Indg 2015 week 9 2020 public

Week 9: November 04, 2020
Dr. Zoe Todd
Introduction to Environmental
Knowledges in Sápmi + Siberia
Copyright Dr. Zoe Todd 2020

• Indigenous issues in Siberia and Sápmi
• Kimmerer: The Honourable Harvest and In the Footsteps of
Nanabozho
Class outline

• We discussed the Week 6 (King, Sharpe, Vaughn texts) and
week 7 (Rubis and Theriault, Paredes articles as well as
Kimmerer’s Wisgaak Gokpenagen, Mishkos Kenomagwen,
Maple Nation)
Recap Week 7 (October 21)

Brightman, Gotti, Ulturgasheva
“In a long history of frontier-centre relations Amazonia
and Siberia have been subject to predatory
exploitation of a centre.”
(Brightman, Gotti and Ulturgasheva 2007: 2)

Siberia – resource frontiers
Brightman, Grotti, Ulturgasheva 2007: 5

Brightman, Grotti, Ulturgasheva p.

https://www.theguardian.com/global-
development/2016/feb/21/sami-people-reindeer-herders-
arctic-culture Copyright Dr. Zoe Todd 2020

Guardian article
• “His colleague, Aslak Eira, adds: “The problem is land grabbing.
Government expropriates land for roads and tunnels, windfarms
and mines. Our land is being eroded by development. Almost half
of our winter lands have gone. I fear that in future there will be
nowhere left for the reindeer.””

Guardian, con’t
• “There is an urban, European way of thinking about their
activity. Pastoralism is aimed at using barren land, but the law
is not set up for the movement of animals in the natural
environment and Norwegian laws can criminalise herder
activity. The authorities want to manage reindeer as if they
were sheep.”

Dr. Olga Ulturgasheva
• Dr. Ulturgasheva is an Indigenous anthropologist at Manchester University:
• “Olga Ulturgasheva (PhD; Cambridge) has carried out ethnographic
research on childhood and adolescence, narrative and memory, animist and
nomadic cosmologies, reindeer herding and hunting, climate change and
the latest envrionmental transformations in Siberia and Alaska. Since 2006
she has been engaged in a number of international projects exploring
human and non-human personhood, youth resilience, climate change and
adaptation patterns in Siberia, American Arctic and Amazonia. She is an
author of Narrating the Future in Siberia: Childhood, Adolescence and
Autobiography among the Eveny (Berghahn Books 2012) and co-editor
of Animism in Rainforest and Tundra: Personhood, Animals, Plants and
Things in Contemporary Amazonia and Siberia (Berghahn 2012).” source:
https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/olga.ulturgasheva.html

Ulturgasheva and Bodenhorn Article:
• Flexibility in the context of confronting the specific challenges of
climate change in the arctic:
“— In the Arctic, the effects of already existing climate changes are
constant and require just as constant responses—material and non-
material.” (p.3)

Ulturgasheva and Bodenhorn
“The effects of these extreme events are as much a function of
politico-economic processes, past and present, as they are of
environmental conditions. The extent to which responses are
realizable depends on the creativity, ingenuity and determination of
people who must cope with the conditions around them. But they also
reflect geopolitics—the possibilities as well as the limits that are
shaped by global processes. In this case, we examine some of the ways
in which Siberia and Alaska share similar ecological conditions and
distinct
socio-political realities.” (p. 3)

Ulturgasheva and Bodenhorn
• “and we need to be able to imagine an economic model that is not
based on infinite growth.” (p.2)
• https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/jun/17/is-time-to-end-
our-fixation-with-gdp-and-growth

Honourable harvest
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lz1vgfZ3etE&ab_channel=TEDx
Talks

Honourable Harvest
• “The Honorable Harvest, a practice both ancient and urgent, applies to every
exchange between people and the Earth. Its protocol is not written down,
but if it were, it would look something like this:
• Ask permission of the ones whose lives you seek. Abide by the answer.
• Never take the first. Never take the last.
• Harvest in a way that minimizes harm.
• Take only what you need and leave some for others.
• Use everything that you take.
• Take only that which is given to you.
• Share it, as the Earth has shared with you.
• Be grateful.
• Reciprocate the gift.
• Sustain the ones who sustain you, and the Earth will last forever.”
Source: Kimmerer 2015, https://www.yesmagazine.org/issue/good-
health/2015/11/26/the-honorable-harvest-lessons-from-an-indigenous-
tradition-of-giving-thanks/)

Honourable Harvest
• Asking Permission from plants to harvest them
• Plants as nonhuman persons with their own forms of self-
determination, societies, collective determinations
Kimmerer 2013: p. 178

In the footsteps of nanabozho
• Building on the principles in the previous chapters, in this chapter,
Kimmerer asks us what is required to live with care in the
lands/waters/atmospheres of Turtle Island – this applies to
Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, and explores how to come
into thoughtful and care-full engagements in homelands across many
geographies
• Important to query the positionality of who has come to North
America and why (remember our discussion of King and Sharpe, and
Maia Butler’s use of Edgewidge Danticat’s floating homelands. While
Kimmerer has given us much to think with here in this chapter,
important to also bring in clear analysis of the difference between
position of white settlers (King’s conquistador humanism) and
African diasporic peoples forcibly brought to the Caribbean, US,
Canada, South America through enslavement.

In the footsteps of Nanabozho
Learning exercise:
• Thinking with the story of Nanabozho’s movements across Turtle
Island here in this chapter, and with the African diasporic scholarship
we have read this term, what reciprocal knowledges of
lands/waters/atmospheres can we draw upon to develop
relationships to place here that honour Indigenous knowledges both
in North America and amongst Indigenous peoples forcibly brought
here through enslavement or as refugees displaced by
American/European/other imperial forces? What tools do we need to
help hold these conversations across Indigenous and diasporic
communities? What does it mean to be in reciprocal relation to place
if we’ve been forced from our homelands?

Final reflection question:
Reflecting on the materials shared this week, what is one primary
principle that you think would help us move through the crisis of
environmental governance we are collectively facing on earth right
now?

Indg 2015 week 9 2020 public

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