Indigenous worldviews in a Western setting

Experiences of place-based connection, culture and environmental responsibility in Ireland

Abstract

This mixed method study employed survey and interviews to explore in an Irish context, whether Indigenous perspectives on nature have persisted. It examined sixty-five participants’ experiences of connection and communication with nature places, their place-based cultural influences, and their environmental beliefs and behaviours.

Employing a phenomenological perspective, findings revealed often strong connections, attachments and embodied communications with nature places, shaped by the folklore and cultural traditions. These environmentally attuned relationships offered a wide range of benefits and prompted reciprocal responses toward nature places, including practical and spiritual care and broader engagement in pro-environmental behaviours.

Most participants connected with nature places through a lived relational worldview aligned with Celtic cosmology resonant with global Indigenous perspectives.  This was characterised by beliefs in nature’s sentience, sacredness, and corresponding requirements for ethical responsibility.  Nature communications were frequently associated with transpersonal experiences including personifications of nature as calming or mothering and often accompanied by feelings of awe and wonder.

The findings indicate that despite Westernisation and the legacy of a colonial past, Indigenous lifeworlds and cosmologies grounded in attuned relationships with natural places, sustained and lived through religious/spiritual heritages, culture and folklore, persist and continue to inform contemporary ecological consciousness and behaviour in Ireland.

Keywords Human-nature communications, Celtic and Indigenous ontologies, ecological beliefs and behaviours, Irish nature-based culture and folklore traditions, phenomenology