholars. We are two sisters who had the privilege of learning from our grandparents in Northern Malawi through traditional storytelling. We share reflections on our formative years in the village, including how those lessons manifest (or not) in our profession and our personal lives raising our children. We both recognize the value of traditional land-based storytelling and how it has shaped who we are as educators and parents. At the same time, we grapple with how to sustain land-based storytelling as a cultural heritage for our family and the Tumbuka heritage (described in the critical lessons section), considering the cosmopolitan nature of our lives and the continued effects of colonialism. Similarly, while there have been calls to Indigenize education curricula in Malawi (Glasson et al., 2006, 2010; Phiri, 2008), Indigenous pedagogical tools such as land-based storytelling are not supported. We hope our land-based learning reflections will contribute to the discussion on promoting Indigenous pedagogical tools as valid in their own right to sustain traditional storytelling as heritage.