INDG 2015: Indigenous
Ecological Ways of
Knowing
September 27, 2021
Dr. Zoe Todd, Department of Sociology and
Anthropology
Week 3: Indigenous Ecological Ways of Knowing,
North America

Week 2 Recap
• Environmental racism
• What examples did we
explore last week?
• Fanon:
• ‘Decolonization is an
agenda for total disorder’

Class outline
Objectives for Today’s Class
• Revisiting Vanessa Watts from
Week 1 (‘Indigenous Place-
Thought’)
• Enrique Salmón: ecological
ways of knowing, relationality
• #LandBack

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

Vanessa Watts Indigenous Place Thought
(returning to this text from week 1)
Watts 2013, p. 22

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

Enrique Salmón: ‘kincentric ecology’
• “Indigenous people view both themselves and nature as part of an
extended ecological family that shares ancestry and origins. It is an
awareness that life in any environment is viable only when humans
view the life surrounding them as kin. The kin, or relatives, include
all the natural elements of an ecosystem. Indigenous people are
affected by and, in turn, affect the life around them. The
interactions that result from this "kincentric ecology" enhance and
preserve the ecosystem. Interactions are the commerce of
ecosystem functioning.” (Salmón 2000, p. 1327)

Salmón: iwígara
• “Iwígara is the total interconnectedness and integration of all life in
the Sierra Madres, physical and spiritual. To say iwígara to a
Raramuri calls on that person to realize life in all its forms. The
person recalls the beginning of Raramuri life, origins, and
relationships to animals, plants, the place of nurturing, and the
entities to which the Raramuri look for guidance.” (Salmón 2000, p.
1328)

What are some
cognate (similar)
concepts to iwígara
in other Indigenous
cosmologies?
• Wahkohtowin (Cree legal-ethical-
philosophical concept of relatedness of
all beings, kinship)
• What other examples come to mind?

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/

Indigenous Place-thought and food
sovereignty (linking Watts and Salmón)
• 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

Food, Place, Land: sovereignty is ‘em-placed’
• Drawing on all of the readings we have done so far, the key message to pull
from the texts is that diverse Indigenous nations co-constitute (co-create) their
existence with place (which includes land, waters, atmospheres, plants, rocks,
animals, insects, stories, ancestors, spirits and other beings). Place and land
are not just ‘objects’, but living beings with agency. So when we talk about
Indigenous sovereignty, it is about maintaining autonomous relationships to
place and land – not through the western understanding of (colonial,
capitalist) sovereignty tied to property, but as relations, kin. This is different
from euro-western notions of sovereignty which is understood as the right to
control land for extraction (resource extraction), dumping (pollution), or for
enacting forms of totalizing war or enforcing hard borders to keep other
communities out even in times of deep human rights of environmental crises.

#LandBack
• “Land Back is a movement that aims to re-establish indigenous political
authority over territories Indigenous tribes and activist groups claim as
belonging to them. Scholars from the Indigenous-run Yellowhead Institute
at Ryerson University describe Land Back as a process of "reclaiming
Indigenous jurisdiction: breathing life into rights and responsibilities."[2] Land
Back is a concept that has existed since indigenous land was first colonized by
European settlers.[citation needed] In addition to the transfer of deeds, Land Back
includes respecting Indigenous rights, preserving languages and traditions,
and ensuring food sovereignty, housing, and clean air and water.[2]” (source:
Wikipedia)
• Hashtag coined by Arnell Tailfeathers in 2018

Weekly participation prompt
• How do relationships to land shape your
experiences of environmental issues in your own
life?