1. Week 8
INDG 2015//SOC2810: Indigenous
Ecological Ways of Knowing
November 1, 2021
Introduction to Environmental Knowledges in The Caribbean and the Trans-Atlantic
Dr. Zoe Todd
Copyright
Professor
Zoe
Todd
2021

2. Class outline
• The Caribbean
• Nadine King Chambers :’when two eyes
meet , the lie ends”
• Tiffany Lethabo King The Black Shoals,
Introduction
• CLR James: Fanon and the Caribbean
• Sarah Vaughn: Disappearing Mangroves: The
Epistemic Politics of Climate Adaptation in
Guyana
• Portfolio overview
Copyright
Professor
Zoe
Todd
2021

3. • Today we are covering the violent, traumatic histories of
displacement, genocide, and enslavement of African
peoples in the western hemisphere, and the concurrent
experiences of North American Indigenous displacement
and genocide. Some of the material is very heavy, so I
want to provide a trigger warning for students with
embodied connections to these mass violations through
community/historical/ancestral ties
Copyright
Professor
Zoe
Todd
2021

4. • Tiffany Lethabo King brings us into
deeply rooted and storied work on
African diasporic peoples,
communities, histories in the
Caribbean, the USA, and Canada by
examining the concept of The Black
Shoals
Copyright
Professor
Zoe
Todd
2021

5. What
is
a
shoal?
• “In oceanography, geomorphology, and earth sciences, a shoal is a
natural submerged ridge, bank, or bar that consists of, or is covered
by, sand or other unconsolidated material, and rises from the bed of
a body of water to near the surface. Often it refers to those
submerged ridges, banks, or bars that rise near enough to the surface
of a body of water as to constitute a danger to navigation. Shoals are
also known as sandbanks, sandbars, or gravelbars. Two or more
shoals that are either separated by shared troughs or interconnected
by past or present sedimentary and hydrographic processes are
referred to as a shoal complex.[1][2]
• The term shoal is also used in a number of ways that can be either
similar or quite different from how it is used in the geologic,
geomorphic, and oceanographic literature. Sometimes, this term
refers to either any relatively shallow place in a stream, lake, sea, or
other body of water; a rocky area on the sea floor within an area
mapped for navigation purposes; a growth of vegetation on the
bottom of a deep lake that occurs at any depth; and as a verb for the
process of proceeding from a greater to a lesser depth of water.[2]”
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoal
Copyright
Professor
Zoe
Todd
2021

6. The Black Shoals -- King
“Shoals in the Tsangpo (Brahmaputra) River, Tibet Autonomous Region, China”
https://www.britannica.com/science/shoal/images-videos

7. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pHpRFoihIE
Example of a shoal

8. • Why does King invoke the concept of the shoal in
this work?
• “By titling this book The Black Shoals, I posit that
Black thought, Black study, Black aesthetics, and
Black expression function as a shoal that interrupts
the course and momentum of the flow of critical
theories about genocide, slavery, and humanity in
the Western Hemisphere. More specifically, the
book intervenes in contemporary discourses and
theories of colonialism and settler colonialism in
North America that dictate how the academy and
“the left” talk about (or do not talk about)
Indigenous genocide, Indigenous peoples, settlers,
arrivants, and Black people.” (King 2019, p. xv)
Copyright
Professor
Zoe
Todd
2021

9. North America:
- 23 countries
- 9 dependent territories
- Puerto Rico
- US Virgin Islands
- Bermuda
- Greenland
- Cayman Islands
- Turks and Caicos
- British Virgin Islands
- Anguilla
- Montserrat
https://geology.com/world/north-america-satellite-image.shtml
https://www.whatarethe7continents.com/north-
american-continent/many-countries-north-
america/

10. The Caribbean
https://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/map/Caribbean-political-map.htm

11. Tiffany
Lethabo
King
–
the
Black
Shoals
• “Genocide and slavery do not have an
edge. While the force of their haunt
has distinct feelings at the stress points
and instantiations of Black fungibility
and Native genocide, the violence
moves as one. To perceive this distinct
yet edgeless violence and its haunting
requires a way of sensing that allows
moving in and out of blurred and
sharpened vision, acute and dulled
senses of smell.” (King 2019: x)
Copyright
Professor
Zoe
Todd
2021

12. Colliding genocides
• “Under relations of conquest,
Black and Indigenous people
made difficult and agonizing
choices when it came to
negotiating and fighting for their
existence. Often when Black and
Indigenous people encountered
one another their meetings
were mediated by the violence
of an evolving humanism
organized through their captivity
and death.5 The terms of
survival—or, said another way,
the circumstances under which
you as a Black or Indigenous
person lived—were often
tethered to the death of the
Other.” (King 2019, p. xi )
Copyright
Professor
Zoe
Todd
2021

13. Transatlantic
Enslavement
https://www.youtube.com/watc
h?v=LnqhdNxqmpc&ab_channe
l=BBCWhat%E2%80%99sNew%
2FActuJeunes
Copyright
Professor
Zoe
Todd
2021

14. The Middle Passage: 1440-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Passage
- 9.4 to 12 million
enslaved Africans
forcibly brought to the
New World through the
Middle Passage

15. The Middle Passage, con’t
Trigger warning: graphic depictions of experiences of
enslaved people through the Middle Passage
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IJrhQE6DZk&ab_ch
annel=HISTORY
Copyright Professor Zoe Todd 2021

16. Tiffany Lethabo King – the Black Shoals
“What my unnamed ancestors knew of slavery was life and world-altering. They knew of a terror that
exceeded the memory and understanding of what we think we know of slavery. I do not believe that
genocide and slavery can be contained. Neither has edges, yet each is distinct. Each form of violence has its
own way of contaminating, haunting, touching, caressing, and whispering to the other. Their force is
particular yet like liquid, as they can spill and seep into the spaces that we carve out as bound off and
untouched by the other.” (King, p. x)
Copyright
Professor
Zoe
Todd
2021

17. • Sit with this question that King poses in the text:
• “what happens—or needs to happen conceptually—when Black diasporic
people, aesthetics, and politics land and encounter Native peoples’
cosmologies and resistance to conquest?” (King 2019, p. 8)
• Indigenous peoples and Black communities are often framed as
separate groups in Canada and the USA, which can erase Black-
Indigenous, Afro-Indigenous peoples
• King’s work invites care-full examinations across histories of genocide,
enslavement, displacement in/of African nations and the experiences
of Indigenous peoples in North America
• What does it look like to displace the logics of white supremacy that
are at the root of the horrors of colliding white supremacist genocides
in Africa, North America and South America?
Copyright
Professor
Zoe
Todd
2021

18. King – The Black
Shoals
• Drawing on the work of Kamau
Braithwaite’s tidalectics, King
reminds us:
• “First, tidalectics confound
the binary and dialectical
thinking that would separate
ocean from land and render
Black people and Indigenous
people as an antagonism.” --
King, 2019, p. 7
Copyright
Professor
Zoe
Todd
2021

19. Learning questions
• Reflect on the history of
Indigenous and Black
communities where you currently
are situated.
• How are these relations
connected to the
lands/waters/atmospheres of
place?
• What does environmental
relationality look like in your
current home/place if we
acknowledge “genocide and
slavery do not have an edge”?
(King 2019, x)
Copyright
Professor
Zoe
Todd
2021

20. • “The Black Shoals arrests settler colonialism’s tendency to resuscitate older
liberal humanist modes of thought to create new poststructural and
postmodern forms of violent humanisms that feed off Indigenous genocide
and Black social death.” (King p. 10)
Copyright
Professor
Zoe
Todd
2021

21. King The Black
Shoals
• Settler vs Conquest
• Conquistador-settler relationship
• “Even if people of color (or non-Black
and non-Indigenous) can over time
occupy the structural position of the
“settler,” then critical social theory
needs another name for the position
previously held by the white settler. If
postcolonial subjects, former “Natives”
and racialized others, can become the
settler, then the white settler has
continued to occupy the structural and
ontological position of the conquistador,
and should be named as such” (King
2019 xii)
Copyright
Professor
Zoe
Todd
2021

22. Canada and the
Middle Passage
• Canada does have a history of enslavement, despite
efforts by white settlers to erase this “Enslavement was
introduced by French colonists in New France in the early
1600s, and lasted until it was abolished throughout British
North America in 1834.”– Natasha Henry
https://thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/black-
enslavement?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIhIGB9oS_5QIVRb7ACh2
5DgpBEAAYASAAEgLf0_D_BwE
Copyright
Professor
Zoe
Todd
2021

23. Refusing the binaries of white colonizer
nation-states
• “Canadian racial discourses prioritize the settler-Indigenous binary and
subordinate—erase—the nation’s own history of slavery and anti-Black racism
through a Canadian project of multiculturalism that focuses on assimilating
(Black) immigrants into its national project.4” (King 2019, 13)
Copyright
Professor
Zoe
Todd
2021

24. Learning question
• How do we think King’s
principle of the Shoals into
being across territorial,
political, geographic,
historical tensions?
Copyright
Professor
Zoe
Todd
2021

25. Nadine King
Chambers
• “This is what this chapter attempts: an
invitation to attend to long relationships
or lack thereof between racialised
communities. It is an invitation to my own
community to take up the new challenges
because ‘risk demands that we look at
blackness across the diaspora and
acknowledge not just black subordination
but those historical and social moments
in which blackness is articulated with and
through settler and other forms of
colonial power’ (Jackson, 2014, p. 64).”
(p. 89)
Copyright
Professor
Zoe
Todd
2021

26. Nadine King Chambers: timeline of resource extraction and
territorial theft (screenshot of timeline on page 90)
Copyright Professor Zoe Todd 2021

27. Nadine King
Chambers
• “Multinational arrangements are key drivers of this
Kitimat-Jamaica connection, linkages between Canada,
Britain (through its Caribbean colonies) and the US by
means of the shifting of global power over the course of
World War Two. Through war-acquisition rights to
resources, these deals for extraction and production had
already occurred in the name of ‘national defence’ long
before the Caribbean independence celebrations of the
1960s. By drawing on a range of scholars from various
disciplines and historical as well as geographical regions,
it is possible to begin to understand the interlocking
framework of power that allows the unchecked
extraction of water and soil for ALCAN’s endeavours in
Canada and Jamaica” (p. 94)
Copyright
Professor
Zoe
Todd
2021

28. CLR James
• “Cyril Lionel Robert James (4 January 1901 – 31 May
1989),[1] who sometimes wrote under the pen-name J. R.
Johnson, was a Trinidadian historian, journalist and Marxist. His
works are influential in various theoretical, social, and
historiographical contexts. His work is a staple of Marxism, and he
figures as a pioneering and influential voice in postcolonial
literature.[2] A tireless political activist, James is the author of the
1937 work World Revolution outlining the history of
the Communist International, which stirred debate
in Trotskyist circles, and in 1938 he wrote on the Haitian
Revolution, The Black Jacobins.[3]
• Characterised by one literary critic as an "anti-
Stalinist dialectician",[4] James was known for his autodidactism,
for his occasional playwriting and fiction – his 1936 book Minty
Alley was the first novel by a black West Indian to be published in
Britain[5] – and as an avid sportsman. He is also famed as a writer
on cricket, and his 1963 book Beyond a Boundary, which he
himself described as "neither cricket reminiscences nor
autobiography",[6] is commonly named as the best single book on
cricket, and even the best book about sports ever written.[7]”
(Source: Wikipedia)
Copyright
Professor
Zoe
Todd
2021

29. CLR James: Fanon
and the Caribbean
• Fanon was trained in the colonial schools of
Martinique
• Traveled to Europe
• Worked with decolonizing forces in Algeria
• In CLR James’ opinion, would have returned
to the Caribbean to share what he learned
from freedom and decolonizing struggles in
Africa
Copyright
Professor
Zoe
Todd
2021

30. Vaughn:
Disappearing
Mangroves
• This article explores the Guyanese Mangrove
Restoration Project (GMRP)
Copyright
Professor
Zoe
Todd
2021

31. Vaughn,
paragraph
2
• "In 2010 the Guyanese government announced the launch of the
GMRP. As a response to the threat of sea-level rise, the GMRP looks
to mangroves for storm protection. The program is partially funded
by the European Union’s Global Climate Change Alliance, which
complements UN climate treaties by supporting national-level
research about climate adaptation. For engineers more familiar with
seawalls than mangroves as defense against the sea, the GMRP
entails a particularly broad-based research program into mangrove
ecosystems. It focuses on exploring how and why processes of
erosion impinge on forests. These research questions have put
engineers in unorthodox partnerships with other technoscientific
experts, including geoscientists analyzing mudbanks, environmental
consultants cultivating trees, and beekeepers developing apiaries.
This is not to say that their combined efforts always prove effective—
they are, in fact, often thwarted by a variety of things like waves,
mud, and debris. In Guyana’s forests, climate adaptation requires
expertise that can reconcile humans’ and nonhumans’ entangled and
increasingly insecure futures.”
Copyright
Professor
Zoe
Todd
2021

32. • Colonization, enslavement, and plantations changed Guyana’s
landscapes:
• “Beginning in the late seventeenth century, Dutch colonists imported
slaves from Africa, while British colonists later brought in more slaves
and indentured laborers from India, Portugal, and China to cultivate
sugar. Since, flood management has been tied to sugar plantations’
elaborate canal and sea-defense grid.” (Vaughn, paragraph 10)
Copyright
Professor
Zoe
Todd
2021

33. The importance of paying
attention to nonhuman beings

34. • ”People often think that a
mangrove is just a tree . . .
but I mean a community of
plants growing along the
shore—a mangle of
forests.”
• (Vaughn, paragraph 45)
Copyright
Professor
Zoe
Todd
2021

35. • “it is also incumbent on us to consider what constitutes
expertise and how this question materializes across a
vulnerable planet.” (Vaughn 2017)
Copyright
Professor
Zoe
Todd
2021

36. • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFJXTYckZEg&ab_chann
el=GCCACommunity
“it is also incumbent on us
to consider what
constitutes expertise and
how this question
materializes across a
vulnerable planet.”
(Vaughn, 2017 )
Watch this video with the above quote in mind: how is ‘expertise’
about nonhuman beings (mangroves) produced in climate change
mitigation work? Whose voices are centred? Whose voices are
excluded? How does this reflect histories in the region?

37. Portfolio
Rubric has been posted to CuLearn
Copyright
Professor
Zoe
Todd
2021
Step 1 – name
Step 2 – fill in 10 scholarly sources, plus 2 course readings
Step 3 – write your 500 word summary
I’ve posted a link to a CuPortfolio template
that you can use as a guide

38. Final reflection
question
How do Tiffany King’s concept of
The Black Shoals, Nadine King
Chambers’ work on extraction
between Jamaica and Kitimaat, and
Sarah Vaughn’s studies of climate
change mitigation expertise inform
your understandings of
environmental relationships? How
can you bring trans-
continental/trans-regional
understandings of human-
environmental relations into your
current work?
Copyright
Professor
Zoe
Todd
2021