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- Convenors:
-
Sami Lakomäki
(University of Oulu)
Janne Lahti (University of Helsinki)
Gunlög Fur (Linnaeus University)
Lindsay Elizabeth Doran (University of Eastern Finland)
Send message to Convenors
- Chairs:
-
Sami Lakomäki
(University of Oulu)
Janne Lahti (University of Helsinki)
Gunlög Fur (Linnaeus University)
- Formats:
- Panel
- Streams:
- Decolonizing Environmental Pasts
- Location:
- Linnanmaa Campus, L9
- Sessions:
- Thursday 22 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
How to write histories of the entangled forces of colonialism and environmental crisis without losing sight of Indigenous peoples as creative agents? Inspired by Gerald Vizenor’s concept of survivance, this panel explores the strategies that have energized Indigenous resilience across the globe.
Long Abstract:
Today, climate change and biodiversity loss are remaking the Earth in ways that are threatening human existence. For many, the situation seems without precedence. For the world’s Indigenous peoples, however, it is yet another crisis. They have already lived through several centuries of colonialism, through shockwaves that have changed the face of our planet, carried tremendous human and environmental consequences, subjected the land to excessive use, and altered climates. Indigenous peoples have become veterans in struggles against intertwined political, ecological, and spiritual crises: loss of homelands, assaults against sovereignty, destruction of habitats, epidemics, and genocidal wars. Yet, against all odds, they have survived, suggesting histories far more complex than traditional declensionist narratives imply.
This panel seeks to understand Indigenous resilience in the face of the twin forces of colonialism and environmental crisis, from ca. 1600 to the present. In particular, it focuses on Indigenous strategies of survivance. Survivance, a fusion of survival and resistance, is a concept coined by Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor to emphasize Indigenous agency involved in the conscious and active process of surviving and resisting colonialism. The panel accordingly invites participants to consider how to write environmental histories that, while recognizing the harrowing impacts of colonialism and environmental crises, draw attention to the creative Indigenous strategies that have fuelled Indigenous resilience and resurgence against almost unthinkable challenges. Likewise, we encourage the panellists to discuss how to connect such critical issues as Indigenous ontologies, art, ritual and traditional ecological knowledge to the majority societies' concerns with environmental history.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 22 August, 2024, -Paper short abstract:
Examines how Diné actors, negatively impacted by uranium mining, pursued transnational survivance strategies: forging solidarity ties and reshaping global anti-nuclear debates through their interactions with Japanese and Pacific Islander environmental, anti-nuclear, and indigenous rights activists.
Paper long abstract:
The historically traumatic impacts of uranium mining on the Diné (Navajo) peoples of the American Southwest – from high cancer rates among mineworkers and their families to the contamination of local reservation resources – have become well-known cases of environmental injustice. Much less understood is how these experiences reverberated on a global stage. Diné activists in the late 1970s and early 1980s pursued particular transnational survivance strategies as they contended with their ongoing settler colonial predicaments and vulnerabilities to the predations of multinational energy corporations: seeking allies and building solidarity networks in ever-widening transnational and trans-indigenous directions. This paper examines how Diné actors in these years especially forged solidarity bonds with Japanese environmental, anti-nuclear, and peace activists as well as indigenous rights and anti-nuclear activists from across the Pacific. At rallies, workshops, and conferences – from the Navajo Reservation to Nagasaki – Diné participants’ personal accounts of uranium mining’s toxic toll encouraged Japanese activists to move beyond their narrower conventional concerns over bombs and energy production, to instead confront all implicated stages of the nuclear fuel cycle and their toxic impacts – from uranium mining on indigenous lands in North America to nuclear waste dumping’s effects on Pacific Islanders. At the same time, through their growing interactions with indigenous actors from across the Pacific, Diné activists helped foster and widely communicate a deeper appreciation of the interconnected nuclear predicaments and vulnerabilities of indigenous people globally, and how such problems were intimately tied to deeper questions of sovereignty and survival.
Paper short abstract:
Analyses publications of Michigan's Mount Pleasant Indian Industrial Boarding School: the state's only federally funded and operated boarding school for Indigenous students (1893 - 1934). Also examined: the lingering effects of school policies built upon settler colonialism and state paternalism.
Paper long abstract:
Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Michigan newspapers frequently mentioned the Mount Pleasant Indian Industrial Boarding School (MPIIBS) during its operation from 1893 to 1934. The school, constructed upon the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe’s Isabella County Indian Reservation and designed to facilitate assimilation of Indigenous children into white Christian-American society, was often treated as an attraction by surrounding communities; including organizations of day-trip campus tours, performances by student bands, and highly-anticipated sports matches between MPIIBS and regional schools. This critical analysis of discourse found within MPIIBS publications and local newspapers such as The Mount Pleasant Times, Isabella County Enterprise, Clare Sentinel, and Provemont Courier argues that rhetoric used in school publications informed and enforced relationships between newspapers, Indigenous students, and surrounding non-Indigenous communities of northern-central Michigan. Additionally examined are presences of paternalistic or settler colonialist rhetoric within newspapers that may have been intentionally utilized to create perceptions of paternalistic bonds formed by MPIIBS staff and non-Indigenous community members towards Indigenous students.
Paper short abstract:
Within the Anishinaabe thought world that Vizenor’s concept of survivance emerges from, elements of Land are agential persons. This paper uses stories of other-than-human survivance against the Trent-Severn Waterway to explore how other-than-human persons can teach and inspire decolonial praxis.
Paper long abstract:
Much of Gerald Vizenor’s thought emerges from Anishinaabe philosophies that also recognize elements of Land, including plants, animals, waters, rocks, and others, as persons, kin, and nations possessing agency, animacy, and spirit. From an Anishinaabe perspective, other-than-human persons undertake acts of survivance, actively and agentially surviving against settler colonialism and environmental destruction.
This paper explores other-than-human survivance against the Trent-Severn Waterway (TSW) and how it can teach and inspire decolonial praxis. The TSW is a 386-kilometer-long system of locks, dams, and canals built onto waterbodies throughout what is now colonially considered central Ontario, Canada, in order to connect Chi’Niibish (Lake Ontario) with Waasegamaa (Georgian Bay). The waterway was constructed throughout the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries to facilitate colonial settlement, logging, and commercial shipping. However, at the same time that it expanded access to central Ontario for settler Canadians, the TSW had devastating impacts on the Indigenous—principally Anishinaabe—Nations whose territory it cut through, and many of their other-than-human relations. The construction of the waterway reshaped rocks and waterbodies, flooded forests, destroyed manoomin beds (wild rice; Zizania palustris), and caused the extirpation of Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) and American eels (Anguilla rostrata). However, other-than-human persons also resisted and survived against the colonial imposition of the TSW through floods, logjams, inclement weather, disease outbreaks, and other acts of survivance. Using these stories of other-than-human survivance, this paper highlights the varied and dynamic nature of survivance and considers the lessons that other-than-human persons can teach about dismantling settler colonialism.
Paper short abstract:
The use of fish skin for garments and accessories is an ancient tradition shared by coastal Arctic societies. This paper proposes a vision of sustainability as an anthropological study of the resourcefulness of Arctic Indigenous Peoples, their subsistence lifestyles, and fish skin practices.
Paper long abstract:
To obtain the warmth needed from their clothing, Arctic and Subarctic Peoples have used for millennia fish skins, transforming them through highly specialized processes into garments, shoes and containers. They maintained a subsistence lifestyle linked with their natural surroundings, in one of the most demanding climates in the world. The specific groups with historical evidence of fish skin production are the Inuit, Yup’ik, Alutiiq and Athabascan of Alaska; the Nivkh and Nanai Siberian Peoples; the Ainu from Hokkaido Island in Japan and Sakhalin Island in Russia; the Hezhe from northeast China and the Saami of northern Scandinavia.
Arctic fish skin practices have historical connection with nature, from sustainable salmon fishing to lower consumption in the Arctic where resources were scarce and precious, respecting the relationship between all things on earth, in stark contrast to our contemporary vision destroying in the name of commerce. Colonisation has negatively impacted traditional Arctic fish skin heritage. Denying Indigenous fishing rights also damaged their relationships with the environment and their own sense of identity. For many Indigenous communities, colonialism has been a history of myriad dispossessions, of their land, water, traditional knowledge and practices both material and spiritual. This research explores fish skin craft produced by the Indigenous groups mentioned above, providing broader understandings of their linked past and heritage. This craft is embedded in their own environments and within a global environmental that is in crisis, a crisis that disproportionally endangers Indigenous communities, who had no part in causing it.
Paper short abstract:
I would like to discuss the environmental and social dimensions of Morocco's ancient hydraulic techniques, in order to present a local vision. i will therefor focus on the social dimension (strengthening solidarity and cooperation ..) and the environmental aspect (preserving the ecosystem,...)
Paper long abstract:
By exploring the foundations and transformations of indigenous hydraulic techniques in Morocco, either to mobilise or to divide and distribute water, I intend to present the main values ignored by colonialism. Identifying their ecological and social dimensions is also an important way of recovering an important part of Morocco's indigenous technical memory, which has been underestimated by the engineers and technicians of the Protectorate, whose visions were based on numerical reasoning and economic logic. In addition, the ethnographic studies in the Protectorate period and the research of modern scholars focus on the analysis of ideals and beliefs related to water, such as myths, rituals, customs, charms and magic. The technical aspect of Moroccan water management is therefore too limited compared to their creativity and effectiveness in this field.
The researcher Mohamed El Faiz, an economic historian, has analyzed a famous "khettaras" and irrigation canals in the context of a natural landscape and a harmonious water heritage. Despite their simple form and widespread presence in many areas of the country's daily life, these techniques of sharing and distribution reveal the genius and intelligence of the Moroccans in mobilizing, sharing and transferring water.
We will therefore first discuss the environmental and social dimensions of Morocco's ancient hydraulic techniques. Secondly, we will focus on the social dimension (strengthening solidarity and cooperation - preserving the existing social order...) and the environmental aspect (preserving the ecosystem, providing water for birds and plants in an ecological way...).