This presentation offers a critique of approaches to the teaching of history in New Zealand schools. Taking knowledge out of place and time and presenting it in textbooks is a conflicted task for schooling not only in New Zealand, but elsewhere. The disembodiment of knowledge in history books has led students to the proclamation that the teaching of history in schools is ‘boring’ and irrelevant to their lives. I will seek a way out of this dilemma by proposing that the teaching of Indigenous history in New Zealand, Australian, US and Canadian schools must recognize that Indigenous historical narratives are intimately tied to the ecologies of places – whether they rural, remote or urban. I will thus propose an approach to teaching history that gets students out of the classroom, and ‘into place’ alongside Indigenous custodians of local knowledge to address issues of environmental racism, eco-justice and climate change. This approach may provide a means of creating an 'affective' and emotional/spiritual sense of ‘belonging’ to history that textbooks cannot provide.