12. November 25: Traditional Ecological Knowledge Braiding Sweetgrass, Chapter 5, “Burning Sweetgrass” (pp.303-340) update: the page numbers don't correspond in all versions of the book so I'll start listing sections instead: Windigo Footprints, The Sacred and the Superfund McGregor, Deborah. 2006. “Traditional Ecological Knowledge”. Ideas: the Arts and Science Review, vol. 3, no. 1 http://www.silvafor.org/assets/silva/PDF/DebMcGregor.pdf Berkes, Fikret. 1999. Chapter 1: Context of Traditional Ecological Knowledge, pp. 1-16 in Sacred Ecology: Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Natural Resource Management. Philadelphia: Taylor and Francis. Scott, Colin. 2011 [1989]. “Science for the West, Myth for the Rest? The Case of James Bay Cree Knowledge Construction.” Pp. 175-197 in The Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies Reader edited by Sandra Harding. Durham: Duke University Press.

1. Week 12 -- Traditional
Ecological Knowledge
November 25, 2020
Dr. Zoe Todd
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Copyright Professor Zoe Todd 2020

2. Class Outline
§ Kimmerer: Windigo (Weetiko)
§ Viewing of Wakening
§ Onandaga Lake
§ Traditional Ecological Knowledge –
McGregor, Scott, Berkes
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2020

3. RECAP: WEEK 11
- Pacific/Oceania Indigenous
experiences and environment
- Salmon, cedars, lichen
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2020

4. Windigo
- Kimmerer draws parallels to
contemporary consumption (2003, p.
305):
Copyright Professor Zoe Todd
2020

5. Insatiable hunger
§ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbmi2ff3MBk
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6. § Group work
| Discuss the ways that insatiable consumption are
present in your world
Copyright Professor Zoe Todd
2020

7. “There is an established link between poverty and the
increased risk of exposure to toxic and hazardous chemicals.
Exposure of poor people to toxic chemicals is often strongly
correlated to geography. In urban settings, low-income or
minority populations typically reside in neighborhoods
considered undesirable, such as areas adjacent to industrial
zones. These places can be major sources of environmental
exposure to toxic chemicals, originating from factories, landfill
sites, incinerators, and/or hazardous waste dumps.” (UNDP
2014: 2)
Copyright Professor Zoe Todd
2020

8. Week 11 Gender and
Environment
§ Aamjiwnaang
First Nation
and Chemical
Valley (Sarnia)
| Canada's Toxic
Chemical Valley
(Full Length)
VICE Canada
§ https://www.y
outube.com/
watch?v=Un
HWZE0M_-k Copyright Professor Zoe Todd
2020

9. § Onondaga Lake
Copyright Professor Zoe Todd
2020

10. § “Sid Hill, a leader of the Onondaga Nation, calls
the cleanup project an expensive Band-Aid. He
says the cleanup is not enough for a site that
has important historic and cultural significance
to his people.
§ "In seven generations, that's still going to be a
Superfund site," Hill says. "For that amount of
damage that they've done to the lake, it doesn't
seem fair to the lake or to the people who use
the lake.”” http://www.npr.org/2012/07/31/157413747/americas-most-
polluted-lake-finally-comes-clean
Copyright Professor Zoe Todd
2020

11. Onondaga Lake
§ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAC_PHfjIPc
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2020

12. Honeywell
http://slideplayer.com/slide/3839835/
§ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1FiF9JcXg8
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2020

13. Learning Activity
§ Compare the Honeywell video with
Kimmerer’s descriptions of efforts to
restore/reclaim/re-incorporate Onandaga
Lake into local kinship relations. Where
do the film and her work converge?
Where do they diverge? Why? What
underlying worldviews shape both
perspectives?
Copyright Professor Zoe Todd
2020

14. TEK
§ Deborah McGregor (2006):
§ “What, then, is TEK? Well, depending on whom you ask, you will
get a different response. Some Aboriginal scholars, such as Marie
Battiste (Micmaq) and James Henderson (Cherokee), argue that it
cannot and should not be defined as definitions of TEK vary from
Nation to Nation and from individual to individual; reducing this
diversity to more universal definitions, it is believed, is a first step
in the Eurocentric process of separating TEK from its intended
context. Others point out that TEK has been defined largely by
non-Aboriginal academics, and that Aboriginal perspectives are
conspicuously absent in the literature (a situation that is changing,
slowly). Some practitioners, like Henry Lickers (Seneca from Six
Nations of the Grand River and Director of Environment for the
Mohawks of Akwesasne), reject the term altogether and substitute
their own. A growing trend, then, is for Aboriginal people to
generate their own definitions, and to use TEK as a label only in
certain situations.” Copyright Professor Zoe Todd 2020

15. TEK: McGregor
§ TEK is not linear – it can be shared
between generations in a circular way
§ TEK is a lived experience of knowledge
about
lands/waters/atmospheres/relations
§ TEK is hard work!: “No one called the principles by
which we lived TEK—and they probably would have been
amused if the idea had been presented to them. A far cry from
the somewhat idealized descriptions bandied about in
academic discussions, actually living and learning TEK was
not at all glamorous— mostly just hard work.” (McGregor 2006:
1)
Copyright Professor Zoe Todd
2020

16. TEK: Scott (2011)
§ It is only in moments of unusual reflexive insight, for example, that
modern Westerners are conscious of the extent to which a (meta-
)physics of impersonal forces imposes itself on our perception of
“nature.” So embedded are the Cartesian myths of the dualities of
mind-body, culturenature, that we tend to privilege models of physical
causality, rather than relations of consciousness or significance, in
our perception even of sentient nature. It is true that we have begun to
culturalize animals in animal communications studies, and to
naturalize culture in anthropological ecology. But our conventional
attitude is to assume fundamental differences between people and
animals, while exploring the nature of their connections. The Cree
disposition seems rather the converse: to assume common
connections among people, animals, and other entities while
exploring the nature of their differences. The connectedness assumed
by the Cree reminds me of what Gregory Bateson (1979) has termed
the “pattern which connects,”4 patterns of dancing, interacting parts
within larger patterns, the stories “shared by all mind or minds,
whether ours or those of redwood forests and sea anemones,” the
“aesthetic unity” of the world” p. 178-179
Copyright Professor Zoe Todd
2020

17. TEK: Paul Nadasdy(2003: 137)
“The problem, I suggest, lies in the assumption that knowledge
exists in discrete Epistemological systems. All attempt to
conceptualize science necessarily take this assumption for granted.
Indeed, most Western academics have a stake in distinguishing
science from non-science because they wish either to preserve for
science a privileged epistemological status (vis-à-vis other systems
of knowledge) or to deny that status as unwarranted or ethnocentric
(i.e. to argue that other knowledge systems are equally valid).
Proponents and critics of science alike use the term “science” to
stand for a collection of beliefs and practices, the actual
meaning/content of which they take for granted. Even when
scholars engage with one another in a struggle over whether some
knowledge artifact qualifies as scientific, they need consider only
the status of the contested artifact not the overall meaning/content
of the term “science” itself.”
Copyright Professor Zoe Todd
2020

18. TEK: Todd (me!) (2016:249-250)
§ “The problem is that the questions being asked about TEK versus
science within the environmental/co-management literature,
generally, are too narrow. The questions, essentially, need to look
beyond framing Indigenous knowledge as analogous solely to
science. Indigenous people are employing legal thinking that
encompasses rights and duties of both human and more-than-
human agents to one another, while scientists necessarily narrow
the focus of their queries about animals and their behavior to the
empirical field of science—behaviour, population size, movement.
The nature-culture duality that informs Western scientific
thinking prevents scientists from understanding that
discussions about respecting animals, about appropriate
human-animal relations, are in fact diplomatic, legal-
governance, intra-nation conversations for Paulatuuqmiut.”
(Zoe Todd, 2016, unpublished PhD thesis, University of
Aberdeen)
Copyright Professor Zoe Todd
2020

19. Learning question
§ How do the principles we started the
term with – environmental racism –
inform how the topic we are finishing
with – TEK – inform how Indigenous
and Black communities’ knowledges
are understood by state/institutional
actors in colonial contexts in Canada
and the US?
Copyright Professor Zoe Todd
2020