This article examines how Tonga and Ila Kuyabila praise poetry encodes indigenous ecological knowledge and mediates human-environment relations in Southern Zambia. Drawing on ecocriticism, cultural materialism, and indigenous epistemologies, it argues that Kuyabila expresses a complex ecological worldview in which land, labour, cattle, and ancestral memory shape social identity and environmental responsibility. Analysis of field-recorded performances shows that ecological knowledge in Kuyabila appears not as abstract reflection but as embodied practice embedded in farming, pastoral life, seasonal rhythms, and material culture. Through land-rooted metaphors, environmental histories, and moral vocabularies of sustenance and stewardship, the poetry constructs belonging as a relational condition grounded in place. Kuyabila functions as an archive of ecological literacy, preserving climate memory, histories of drought and abundance, and culturally embedded systems of environmental governance. The study contributes to Environmental Humanities and African oral literature by showing how poetic traditions transmit ecological ethics, sustain environmental memory, and support culturally grounded environmental resilience.
Keywords: Ecocriticism, Ila, Indigenous ecological knowledge, Kuyabila poetry, Oral literature, Tonga, Zambia
