INDG3015 Week 3: Earth/Soil/Land Week 3 explores relationships Indigenous ecological relationships to earth/soil/land drawing on readings by Vanessa Watts, Leroy Little Bear, Enrique Salmón, and Robin Wall Kimmerer

1. INDG 3015: Indigenous
Ecological Ways of
Knowing and the
Academy
• January 26, 2021
• Dr. Zoe Todd, Sociology
• Week 3: Earth/Soil/Land

2. Class outline
• Gathering Moss -- Sexual Assymetry and the
Satelite Sisters; An Affinity for Water; Binding
Up the Wounds: Mosses in Ecological
Succession; In the Forest of the Waterbear (p.
29-61)
OPTIONAL READINGS
• Watts, Vanessa. 2013. Indigenous Place-
Thought and Agency amongst Humans and
Non-humans (First Woman and Sky Woman
go on a European Tour!). DIES:
Decolonization, Indigeneity, Education and
Society 2(1): 20–34
(https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/
article/view/19145)
• Salmón, Enrique. 2012. “Eating the
Landscape” (talk).
https://bioneers.org/enrique-salmon-eat- ing-
the-landscape-american-indian-stories-of-
food-and-resilience-bioneers/

3. Gathering Moss
• This week we learned about:
• moss reproduction (queer ecologies)
• moss relationships to water
• uses of moss in ecological succession (healing wounded
landscapes)
• waterbears/moss ecosystems

4. Leroy Little Bear,
2016
• “the fish, for instance, nobody's talked
about the fish in this Congress, not that I
know of. But, the fish has been around --
think about it -- way before the
dinosaurs, way before the Neanderthals,
way before our time. The fish is still
around. I wonder what scientific formula
the fish has discovered. We should ask
the fish. They've survived.”
- Leroy Little Bear, Congress of the
Humanities, Calgary 2016

5. Moss reproduction
• “The term “queer ecology” refers to a loose,
interdisciplinary constellation of practices that aim, in
different ways, to disrupt prevailing heterosexist
discursive and institutional articulations of sexuality and
nature, and also to reimagine evolutionary processes,
ecological interactions, and environmental politics in light
of queer theory. Drawing from traditions as diverse as
evolutionary biology, LGBTTIQQ2SA (lesbian, gay,
bisexual, transgender, transsexual, intersex, queer,
questioning, two-spirited, and allies) movements, and
queer geography and history, feminist science studies,
ecofeminism, and environmental justice, queer ecology
currently highlights the complexity of contemporary
biopolitics, draws important connections between the
material and cultural dimensions of environmental issues,
and insists on an articulatory practice in which sex and
nature are understood in light of multiple trajectories of
power and matter.” Catriona Sandilands
https://keywords.nyupress.org/environmental-
studies/essay/queer-ecology/

6. Moss and water
(chapter 8)
• “light is of less concern to moss than water” (p.
39)
• “Moss shoots, branches, and leaves are arranged
in such a way as to prolong the residence time of
water and to counter the forces of evaporation,
with the pull of capillarity. Mosses without such
favorable design dried out too quickly and were
eliminated by natural selection.”
• Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Gathering Moss (p. 39).
Oregon State University Press. Kindle Edition.

7. “Binding up the
wounds” (chapter 9)
• “Most of this slope is a carpet of Polytrichum
moss, the same species I saw at the top of Cat
Mountain. I admire its tenacity in enduring this
place, where others would wither away in the
span of a single day.
• Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Gathering Moss (p. 47).
Oregon State University Press. Kindle Edition. “

8. Learning question:
What do mosses teach us about relationships to
wounded landscapes?

9. Waterbears and
springtails
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l
oUqmWGcuGE&ab_channel=micros
copeitaly (video has no sound)

10. Vanessa Watts Indigenous Place Thought
Watts 2013, p. 22

11. Watts: Indigenous
Place-Thought
• “Our understandings of the world are often
viewed as mythic by “modern” society, while
our stories are considered to be an alternative
mode of understanding and interpretation
rather than “real” events. Colonization is not
solely an attack on peoples and lands; rather,
this attack is accomplished in part through
purposeful and ignorant misrepresentations of
Indigenous cosmologies.” (Watts 2013: 22)

12. Watts: Indigenous Place-Thought
• “in a Haudenosaunee or Anishnaabe framework is
that our cosmological frameworks are not an
abstraction but rather a literal and animate extension
of Sky Woman’s and First Woman’s thoughts; it is
impossible to separate theory from praxis if we
believe in the original historical events of Sky
Woman and First Woman. So it is not that
Indigenous peoples do not theorize, but that these
complex theories are not distinct from place.” (Watts
2013: 22)

13. Watts: Indigenous
Place-Thought
• “non-human beings choose how they
reside, interact and develop relationships
with other non-humans.So, all elements of
nature possess agency, and this agency is
not limited to innate action or causal
relationships.” (Watts 2013: 23)

14. Watts: Indigenous Place-Thought
• “From a theoretical standpoint, the material
(body/land) becomes abstracted into
epistemological spaces as a resource for non-
Indigenous scholars to implode their hegemonic
borders. The excavated First Woman and all of
her teachings, ontologies, and actions are
interpreted as sexy lore and points of theoretical
jump-offs to dismantle and dissect that which
oppresses” (Watts 2013: 31)

15. Watts: Indigenous Place-Thought
• “Our cosmologies (and the theories within
them) are righteously different and cannot
be separated from the stuff of nature. When
an Indigenous cosmology is translated
through a Euro-Western process, it
necessitates a distinction between place
and thought.” (Watts 2013: 32)

16. Salmón: Eating the Landscape: American
Indian Stories of Food and Resilience (2012)
https://bioneers.org/enrique-salmon-eating-the-landscape-american-indian-stories-of-
food-and-resilience-bioneers/

17. Indigenous Place-thought and food
sovereignty
• What do we learn from Dr. Salmón’s talk?
• Relationships to place are shaped by food: plants, animals we
consume become part of us – reciprocal relationships through
food are intensely visceral, embodied (the taste of a specific
kind of corn in a place it has grown for generations; the taste
of landlocked char from a specific small arctic lake) – place,
knowing, food, sovereignty are all interconnected

18. Weekly participation prompt
• What does it mean to live ‘within the narrow
conditions of existence’ that Little Bear teaches
us about?