ABSTRACTEducational institutions have long been terrains of struggle. Schools and universities have dispossessed Indigenous peoples of their lands, cultures, and labor, whereas alternative modes of study have been central to many resistance movements, including for decolonization. In this article, we put Indigenous study projects in conversation with free universities, which have also struggled against and beyond normal universities. Through militant co-research, we ask: on what grounds might free universities align with Indigenous struggles, and how might such convergences be fruitful or fraught? We contribute to critical political-ecological interventions in environmental education by approaching this question through a theoretical framework that combines political ecology with ″more-than-humanist theory″ and Indigenous scholarship. We highlight how different modes of study—″education″ and its alternatives—reveal networks of more-than-human interrelatedness that either reinforce or resist colonial-capitalist enclosures. We then highlight parallels between free universities and Indigenous modes of study, before outlining some possibilities and dangers for collaborations between these two movements. Through case studies drawn from our own involvement in free universities, we suggest that more-than-humanist theories provide useful means to conceptualize the radical struggles taken up by free universities, as well as to ″translate″ between free universities and Indigenous movements, to facilitate accompliceships through collective study.
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