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Week 9 INDG 2015 SOCI 2810 (public version).pdf
- 1. INDG 2015//SOCI 2810 •Dr. Zoe Todd •November 8, 2021 •Week 7: “Indigenous ecological knowledges: Asia” Copyright Professor Zoe Todd 2021
- 2. Class outline • Rubis and Theriault: the right to Indigenous peoples to conceal knowledge from extractive organizations/institutions/individuals; survivance • Paredes: rivers in social organization; watery relations Copyright Professor Zoe Todd 2021
- 3. Recap, week 6 • Tiffany Lethabo King: Black and Indigenous experiences of slavery, genocide • Chambers: resource extraction in Jamaica and Kitamaat • Vaughn: climate change expertise through mangrove protection/restoration in Guyana Copyright Professor Zoe Todd 2021
- 5. Countries in Asia • “Asia is the largest continent on Earth. It covers 9% of the Earth's total surface area (or 30% of its land area), and has the longest coastline, at 62,800 kilometres (39,022 mi). Asia is generally defined as comprising the eastern four-fifths of Eurasia. It is located to the east of the Suez Canal and the Ural Mountains, and south of the Caucasus Mountains (or the Kuma–Manych Depression) and the Caspian and Black Seas.[7][44] It is bounded on the east by the Pacific Ocean, on the south by the Indian Ocean and on the north by the Arctic Ocean. Asia is subdivided into 49 countries, five of them (Georgia, Azerbaijan, Russia, Kazakhstan and Turkey) are transcontinental countries and having part of their land in Europe.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asia Copyright Professor Zoe Todd 2021
- 6. Indigenous Peoples (IPs) in Asia • Resources: • http://www.aitpn.org/ • 20 year old article from Cultural Survival about Indigenous struggles in Asia https://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural- survival-quarterly/are-there-indigenous-peoples- asia#:~:text=So%2C%20rather%20than%20%60Indigenou s',tribes'%20(Taiwan)%2C%20%60 • UN backgrounder in Indigenous Peoples in Asia https://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/documents/2014 /press/asia.pdf • International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs (IWGIA) backgrounder on Indigenous issues in Asia https://iilj.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Kingsbury- Indigenous-Peoples-in-International-Law-2.pdf Copyright Professor Zoe Todd 2021
- 7. South-east Asia Copyright Professor Zoe Todd 2021
- 8. Rubis and Theriault • “In practice, many conservation interventions, particularly those led by government agencies and transnational NGOs, continue to conflict with and even disrupt Indigenous knowledges, livelihoods, and ecologies. And, as a result, even the most progressively minded projects too often work to normalize and propel the enclosure, commodification, and dispossession of Indigenous lands (see Benjaminsen & Bryceson, 2012; Chernela, 2005; Dressler, 2009; Dressler et al., 2016; Theriault, 2017; West, 2006, 2016).” (p. 964) Copyright Professor Zoe Todd 2021
- 9. • Rubis and Theriault invoke Gerald Vizenor’s concept of survivance: • “we are describing a form of what Anishinaabe author Gerald Vizenor calls ‘survivance’ manifestations of Indigenous world- making that are ‘more than survival, more than endurance or mere response; an active repudiation of dominance, tragedy, and victimry’ (Vizenor,1998,p.15; cf.Povinelli,2011)” (Rubis and Theriault 2019, p. 964) Copyright Professor Zoe Todd 2021
- 10. Gerald Vizenor • ‘Gerald Robert Vizenor (born 1934) is an American writer and scholar, and an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, White Earth Reservation. Vizenor also taught for many years at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was Director of Native American Studies. With more than 30 books published, Vizenor is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, and Professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Vizenor Copyright Professor Zoe Todd 2021
- 11. Vizenor: Survivance https://beta.prx.org/stories/266444 Please listen to this short interview with Gerald Vizenor Copyright Professor Zoe Todd 2021
- 12. A conversation with Gerald Vizenor and Kimberly Blaeser • https://www.yo utube.com/wat ch?v=A9LVLUrN rh8&ab_chann el=Centerfor21s tCenturyStudies Copyright Professor Zoe Todd 2021 A longer talk to listen to if you have time/for fun:
- 13. Rubis and Theriault • The conundrum of visibility (Rubis and Theriault) or recognition (Coulthard) • “As activists and scholars, we have been conditioned to think of institutional ‘visibility’ as a form of empowerment for socio- politically ‘invisible’ populations and therefore also a necessary part of accountable research. From this perspective, one important way to challenge misguided conservation policies would be to document and make visible that which they misapprehend or distort. But we have come to question this notion as a result of our respective research engagements with Indigenous communities in Sarawak and Palawan. Does the will to make visible, even among critical scholars and activists, unconsciously reproduce the impulse that drives the instrumentalizing documentation of ‘traditional ecological knowledge’ or the one that drives the ‘discovery,’ documentation, and securitization of new and threatened species (Lowe, 2004; Mitchell, 2016)?” (p. 965) Copyright Professor Zoe Todd 2021
- 14. • The late great author Ursula K LeGuin wrote: • “One of our finest methods of organized forgetting is called discovery” • Source: https://cpb-us- e1.wpmucdn.com/sites.ucsc.edu/dist/9/20/files/2019/07/1989a _Le-Guin_non-Euclidean-view-California.pdf Copyright Professor Zoe Todd 2021
- 17. • When western environmentalists, American/Canadian/European scholars write about Indigenous environmental knowledge in the Global South, all too often THEY become the people who are cited and credited with that knowledge. Indigenous environmental knowledge is all too often seen as a resource to mine/extract from and Indigenous people left nameless, faceless, uncredited by western actors. Indigenous people are often not seen as theorists, just repositories of knowledge for others. Copyright Professor Zoe Todd 2021
- 18. Learning questions/activity • There’s no way to to know for sure from the outside if environmental research is truly ethical, however by now we’ve read work by Nicholas Reo (2019) on relational accountability in environmental research. • Take a moment to list some characteristics of what ethical environmental research with Indigenous communities would look like given the materials we’ve covered so far Copyright Professor Zoe Todd 2021
- 19. Points to consider Some characteristics/clues about whether environmental research on Indigenous communities is ethical: • Indigenous people are cited directly and unambiguously; • evidence of accountability to local Indigenous legal orders; • Indigenous people from the community have seen the work that is published about them/have consented to be cited; • author credits Indigenous people by name for teaching them specific topics/ideas/skills; • Indigenous people cited as theorists, not just field assistants or helpers; • evidence of a long-term research relationship; • evidence Indigenous people from the community in question had a role in shaping the research; • Indigenous community members fairly remunerated for their time, labour, knowledge • Evidence of respect for Indigenous community sovereignty/self-determination • Inclusion of broad representation of community (reflects intra-and inter-community diversity of Indigenous communities) Copyright Professor Zoe Todd 2021
- 20. activity • Reflecting on Dr. Rubis’ experiences as a Bidayuh (Indigenous) scholar from Borneo and how her longterm work was disappeared in euro- western academe in the Global North, read this interview with a white scholar at Harvard about their concept of ‘Lo-TEK’: https://www.dezeen.com/2020/02/11/lo-tek-design-radical- indigenism-julia-watson-indigenous-technologies/ Copyright Professor Zoe Todd 2021
- 21. • Does the Dezeen interview reflect principles of reciprocity and care in ethical Indigenous environmental research as outlined by other texts we have covered this term? • How could the scholar interviewed in that piece come into better reciprocal relations with the people whose knowledge she is drawing upon? Copyright Professor Zoe Todd 2021
- 22. • “RIVERS GIVE SOCIAL MEANING to the past and present lives of the ‘tribal’ Lumad peoples of Mindanao, in the southern Philippines” (Paredes, p. 329) Image: google maps
- 23. Rivers of Memory – Parades 2016 • “Drawing on two decades of field and archival research, I focus on one particular Lumad ethnic group – the Higaunon – as a case study. ‘Lumad’ is the umbrella term for the indigenous peoples of the southern Philippines whose ancestors did not convert to Islam in pre-colonial times. The Higaunon people, in turn, comprise one of the largest Lumad ethnic groups today, with their territory reaching across five different provinces in northern Mindanao.” (p.330) Copyright Professor Zoe Todd 2021
- 25. Dr. Oona Paredes • For further learning you may watch this talk by Dr. Paredes: • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ly6uF5hDydY &ab_channel=SOASUniversityofLondon Copyright Professor Zoe Todd 2021
- 26. Summary • Rubis and Theriault: the right to Indigenous peoples to conceal knowledge from extractive organizations/institutions/individuals; survivance • Paredes: rivers in social organization; watery relations Copyright Professor Zoe Todd 2021
- 27. Weekly participation grade assignment • How do we encourage universities to honour First Nations, Inuit, and Métis sovereignty in Canada, (and the sovereignty of Indigenous societies in Asia and other parts of the globe, as we looked at today and in previous weeks)? Copyright Professor Zoe Todd 2021