Adamson, Joni & Monani, Salma. “Introduction: Cosmovisions, Ecocriticism, and Indigenous Studies.”Ecocriticism and Indigenous Studies: Conversations from Earth to Cosmos, edited by Joni Adamson & Salma Monani. New York: Routledge, 2016, 1-19. https://www-taylorfrancis-com.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/books/e/9781317449126
In this introduction to a collection of works that focuses on the intersections between Indigenous studies, interdisciplinary ecocriticism, and literary development, Adamson and Monani examine the ways in which Indigenous writings have often been excluded from the work of science fiction, due to the stereotype and simplification that Indigenous peoples are mainly concerned with the Earth. Joni Adamson is a professor in English and Environmental Humanities, and is also a Senior Sustainability Scholar. Her work focuses on intersections between literary studies and sustainability, and she has crossed the barriers of academia by working on publications, leading courses, and speaking interdisciplinarily on sustainability and humanities. She is a model for someone who engages cross-culturally and cross-disciplinarily when studying literature, and whose writing is primarily concerned with the Earth. Salma Monani is an environmental studies professor who has received degrees in Geology, Creative Writing, and Science And Technical Communication. She is interested in how “various cultural media such as literature, film, photographs, and other communicative modes shape (and are shaped by) environmental issues.” Her work exemplifies the ways in which arts and sciences can intersect to redefine the relationship between writing and our understanding of the planet.
Their article discusses the dangers of this exclusion, linking to the urgency of the 2015 United Nations Conference on Climate Change with the need to embrace Indigenous knowledge, worldview, and fiction, both for how it connects to the world’s past and how it envisions a possible future. Using Indigenous perspective in envisioning the future of literature allows for greater interdisciplinary work, a larger connection between human action and the environment, and the ability to envision oneself within a larger context — whether local, global, or even cosmic. Solving big problems involves big collaboration and this article outlines just some of the innovative viewpoints on these connections, and is applicable in advocacy, protest, and indigenous collaborations on climate change. Changing our relationship to our world requires changing our story. Adamson and Monani demonstrate one way in which we can approach these changes, and their broader work demonstrates the ways in which individuals can connect these issues both within and outside of academia to produce meaningful change.
Kuptana, Rosemarie. “The Inuit Sea.” Nilliajut: Inuit Perspectives on Security, Patriotism and Sovereignty, Jan. 2013, pp. 10–13., www.inuitknowledge.ca/sites/ikc/files/attachments
20130125-en-nilliajut-inuitperspectivessecuritysovereigntypatriotism_0.pdf
Nilliajut is a project created by the Inuit Qaujisarvingat Knowledge Centre to collect and share Inuit perspectives on issues of sovereignty, security and climate change in the arctic. Rosemarie Kuptana criticizes the ways which governments compete for control of the Inuit Sea while leaving Inuit perspectives out of discussions, and ignoring their right to protect it. She explains that her people are being denied sovereignty over the lands and waters they have inhabited for millennia. Land claim agreements and laws protecting Inuit rights provide legal substance to their jurisdiction over the Inuit Sea, and must be respected. Kuptana directs readers to documents which should act to protect Inuit rights over Arctic lands and waters, including United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Section 35 of the Constitution Act, and Section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, while discussing the advantages and limitations of such current policies. Further, she asserts that since government action has often been more harmful than beneficial—“on-going government policy and actions are working to deprive the Inuit of a basic right to life” (Kuptana 12)—intervention is necessary. Further, new policy should also be created to more effectively protect Inuit sovereignty. Kuptana tells readers “The right of Inuit to our land and seas has never been nebulous. We have used and occupied both the land and sea for our very survival as a people and for millennia. The rest of the world, if it has the courage to look beyond its colonial mentality, must know and recognize that jurisdiction over the Inuit Sea continues to lie with the Inuit who have been the stewards of the arctic for a very long time” (Kuptana 12). Overall, her work presents important perspectives on current issues of control over Inuit lands and seas, and asserts that the needs of Inuit peoples must not only be included in, but central to, discussions of sovereignty over Arctic regions.
Latimer, Michelle, director. Nuuca. Field of Vision, Catie Lamer, 2 July 2018,
fieldofvision.org/nuuca.
Michelle Latimer is a filmmaker, director, and actress of Métis and Algonquin descent. She created the production company Streel Films, based in Toronto Ontario, for the “development and production of innovative, socially conscious, character-driven films” (Latimer “Streel Films”). Her website for Streel Films is an excellent resource for finding the works of new and emerging artists who are participating in dialogues of geography, decolonization, and relationships between land and story. Nuuca, a short film directed by Latimer, is a great example of how artists can use a medium like film to draw such connections, in this case, while advocating for environmental rights and the rights of Indigenous women. Nuuca begins with images of the physical geography of North Dakota, overlayed with the voices women speaking about their connections to the land as their home. These images of the natural landscape transition into images industrialized space, trucks, and pollution as the dialogue shifts describe the way the land of the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation has changed due to the oil industry: “a dullness just kind of crept over this area, and it had physical traits” (Latimer Nuuca). The Bakken oil patch and flood of workers entered the area to staff it has had a direct effect on not only the land but the women from this reserve: “just as the land is being used, women are being used” (Latimer Nuuca). Nuuca is only 12 minutes long, but extremely impactful, and you can view it here.
Lewis, Jason and Fragnito, Skawennati Tricia. “Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace.” Cultural Survival Quarterly, vol. 29, no. 2, 2005, pp. 29-31. https://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/aboriginal-territories-cyberspace
In this article, Lewis and Fragnito introduce the idea of Indigenous peoples creating their own digital “territories”, both as a way to strengthen ties to physical locations and to create an Indigenous space when no physical space is available. While the main case study, CyberPowWow is no longer active, new spaces such as RavenSpace are using a similar, but modernized, model. These spaces are designed by Indigenous peoples, for Indigenous peoples, creating a space that is distinctly Indigenous that is otherwise not often found. These digital spaces can be one method of overcoming geographic limitations in the creation of Indigenous Canadian literature.
Myburgh, Brittany. “Here and Now: Indigenous Canadian Perspectives and New Media in Works by Ruben Komangapik, Kent Monkman and Adrian Duke.” Leonardo, vol. 51 no. 4, 2018, pp. 394-398. Project MUSE, muse.jhu.edu/article/702020.
Myburgh weaves together examples of three contemporary Indigenous artists engaging new media to expand Indigenous art, story, and literature. Of particular interest to me was Myburgh’s examination of Augmented Reality (AR) utilization, employed to tie Indigenous artwork and story stored in the digital realm to physical locations. One example is Wikiup, “a free, location-based mobile app for sharing Indigenous Knowledge.” Indigenous creators using Wikiup can bypass traditional space gatekeepers (such as installation permits or municipal bylaws), yet still tie their work to physical locations relevant to their work. Myburgh also discusses the integration of digital work to physical work by artist Ruben Komangapik. Komangapik includes QR codes in his work, which link to videos of him telling the oral histories related to his carvings. This combination allows viewers of the art to learn the histories behind the pieces and keeps the oral storytelling techniques alive. This article is a great starting point to explore how Indigenous authors and creators can incorporate new media into their works, and expand what is possible in storytelling and literature.
Ricou, Laurie. “Disturbance-Loving Species: Habitat Studies, Ecocritical Pedagogy, and Canadian Literature.” Critical Collaborations: Indigineity, Diaspora, and Ecology in Canadian Literary Studies, edited by Smaro Kamboureli & Christl Verduyn. Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2013, 161-174. https://muse-jhu-edu.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/chapter/1212651
In this essay, Laurie Ricou presents an interdisciplinary approach to answering “Where is here?” through habitat and biological studies. Ricou is a Professor Emeritus at UBC in the department of English, and has previously focused on prairie writings and prairie systems. However, Ricou primarily describes his work as “a delayed search for home” and engages with the significance of landscape and environment in writing. Habitat studies examines the interconnection between animals, territory, ecosystems and biodiversity; in analyzing literature through this lens, Ricou brings a focus to the micro by studying soil, animals, and the elements in Canadian Literature. This approach grounds it in the concrete, and examines patterns and cycles that elucidate wider truths about Canadian identity, especially by understanding the role of “disturbance;” how do organisms and the environment respond to disruption? How do humans respond to disruptions in their habitat, or their culture? How do we see this in our writing?
Ricou also grounds his work within boundaries, playing with the non-traditional understanding of habitat as a mode to understand the shifting, changing ideas of borders. Within Canada’s literary future, Ricou’s approach could be used to examine the connections between the natural world, culture, and threats to our territory more broadly, like climate change and how it is altering both Canadian landscape and traditional indigenous ways of life, particularly for the Inuit people in Canada’s North. This approach resists the current tendency to view literature and academia in a globalized context by encouraging the analysis of micro-elements in considering the whole. This bottom-up approach is one avenue through which literature can begin to examine complex relationships through their smaller components, which could include analyzing small elements of our history with Indigenous cultures to understand the larger networks of discrimination that face Canada, or analyzing the development of regionalist writings to understand the microcultures that exist within Canadian literature.
Tally, Robert. “Geocriticism: Literary Studies after the Spatial Turn.” Online video clip. Youtube. Youtube, 5 Nov. 2018. Web. 27 Mar. 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scK1y2JIbcg
In this discussion at a symposium for geographical approaches to language, literature, and culture, Robert Tally (an English and literature professor at Texas State University), discusses the implications of Geocriticism. He first references his own – and most widely used – definition of Geocriticism: it is a spatially-oriented approach to literature and reading that brings more awareness to important spatial contexts of the text under consideration and has a focus on how authors map the real and imagined spaces of their literary worlds. Tally further explains that Geocriticism can be used to examine the fundamental ideas of space itself, allowing us to examine how social spaces can become places (and therefore how literary representation and spatiality can interconnect) as well as challenging the idea that space is stable and straightforward. For example, Tally references French scholar Bernard Westphal’s ideas that maps give a certain impression of geographical knowledge on the surface of the depicted space. However, this is representative of “the West” repeatedly transforming the open spaces of the world into closed spaces through the use of cartography. Tally further mentions Westphal’s philosophy that Geocriticism allows for the exploration of the use of other counter-Western cartographic methods (ie. Aztec visual arts, Australian aboriginal chanted lines, and Eastern versions of cartography) for the consideration of space and place while also bringing to light hidden elements of the space around us that may have been hidden by our strictly Eurocentric perspective. Overall, the importance of Geocriticism, particularly in terms of literature, is that it can help us to ask new questions, read differently, and engage with other disciplinary methods. Therefore, this allows us to the better understand the different perspectives by which place and space may be considered, disassembling the Eurocentric boundaries that have been so well established within Canadian literature.
Tally Jr., Robert & Christine Battista. “Introduction: Ecocritical Geographies, Geocritical Ecologies, and the Spaces of Modernity”. Ecocriticism and Geocriticism: Overlapping Territories in Environmental and Spatial Literary Studies. Edited by Robert Tally Jr. and Christine Battista. 2016, 1 – 15. https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1057%2F9781137542625.pdf.
This introduction to a collection of essays edited by Robert Tally Jr. and Christine Battista, analyzes the intersection of ecocriticism and geocriticism and the dynamic relationships existing between space, place, and literature. Tally Jr. and Battista draw attention to ideas established by ecocritics and geocritics, namely ecocriticism’s social and political literary connections and geocriticism’s insights into space and place having a considerable social importance. They emphasize that literary geography is often heavily influenced by political goals and the need to map literary space in order to bring historically repressed narratives to light. They additionally discuss how previous stable spatial and environmental markers (ie. national borders) are becoming threatened by the ever-increasing disparity between the natural environment and the social environment. To combat this separation, space and environment need to be reconnected together and with literature, bringing space, place, and environmental concerns together with literary concerns.
Everything happens somewhere, including stories. Every story is rooted in place, and by reconnecting place to story, literary geographical understandings can be reinvented.
Temprano, Victor. “Native Land.” Native Land Digital. 2015, https://native-land.ca/. Accessed 8 April 2019.
Victor Temprano, a settler from Okanagan territory, created an interactive mapping platform in order to help audiences become interested and engaged in the issues that formal colonial mapping can create. The interactive tool displays the ranges of Indigenous territories, languages, and treaties world wide over top a world map, allow the user to visually understand how far a territory or language can span. Temprano created the tool because he felt that Western maps imposed improper borders that never existed before settlers arrived on the land. He connects his project to having a similar goal as Araon Capella’s Tribal Nations Map project, where the maps are intended to remind us that Western borders have been established on a once vast, autonomous land of Indigenous people who called the land different names based on their own local languages and local geography. Along with the interactive mapping portion of the site, there is also a blog written by Temprano, which brings into question complicated ideas surrounding land, territory, and borders. This resource is helpful for undermining the Western world view of the user through the visualization of all the overlapping boundaries and establishing that the borders that we impose between provinces, states, or countries are just social constructs that we have put there, and are not truly connected to the land on which they create a barrier. This allows us to question why we established those borders in the first place and how we might take better strides towards reconnecting these political and social barriers to the geography of the land.
Works Cited
Adamson, Joni. “Joni Adamson: Professor of Environmental Humanities.” joniadamson.com/.
Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Part 1 of the Constitution Act, 1982, being Schedule B to the Canada Act 1982 (UK), c 11,
http://publications.gc.ca/collections/Collection/CH37-4-3-2002E.pdf. Accessed 28 Mar 2019.
“Climate change: The Basics.” Climate Change Atlas of Canada, 4 April 2018,
www.climateatlas.ca/climate-change-basics. Accessed 28 Mar 2019.
CyberPowWow. www.cyberpowwow.net/ Accessed 30 Mar 2019.
“Ecocriticism.” Purdue Online Writing Lab.
www.owl.purdue.edu/owl/subject_specific_writing/writing_in_literature/literary_theory_and_schools_of_criticism/ecocriticism.html. Accessed 28 Mar. 2019.
Fraser, James. “Why Amazonian Fores Peoples are ‘Counter-Mapping’ their Ancestral Lands.” The Conversation, 26 Sept. 2017,
www.theconversation.com/why-amazonian-forest-peoples-are-counter-mapping-their-ancestral-lands-84474. Accessed 28 Mar. 2019.
“Habitat Studies.” US Fish and Wildlife Services,
www.fws.gov/uploadedFiles/Region_1/NWRS/Zone_2/Ridgefield_Complex/Steigerwald_Lake/Documents/Ch%209%20STG%20Educators%20Guide%205_1_2013-10.pdf Accessed 27 Mar 2019.
Hanson, Erin. “Constitution Act, 1982 Section 35.” Indigenous Foundations, UBC, indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca/constitution_act_1982_section_35/.
“Indigenous Community-Based Climate Monitoring Program.” Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada, 28 January 2019,
www.aadnc-aandc.gc.ca/eng/1509728370447/1509728402247 . Accessed 28 Mar 2019.
“An Indigenous-Led Climate Change Initiative.” Indigenous Climate Action, 2017,
www.indigenousclimateaction.com/ . Accessed 27 Mar 2019.
Inuit Qaujisarvingat Knowledge Centre. “About.” Inuit Qaujisarvingat Knowledge Centre, Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, www.inuitknowledge.ca/about. Accessed 29 March 2019.
Keating, Cecilia. “Indigenous Geographies Overlap in This Colourful Online Map.” Atlas Obscura, 24 July 2018,
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/native-land-map-of-indigenous-territories. Accessed 8 April 2019.
Komangapik, Ruben Anton. “Kinguvaatinnu | Ruben Anton Komangapik | Walrus Talks.” YouTube, uploaded by The Walrus, August 10, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hs70uLh5YvY.
Latimer, Michelle. “Nuuca.” Streel Films, 2017,
http://www.michellelatimer.ca/portfolio/nuuca/.
Latimer, Michelle. “Streel Films.” Streel Films, 2013, www.michellelatimer.ca/.
Lawrence-Zuniga, Denise. “Space and Place.” Oxford Bibliographies, 30 Mar. 2017,
www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199766567/obo-9780199766567-0170.xml. Accessed 28 Mar. 2019.
Lewis, Jason and Fragnito, Skawennati Tricia. “Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace.” Cultural Survival Quarterly, vol. 29, no. 2, 2005, pp. 29-31. www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/aboriginal-territories-cyberspace
Mercer, Greg. “‘Sea, ice, snow … it’s all changing’: Inuit struggle with warming world.” The Guardian, 30 May 2018,
www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/30/canada-inuits-climate-change-impact-global-warming-melting-ice . Accessed 28 Mar 2019.
Myburgh, Brittany. “Here and Now: Indigenous Canadian Perspectives and New Media in Works by Ruben Komangapik, Kent Monkman and Adrian Duke.” Leonardo, vol. 51 no. 4, 2018, pp. 394-398. Project MUSE, muse.jhu.edu/article/702020.
“RavenSpace.” UBC Press, www.ubcpress.ca/ravenspace Accessed 30 Mar. 2019.
Ricou, Laurie. “Laurie Ricou Biography.” UBC Blogs, blogs.ubc.ca/lricou/biography/.
Ridanpää, Juha. “Geography and Literature.” Oxford Bibliographies, 26 Feb. 2013.
www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199874002/obo-9780199874002-0013.xml. Accessed 28 Mar. 2019.
“Rosemarie Kuptana.” Indspire.ca, Indspire, 2019, indspire.ca/laureate/rosemarie-kuptana-2/. Accessed 28 Mar. 2019.
Temprano, Victor. “What is ‘Territory’?” Native Land Digital, 9 April 2018,
https://native-land.ca/what-is-territory/ Accessed 8 April 2019.
“The Paris Agreement.” United Nations: Climate Change, 22 October 2018,
www.unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/the-paris-agreement/the-paris-agreement Accessed 27 Mar 2019.
United Nations. (2007). United Nation Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/documents/DRIPS_en.pdf. Accessed 27 Mar 2019.
Wikiup. www.wikiup.org Accessed 31 Mar 2019.
Last updated: 13:15 April 8, 2019
Decolonizing Ourselves 
As place is so heavily tied to a society’s cultural values, and with that idea, I find the concept of the Wikiup website interesting in reconnecting place to artistic forms of media. Particularly with what we have seen on the Voyageur team’s annotated bibliography, I think that the disconnect between place and media hinders the ability for minority artists to bring their work into a frame in which publishers of the work will consider it within a Canadian context. While Wikiup is used as “a free, location-based mobile app for sharing Indigenous Knowledge,” I wonder if digital technology could be used in a similar manner to reconnect the place in minority artists’ work with the place that exists as a basis for the cultural knowledge of that artistic work? Would this help Canadians better embrace the Canadianism of diasporic works within Canada?
– Cassie
LikeLike
Hi Cassie,
I think this raises a really interesting point about how understanding context informs our ability to empathize and interpret narrative in a new light. I agree that attempting to present media in a vacuum, disconnected from place, is a bit oxymoronic. Although a work of fiction or media can be presented as a stand-alone work, it is inherently informed by the artist’s worldview and experiences. I think highlighting cultural background could in this sense be a motivator for enacting greater empathy and connection among majority audiences and minority peoples, in that it provides the context necessary to understand others’ experience. It is far harder to dismiss a story as dissimilar to yourself when you are placed into the history leading to its construction.
In psychology, the tendency to prefer people who are similar to you is called “In-group bias,” and the American Psychological Association defines in-group bias as “the tendency to favor one’s own group, its members, its characteristics, and its products, particularly in reference to other groups. The favoring of the ingroup tends to be more pronounced than the rejection of the outgroup, but both tendencies become more pronounced during periods of intergroup contact. At the regional, cultural, or national level, this bias is often termed ethnocentrism. Also called ingroup favoritism” (https://dictionary.apa.org/ingroup-bias). In-group bias can pay out in a number of contexts but is especially prevalent in contexts of race and ethnicity. However, in-group bias is also incredibly sensitive; in one study, when children in preschool were arbitrarily assigned to an orange or a green group based on the colour of the stickers they received, they immediately began to display a preference for children with similar colour markings (https://www.collabra.org/articles/10.1525/collabra.44/). This ability to assign group membership based on minimal indicators is called “minimal group preference;” I reference these studies because I think the idea of minimal group preference is really interesting when we consider how to counteract negative stereotypes and biases. For example, in in the past regions have been used as a cue for in-group membership, and the ways they have been outlined in colonial maps, redefined to exclude Indigenous groups, and used to emphasize division have contributed to the systemic dehumanization of Indigenous people. However, the ability to clue into similarity through minimal group membership also shows how sensitive humans can be to commonality. Highlighting the history of an artist, of their work, and tracing the paths to its creation allows the audience the chance to find similarity not only with their work, but with the creator and their experiences. You don’t need to have immigrated to understand loneliness, or to be part of a diasporic community to recognize the loneliness that can come from being torn on a part of your identity. This kind of empathy can help us refocus our interpretation of literature to empathize with the creator AND the story they’re telling.
I think making these connections is a way to increase receptivity to minority artists, and redefine the current, sometimes antagonistic discourse to one that focuses on similarities while still giving recognition to the origins of the artist and their work.
Works Cited:
American Psychological Association. “Ingroup Bias.” dictionary.apa.org/ingroup-bias. Accessed April 15th, 2019.
Richter, Nadja., Over, Harriet., & Dunham, Yarrow. “The Effects of Minimal Group Membership on Young Preschoolers’ Social Preferences, Estimates of Similarity, and Behavioral Attribution.” Collabra, 2(1), 8. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1525/collabra.44. Accessed April 15th, 2019.
LikeLike
Currently, I am reading a book called “A History of Canada in 10 Maps” by Adam Shoalts. Shoalts brings together the ten maps that he feels are most important in displaying the way in which Canada eventually became Canada. He discusses the Vikings arriving on the Eastern coast of modern day Canada as the first Europeans to attempt to settle in North America, how the French arrived and were to first to establish settlements for the fur trade as well as explore the depths of the Northern portion of North America, and how the present borders were drawn due to conflicts between the French and the English over Canadian territory and French colonies. The most interesting thing I took away from this book was how the border between the current United States and Canada was established – because of colonial conflict while ignoring the consideration of the Indigenous peoples. The Native Land mapping tool displays that the Indigenous peoples territories spanned across our concept of the modern day borders. Their territories probably are shaped the way they are because of topography or the range of the resources (such as plants, animals, and water sources) that they typically utilized in order to live. Their territorial “borders” are heavily tied to the land on which each Indigenous group was (and is) connected to, while our current national borders are constructs of a war that did not historically involve the concerns of the Indigenous peoples of the time. One could say that present day borders ignored everything except the direct political issues of the French and English, as the border between the U.S. and Canada not only spans across traditional Indigenous territories, but also across massive topographical features (such as the Rocky Mountains or 4/5 of the Great Lakes). I wonder what the implications of reconnecting our borders (both nationally and provincially) to the land they divide could be. Would there be conflicts over resources that were once shared? Would there be political ramifications? Would it be a successful (although radical) method of deconstructing the Western notion of borders? Are there simpler ways of establishing the re-connection between the land and the borders that wouldn’t be so drastic, such as changing what we consider to be the most dominant form of mapping? For instance, when you google “world map” the maps that appear are those that distinguish the boundaries between the different nations. Maybe instead, if we made the “world map” that first comes up on say, a Google search, a topographical map void of societal borders instead, would that eventually also be effective in deconstructing the Western notion of borders?
– Cassie
LikeLike
Hi Cassie!
These are very fascinating, insightful questions! I particularly enjoyed considering the impacts of colonial borders on Indigenous nations and their cultures. Do you think, from reading Shoalts, that re-drawing borders or having alternative maps could give more respect to Indigenous nations as sovereign nations?
– Cianne
LikeLike
Mercer’s article on the link between climate change and mental health of Inuit communities strikes a deep chord with me. Living in cities, we are generally very isolated from nature, and living in a city such as Vancouver, the changes between seasons are mild. I can only imagine how culturally and personally devastating it must be to watch your way of life shift and change and slip away from you.
How can we best support these communities during this shift? How can we help them honour their centuries-old traditions as the ice gives way below them? I think that it is vital that we ask the communities these questions and do whatever we can, as academics and Canadian citizens (whether they want that label is, of course, up to them) to both work to slow the effects of climate change and make sure that these vulnerable communities have the support that they need.
– Cianne
LikeLike
I was very interested in Rosemarie Kuptana’s perspectives on The Inuit Sea. I think this article is particularly interesting in our discussion of regionalism as it highlights how history intersects with narrative, policy, and the future. By ignoring Inuit claims to the sea, the Canadian government reasserts their dominance over Inuit territory, repeating a cycle that originated in colonizers using their own language to justify racism. Some of the reasons this was really interesting to me in our current conversation about the opportunities of regionalism as a perspective are in how it illustrates how regionalism could benefit Canadians multi-disciplinarily; not only would encourage Inuit voices in literature to share their perspective on literary features, it would also increase the ways in which we afford authority to Inuit perspectives in academia. This also clearly has implications for the health of our planet in that assuming the Inuit do not have title over the sea is not only continuing a cycle of colonization, it is also refusing to acknowledge the respect and care our environment needs in order to thrive. Especially considering Canada is warming at twice the rate of the rest of the world (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-47754189), considering Inuit perspectives is not just the civil thing to do, it is a matter of survival. This survival has to be fought on multiple fronts, not only through climate and policy, but also promoting a future in which Canadians reconsider our relationship to the land. Using regionalism in the sense would encourage a better understanding of the connection between the narratives we write and believe, the actions we take, and the impact we have on our planet. We can shape our narrative future.
-Charlotte
Works Cited
“Canada Warming Twice as Fast as Rest of the World, Report Says.” BBC News: US and Canada, 3 April 2019, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-47754189. Accessed 15 April 2019.
LikeLike