Short Abstract

This panel will consist of papers on narrative by indigenous scholars from Northeast India working within their native communities. The narratives concern nature, indigenous epistemologies, spirituality, and native science and climate change.

Long Abstract

Well over two hundred languages are spoken across Northeast India, the region that lies east of the narrow “chicken’s neck” where Indian territory snakes between Nepal and Bangladesh. What is notable from the perspective of ethnographic research is the rise of cohorts of indigenous scholars and their fieldwork within their own communities. Their work is at the forefront of decolonizing ethnographic practice through intimate local knowledge, developing community-oriented methodology, deconstructing power relationships between scholars and subjects, and framing indigenous epistemologies. On the global academic stage this work complements theory and practice in indigenous studies being undertaken by scholars in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. In collecting oral narratives and interpreting them, these scholars also dialogue with and build upon 19th and 20th century research by colonial scholars and researchers.

In particular, panelists address one or more of the following subthemes in their topics:

a. Bridging Human and Nonhuman Worlds: By personifying animals or landscapes, indigenous oral narratives make ecological relationships emotionally accessible/ creating a kinship.

b. Agency and lifeworlds: In many indigenous worldviews,stories reflect a cosmology in which nonhumans possess actual agency. Stones, Rivers, Animals and Spirits are embodiments of a community’s ecological relations and lifeworlds. …

c. Knowledge Transmission: Narratives encode environmental knowledge, species habits, seasonal changes, ecological interactions, and spiritual attitudes in forms memorable to both children and adults.

d. Moral Ecology: Anthropomorphic characters often serve as moral exemplars or cautionary figures, shaping attitudes toward exploitation, stewardship of land etc. Place-based ecological wisdom like Sacred Groves

e. Ethics of co-existence: Storytelling often encodes ecological rules, taboos, proscriptions, and ritual observances, which sustain biodiversity and regulate human exploitation of forest and land. Embedded ethics reminiscent in hunting registers and beliefs etc.