University of Connecticut
Social and Critical Inquiry
Practicing Peace for Climate Justice: Haudenosaunee Knowledge in Global Context March 14, 2019, Cornell University The goal of this symposium was to engage the Haudenosaunee Great Law of Peace as a multifaceted legal and philosophical... more
Practicing Peace for Climate Justice: Haudenosaunee Knowledge in Global Context
March 14, 2019, Cornell University
The goal of this symposium was to engage the Haudenosaunee Great Law of Peace as a multifaceted legal and philosophical system well suited to address the political and environmental crises of our times. This is an interdisciplinary conversation, engaging multiple academic departments and regional communities, geared toward a robust Indigenous-centered theorization of the practice of peace.
The panel is co-hosted by Cornell University’s Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies (PACS) and the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program (AIISP). In particular, this event has benefited from the mentorship and guidance of AIISP Director, Professor Jolene Rickard.
Full event description and video available here:
https://aiisp.cornell.edu/news-and-events/featured-events/symposium-practicing-peace-climate-justice/
Speakers:
Gahaygas Agnes F. Williams, LMSC
Kayenesenh Paul Williams, Esq.
Iakoiane Wakerahkats:teh Louise McDonald
March 14, 2019, Cornell University
The goal of this symposium was to engage the Haudenosaunee Great Law of Peace as a multifaceted legal and philosophical system well suited to address the political and environmental crises of our times. This is an interdisciplinary conversation, engaging multiple academic departments and regional communities, geared toward a robust Indigenous-centered theorization of the practice of peace.
The panel is co-hosted by Cornell University’s Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies (PACS) and the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program (AIISP). In particular, this event has benefited from the mentorship and guidance of AIISP Director, Professor Jolene Rickard.
Full event description and video available here:
https://aiisp.cornell.edu/news-and-events/featured-events/symposium-practicing-peace-climate-justice/
Speakers:
Gahaygas Agnes F. Williams, LMSC
Kayenesenh Paul Williams, Esq.
Iakoiane Wakerahkats:teh Louise McDonald
Amid catastrophic wildfires in northern California, Indigenous Karuk people are revitalizing practices of prescribed burning in order to protect lives and lands within their ancestral territory and strengthen sovereignty and community... more
Amid catastrophic wildfires in northern California, Indigenous Karuk people are revitalizing practices of prescribed burning in order to protect lives and lands within their ancestral territory and strengthen sovereignty and community well-being. The Karuk Department of Natural Resources (DNR) critiques and works to dismantle the settler state’s paradigm of “fire suppression.” For over a century, fire suppression policies have criminalized Karuk ceremonial and stewardship burning practices and led to increasingly destructive wildfires as forest fuels accumulate. As the region warms, the Karuk DNR asserts that prescribed burning is a climate justice imperative.
Working for the Karuk DNR as filmmakers and media consultants over the past two years, we co-produced three educational and advocacy videos communicating the DNR’s efforts. We edited each video for a different audience: one for federal and California state forest managers, one for a general social media public, and one for internal use among Karuk Tribal membership.
This poster highlights the visual and narrative strategies employed in the production and distribution of these videos. Our challenges included, how do we help viewers re-think their fear of fire and build support for Indigenous-led prescribed burning? How do we encourage viewers to imagine hopeful and just socio-ecological futures while also confronting California’s historical and contemporary dispossession and genocide? How does Karuk knowledge compete for legitimacy in a settler colonial society founded on Indigenous erasure? Additionally, the poster discusses the mechanics of collaboration, specifically the Karuk DNR’s protocols for employing non-Indigenous outsiders such as ourselves.
Watch the films:
Fire Belongs Here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbNy52Ed-3k
pananu’thívthaaneen xúus nu’êethtiheesh: We’re Caring For Our World
https://vimeo.com/367538820
Revitalizing Our Relationship With Fire
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SF3MNpuqzSg
Working for the Karuk DNR as filmmakers and media consultants over the past two years, we co-produced three educational and advocacy videos communicating the DNR’s efforts. We edited each video for a different audience: one for federal and California state forest managers, one for a general social media public, and one for internal use among Karuk Tribal membership.
This poster highlights the visual and narrative strategies employed in the production and distribution of these videos. Our challenges included, how do we help viewers re-think their fear of fire and build support for Indigenous-led prescribed burning? How do we encourage viewers to imagine hopeful and just socio-ecological futures while also confronting California’s historical and contemporary dispossession and genocide? How does Karuk knowledge compete for legitimacy in a settler colonial society founded on Indigenous erasure? Additionally, the poster discusses the mechanics of collaboration, specifically the Karuk DNR’s protocols for employing non-Indigenous outsiders such as ourselves.
Watch the films:
Fire Belongs Here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbNy52Ed-3k
pananu’thívthaaneen xúus nu’êethtiheesh: We’re Caring For Our World
https://vimeo.com/367538820
Revitalizing Our Relationship With Fire
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SF3MNpuqzSg
This chapter centers on an inchoate nomadic movement bound by shared environmental practices, here called wildtending, and speculates about ways Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in the United States Northwest imagine an array of... more
This chapter centers on an inchoate nomadic movement bound by shared environmental practices, here called wildtending, and speculates about ways Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in the United States Northwest imagine an array of contradictory environmental futures. The chapter situates wildtenders’ ecocultural identity formation within the ongoing structural conditions of U.S. settler colonialism. I contend that such radical environmentalisms could more fully realize their liberatory potential by entering into relationships of direct accountability with contemporary Indigenous efforts toward land repatriation, resurgence, and self-determination. Drawing attention to diverse and sometimes competing visions for the movement’s possible trajectories, I make the theoretical argument that ecocultural identities emerge not only within networks of human and nonhuman relations, but moreover in the ways those relations are imagined into the future. I complicate some wildtenders’ settler futurities by centering scholarship on North American Indigenous resurgence, futurisms, and science fiction, as well as Black feminist Afro-futurism. I propose that such a focus combined with a conception of community organizing as a form of practical science fiction opens space for a hopeful orientation toward viable ecocultural futures, disrupting the predominantly apocalyptic tone of 21st century global warming discourse.
In the Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity (Released May 2020)
Drawing on a diverse range of contributors who utilise an array of multi-disciplinary lenses, this Handbook provides a much-needed reference on the many ways in which individual and collective ecocultural identities are being produced and performed on individual, local, and global scales. Each section includes authoritative grounded theoretical essays and an international range of case studies. Providing a transdisciplinary overview of this cutting-edge subject, this Handbook will be an essential resource for students and scholars of environmental communication, environmental sociology, human geography, and environmental studies more broadly.
In the Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity (Released May 2020)
Drawing on a diverse range of contributors who utilise an array of multi-disciplinary lenses, this Handbook provides a much-needed reference on the many ways in which individual and collective ecocultural identities are being produced and performed on individual, local, and global scales. Each section includes authoritative grounded theoretical essays and an international range of case studies. Providing a transdisciplinary overview of this cutting-edge subject, this Handbook will be an essential resource for students and scholars of environmental communication, environmental sociology, human geography, and environmental studies more broadly.
This is an upper division undergraduate syllabus that I produced as part of my qualifying exam in environmental anthropology. 2020.
Sometimes we wish we could solve the world’s problems with a *snap* of our fingers, even though we know it’s never that simple: compound problems require compound solutions. Still, accelerating climate crisis and the unwillingness of... more
Sometimes we wish we could solve the world’s problems with a *snap* of our fingers, even though we know it’s never that simple: compound problems require compound solutions. Still, accelerating climate crisis and the unwillingness of global leaders to take meaningful climate action can breed nihilism – likely we’ve all witnessed it in students, colleagues, family members, and even ourselves. With such nihilism, though, sometimes comes a notion that mass violence could be a viable environmental solution. This specter of ecofascism looms in pop-cultural imaginations as a malevolent threat for some and a tantalizing fantasy for others.
Ecofascism, like fascism, never springs from nowhere. It creeps through our language, metaphors, visual media, narratives, and ideas of environmental health and security. This zine is intended to be a tool to help halt ecofascism wherever, whenever it may be creeping, by examining its roots, prompting reflection, and inspiring action.
The Anti-Creep Climate Initiative smashes ecofascist mythology, champions liberatory environmental futures, and has fun doing it! The Initiative was formed by April Anson, Cassie Galentine, Shane Hall, Alex Menrisky, and Bruno Seraphin. April Anson is an Assistant Professor of Public Humanities at San Diego State University, core faculty for the Institute for Ethics and Public Policy, and affiliate faculty in American Indian Studies. Cassie Galentine is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Oregon. Shane Hall is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Salisbury University. Alex Menrisky is an Assistant Professor of English and affiliate faculty in American Studies at University of Connecticut. Bruno Seraphin is a doctoral candidate in sociocultural Anthropology with a graduate minor in American Indian and Indigenous Studies at Cornell University.
Ecofascism, like fascism, never springs from nowhere. It creeps through our language, metaphors, visual media, narratives, and ideas of environmental health and security. This zine is intended to be a tool to help halt ecofascism wherever, whenever it may be creeping, by examining its roots, prompting reflection, and inspiring action.
The Anti-Creep Climate Initiative smashes ecofascist mythology, champions liberatory environmental futures, and has fun doing it! The Initiative was formed by April Anson, Cassie Galentine, Shane Hall, Alex Menrisky, and Bruno Seraphin. April Anson is an Assistant Professor of Public Humanities at San Diego State University, core faculty for the Institute for Ethics and Public Policy, and affiliate faculty in American Indian Studies. Cassie Galentine is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Oregon. Shane Hall is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Salisbury University. Alex Menrisky is an Assistant Professor of English and affiliate faculty in American Studies at University of Connecticut. Bruno Seraphin is a doctoral candidate in sociocultural Anthropology with a graduate minor in American Indian and Indigenous Studies at Cornell University.
In 2016, the US-based private military contractor TigerSwan was denied a license to operate in North Dakota. Nonetheless, it coordinated a counterinsurgency (COIN) campaign employing war-on-terror tactics, brutalizing Indigenous and... more
In 2016, the US-based private military contractor TigerSwan was denied a license to operate in North Dakota. Nonetheless, it coordinated a counterinsurgency (COIN) campaign employing war-on-terror tactics, brutalizing Indigenous and allied water protectors associated with the Indigenous-led movement to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline (#NoDAPL) on Standing Rock Lakota territory. This article takes COIN as an analytic to show that US settler colonialism is a multilateral, internally conflicted, and anxious mode of power. The settler state both depends upon and disavows anti-Indigenous and anti-Black violence enacted by rogue civilian individuals and organizations, a phenomenon here termed ‘more-than-state policing’. The repression of #NoDAPL was not solely a boomerang by-product of the global war on terror but rather exposes an established infrastructure of settler colonial COIN intrinsic to US normal politics, in which Indigenous resistance and sovereignty are constructed as metastasizing, viral threats to settler colonial legitimacy. As modern COIN warfare has evolved from four centuries of North American settler colonial invasion and governance, settler colonial studies are key to grasping 21st-century topics of war, imperialism, securitization, resource extraction, and climate justice.
Dominant causal explanations of the wildfire threat in California include anthropogenic climate change, fire suppression, industrial logging, and the expansion of residential settlements, which are all products of settler colonial... more
Dominant causal explanations of the wildfire threat in California include anthropogenic climate change, fire suppression, industrial logging, and the expansion of residential settlements, which are all products of settler colonial property regimes and structures of resource extraction. Settler colonialism is grounded in Indigenous erasure and dispossession through militarism and incarceration, which are prominent tools in California's fire industrial complex. To challenge settler colonial frameworks within fire management, Indigenous peoples are organizing to expand Indigenous cultural controlled burning, fire stewardship, and sovereignty. These initiatives emphasize reciprocal human-fire relations and uphold Indigenous knowledge systems and livelihoods. Concurrently, Indigenous fire sovereignty is threatened by knowledge appropriation and superficial collaborations. In this article, we review contemporary research on Indigenous burning in order to highlight the strategies that Indigenous communities and scholars employ to subvert colonial power relations within wildfire management and actualize regenerative Indigenous futures. (Open access; download using link above).