Relationality and Braiding Indigenous Women’s Environmental Knowledge
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Year of publication | 2025 |
Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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Description | The presentation first unpacks several aspects of the entangled relationship between Indigeneity and environmental (in)justice and environmental racism, highlighting how this relationship is embedded in the nature of the settler colonial nation-state and how specific Indigenous concepts such as TEK (Traditional Ecological Knowledge) intervene into mainstream environmental discourse. Then, it brings to attention particularly the role of Indigenous women’s intellectual tradition in bringing forward and articulating key concepts shaping environmental injustice as well as cultural destruction as a direct consequence of settler colonization. Although often overlooked and doubly marginalized in the settler colonial patriarchal and neoliberal setting, Indigenous women have always been important agents of witnessing, bearers of knowledge, and educators of the next generations, who communicate significant knowledges related to land management, environmental protection and sustainability, and the well-being of all eco-systems and interrelated beings, human and non-human alike. One of the key principles presented in this knowledge system is relationality and kinship with what has been called “other-than human” or “more-than human” world, which, when put at the center of discussions, challenge the human/non-human hierarchies dominating Western intellectual environmental thought. The notion of “all our relations,” embedded in many Indigenous philosophies, refers to the principles of interrelatedness and interdependence of all living and non-living entities, such as human and nonhuman animals, plants, lakes, rocks, etc., which the Dene scholar Glen Coulthard also calls “place-based ethics of reciprocity.” Finally, the presentation provides a short case study of the work of Indigenous environmental scientist and educator Robin Wall Kimmerer, as an illustration of contemporary Indigenous woman and public intellectual who crosses multiple discursive boundaries: epistemological (e.g. by interweaving local or traditional Indigenous knowledges and Western scientific knowledge), political and institutional (e.g. by engaging in Western educational systems and politics), as well as cultural (e.g. by transcending cultural separatism and engaging with mainstream cultural politics). Thus, Indigenous women such as Kimmerer work at the intersections of Indigenous solidarity and settler alliances in their environmental writings and political work, spotlighting the ways in which Indigenous women’s intellectual as well as activist tradition innovates and even challenges the mainstream environmental discourse. |
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