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Decolonizing posthumanist geographies

Juanita SundbergUniversity of British Columbia, Canada

AbstractThis paper engages my struggles to craft geo-graphs or earth writings that also further broaden political goals of decolonizing the discipline of geography. To this end, I address a body of literature roughly termed ‘posthumanism’ because it offers powerful tools to identify and critique dualist constructions of nature and culture that work to uphold Eurocentric knowledge and the colonial present. However, I am discomforted by the ways in which geographical engagements with posthumanism tend to reproduce colonial ways of knowing and being by enacting universalizing claims and, consequently, further subordinating other ontologies. Building from this discomfort, I elaborate a critique of geographical-posthumanist engagements. Taking direction from Indigenous and decolonial theorizing, the paper identifies two Eurocentric performances common in posthumanist geographies and analyzes their implications. I then conclude with some thoughts about steps to decolonize geo-graphs. To this end, I take up learnings offered by the Zapatistas. My goal is to foster geographical engagements open to conversing with and walking alongside other epistemic worlds.

Keywordsdecolonizing, Eurocentrism, Indigenous geographies, ontology, posthumanism

Introduction

This paper engages my struggles to craft geo-graphs or earth writings that also further broaden political goals of decolonizing the discipline of geography. To this end, I address a body of litera-ture broadly termed ‘posthumanist’ because it offers powerful tools to identify and critique dualist constructions of nature and culture that work to uphold Eurocentric knowledge and the colonial present.1 Geographers have taken up posthumanist approaches in various ways, producing a sig-nificant body of work that contests dualist ontologies in Anglo/European political philosophy by showing how a multiplicity of beings cast as human and nonhuman – people, plants, animals, ener-gies, technological objects – participate in the coproduction of socio-political collectives.2 In so doing, geographers also point to the epistemological, political, and ethical limitations of on-going

Corresponding author:Juanita Sundberg, Department of Geography, University of British Columbia, 1984 West Mall, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2, Canada.Email: juanita.sundberg@ubc.ca

486067 CGJ0010.1177/1474474013486067Cultural GeographiesSundberg2013

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processes of ontological purification, which, in Bruno Latour’s words, work to close off the pos-sibility of democracy for all worldly entities – human and otherwise.3

Nonetheless, I am discomforted by the ways in which geographical engagements with posthu-manism tend to reproduce colonial ways of knowing and being by enacting universalizing claims and, consequently, further subordinating other ontologies. As Ruth Panelli suggests, posthumanist geographies are tightly bound in and by Eurocentric scholarship and, Annette Watson and Orville H. Huntington argue, tend to ‘glorify “modern” science and technology,’ thereby privileging ‘only certain human–nonhuman assemblages.’4 In what follows, I build from my discomfort to elaborate a critique of geographical-posthumanist engagements. Taking direction from Indigenous and deco-lonial theorizing, I begin the paper by identifying two Eurocentric performances common in post-humanist geographies and analyzing their implications. In so doing, I critically reflect on my own recent use of posthumanist theories while also addressing other recently published texts. I then conclude with some thoughts about ways to decolonize geo-graphs. I offer this critique to share ideas that may resonate with others, so together we may work through ontological questions that are integral to political goals held in common.

Before turning to my argument, I define several terms used throughout. I use the term ‘posthu-manism’ to signal a diverse body of work rooted in Anglo-European political philosophy that refuses to treat the human as 1) an ontological given, the privileged if not the only actor of conse-quence and, 2) disembodied and autonomous, separate from the world of nature and animality.5 I use ‘Eurocentrism’ when referring to a contingent conceptual apparatus that frames Europe as the primary architect of world history and bearer of universal values, reason, and theory.6 The term Anglo-European includes English-speaking white supremacist settler societies as bearers of these Eurocentric imaginaries.7 Because of my location as citizen of one white supremacist settler soci-ety (the United States of America) and resident of another (Canada), I primarily address relations between Anglo-Eurocentrism and Indigenous theorizing; however, I hope the thoughts offered here will be of relevance to other geopolitical contexts.

Following Shaw, Herman and Dobbs, I use the word ‘Indigenous’ to refer to groups with ances-tral ties/claims to particular lands prior to colonization by outside powers and ‘whose nations remain submerged within the states created by those powers.’8 In referring to Eurocentric and Indigenous epistemes throughout, I recognize the risk of positing a sharp division between them. This is not my goal; I join Watson and Huntington in recognizing on-going epistemic interactions across time and space while acknowledging the existence and particularities of Indigenous episte-mologies.9 I maintain an analytical separation between posthumanist theory and Indigenous epis-temes even as there may be overlapping themes and goals.

By ‘decolonizing,’ I mean exposing the ontological violence authorized by Eurocentric episte-mologies both in scholarship and everyday life.10 As an inhabitant of a white supremacist settler society, I have a profound obligation and responsibility to confront the widespread implications of colonialism in my scholarship and to ask what (geographical) thought has to become to face the political, philosophical, and ethical challenges of decolonizing.11 This is especially the case in rela-tion to thinking about the land and how human societies interact with those cast as nonhuman.12

Decolonizing also involves fostering ‘multiepistemic literacy,’ a term proposed by Sami scholar Rauna Kuokkanen to indicate learning and dialogue between epistemic worlds.13 Dialogue ‘between a diversity of epistemic/ethical/political approaches,’ or epistemic worlds, works to enact a ‘pluriversal world’:14 a world in which many worlds fit, a vision put forward by the Zapatista movement in Mexico.15 The Zapatistas (Zapatista Army of National Liberation) emerged on the world scene in 1994, and have put forward a significant body of knowledge rooted in the political analysis, ontologies, and everyday experiences of various Maya communities in Chiapas, Mexico.

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This work, collected and disseminated in a variety of ways, has had a tremendous influence on global organizing against neoliberalism and solidarity practice as well as political theory.16 In my conclusion, I take up learnings offered by the Zapatistas as steps on a path to decolonizing. My goal is to foster geographical engagements open to conversing with and walking alongside other epis-temic worlds.

Posthumanist performances

I have embraced posthumanism because it helps me address the methodological challenge of accounting for nonhumans as political actors in (geo)political processes. As I noted in a recent paper, this (by no means cohesive) body of work advances relational ontological approaches, which treat ‘the human and nonhuman as mutually constituted in and through social relations.’17 For instance, Haraway’s Companion Species Manifesto calls for and enacts storytelling that empha-sizes ‘co-habitation, co-evolution, and embodied cross-species sociality’ between humans and domesticated animals such as dogs.18 I, like many geographers interested in confronting the disci-pline’s on-going struggles with epistemologies of segmentation, have been drawn to posthumanist theories.19 Moreover, Indigenous scholars increasingly challenge Anglo-European geography to evaluate and transform our disciplinary habits, especially in relation to ontologies of the human and nonhuman.20

Despite my enthusiasm, I am concerned that posthumanist theory remains within the orbit of Eurocentered epistemologies and ontologies. Indeed, the literature continuously refers to a founda-tional ontological split between nature and culture as if it is universal. Jay Johnson and Brian Murton refer to this split as a meta-narrative rooted in Enlightenment thinking and globalized through colonial discursive practices.21 While Anglo-European thought does not comprise a coher-ent body of work, and dualist constructions are continuously examined and challenged, my point is that this literature repeatedly references such dualisms as if they are universal foundations of thought, which only serves to perpetuate their presumed universality.

Even as I have grappled with these ideas, I initially did not question the implications of consult-ing scholarship rooted in Eurocentric thinking in order to address methodological challenges stem-ming from Eurocentric meta-narratives and dualist ontologies. Why did I not seek out scholarship rooted in non-dualistic epistemic traditions? Indigenous authors in the Americas, for instance, out-line complex knowledge systems wherein animals, plants, and spirits are understood as beings who participate in the everyday practices that bring worlds into being.22 These epistemic traditions are not organized in and through dualist ontologies of nature/culture. Does it not seem obvious to con-sult such work in order to think through methodological difficulties that stem from trying to under-stand and depict co-production from within a body of thought that tends to purification and segmentation?

This paper is part of my process of addressing these questions, becoming accountable for my epistemological and ontological habits, and advocating institutional change as steps towards decol-onizing geography. As a first step, I identify two performances enacted in posthumanist theories that work to constitute posthumanist geographies as Eurocentric: silence about location and silence about Indigenous epistemes. Although I treat these performances separately for heuristic purposes, they are interconnected and mutually constituting. The notion of performance allows me to high-light how worlds are brought into being through enactments of everyday discursive practices regu-lated by social norms.23 As David Turnbull suggests, ‘Knowledge is performative. In the act of producing knowledge, we create space.’24 We also fashion ourselves as subjects. What kind of spaces are posthumanist geographies creating? And, what kinds of subjects?

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Performance #1

Posthumanist thought tends to be silent about its ‘loci of enunciation,’ a term offered by Walter Mignolo to address the ‘geohistorical and bio-graphic’ location of authors as well as bodies of thought.25 Locating the self is a tactic common to feminist methodologies to acknowledge that knowledge comes from somewhere and is, therefore, bound up in power relations. In Indigenous methodologies, situating self in relation to community affiliation and place accounts for the impor-tance of place in knowledge production and avoids essentialist conceptions of a pan-Indigenous epistemology.26

However, this practice is uncommon in posthumanist theorizing. For example, in What is Posthumanism? Cary Wolfe analyzes various strands of posthumanist thinking in relation to ‘the fundamental anthropological dogma’ of Enlightenment humanism, which holds that the figure of the human is achieved by transcending materiality and especially animality (empha-sis in original).27 Wolfe’s analysis, however, enacts its own universalizing performances in that he does not explicitly identify the loci of enunciation of such dogmas. Indeed, Wolfe is silent about the fact that Enlightenment humanist dogmas represent a particular, indeed pro-vincial, body of thought on the question of the human. Thus, he does not mention that such dogmas originated in European societies involved in colonization, were globalized in and through colonial practices, and are currently given life in white supremacist settler societies.28 Along these lines, Wolfe makes no mention of past and present knowledge systems founded in non-dualist thinking. Consequently, Wolfe universalizes Enlightenment humanist dogmas and participates in on-going colonial practices that eliminate or erase other ontological frame-works in other knowledge systems.

With few exceptions, posthumanist geographies repeat this performance.29 For example, in a recently published paper specifically engaging posthumanist methodologies, I situate my efforts to address nonhumans as political actors in the United States-Mexico borderlands in relation to a contained and self-referential circle of Anglo-Eurocentered thinkers, although I did not make a statement to that effect nor explain why this was so.30 Nor do I mention that the ‘more-than-human’ methodologies currently elaborated in posthumanist geographies are but one approach in a world of inclusive or non-dualist frameworks, such as those articu-lated by Indigenous scholars.31 Neither the reviewers nor the editor called me on my Anglo-Eurocentrism.

To give another example, I turn to Bruce Braun and Sarah Whatmore’s edited volume Political Matter.32 In the introduction, the authors pose the book’s central question: ‘What if we took the stuff of politics seriously’? Who constitutes this ‘we’ is never located. Instead, the coordinates of this particular ‘we’ are to be found in relation to the geopolitical location of the sources cited and examples given, which are all Anglo-European. Further along, Braun and Whatmore highlight what they term the ‘stubborn attachment of many scholars – liberal and radical alike – to a human-ism that finds ever new ways of positing the nonhuman “out there”.’33 The authors do not qualify who these scholars may be. Consequently, this stubborn attachment is called into being as a univer-sal phenomenon.

In sum, silence about location is a significant performance that enacts Eurocentric theory as universal, the only body of knowledge that matters. In the following section, I discuss another dimension of this silence, and that is the overwhelming silence about Indigenous scholarship, which articulates non-dualist frameworks. However, as I illustrate, this silence tends to be comple-mented by very particular and circumscribed references to Indigeneity. Taken together, these maneuvers perpetuate colonial violences.

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Performance #2

Johnson and Murton, Panelli and others have commented on geography’s lack of engagement with Indigenous ontologies as well as research by Indigenous scholars, including in geographies of nature.34 Kuokkanen frames the absence of engagement with Indigenous epistemes as a form of sanctioned ‘epistemic ignorance’ that enables ‘the ongoing exclusion of other than dominant Western epistemic and intellectual traditions.’35

As noted above, my own recently published work further sanctioned this ignorance. For another example, I again turn to Braun and Whatmore’s introduction in Political Matter. According to the authors, the book aims to sketch out ‘a more fully materialist theory of politics’ by bringing sci-ence, technology, and society studies together with political theory.36 Never mentioned are the many Indigenous epistemes that take the material world very seriously in constituting political ontologies.37 Instead, Braun and Whatmore’s approach is sketched out solely in relation to Anglo-Eurocentered thinkers.

The habitual exclusion of Indigenous scholarship, however, is accompanied by very particular references to Indigeneity. This move is enacted in Braun and Whatmore’s introductory comments about the ways in which (unnamed) political theorists populate the polis solely with human beings. In political theory, the authors state, ‘The idea that “things” might condition political life is seen to return us to a primitive state, attributing magical qualities to inanimate objects.’38 While critical of political theory, this statement does not specify who constitutes ‘us,’ nor do Braun and Whatmore provide any discussion to contextualize which political theorists they are referencing or what, pre-cisely, they mean to say by mentioning the primitive. I suggest the primitive’s appearance in this sentence calls forth but also upholds Eurocentric and colonial imaginaries that constitute European Selves as civilized in relation to primitive Others through binaries such as political theory/primi-tive religion and rational/magical.39 Even so, in the sentence that follows, Braun and Whatmore state: ‘Despite this, we believe that modern political theory provides many openings to imagine the matter of politics differently.’40 The question of how theoretical work underpinned by dualist, colo-nial imaginaries is going to constitute different political imaginings – and for who – is not addressed.

The enactment of a rational Self in relation to the magical, primitive Other is evident in Jane Bennett’s chapter as well. Bennett’s goal is to ‘highlight the active role of nonhuman materials in public life,’ to ‘give voice to a thing power,’ or the vitality and capacity of things to produce effects that exceed human intentionality.41 Her tale of plastic gloves, dead rats, and oak pollen seeks to demonstrate the intimate connections between people and material objects so as to foster different ethical and political relations. The chapter’s final section, entitled ‘The Naive Ambition of Vital Materialism,’ calls upon ‘modern, secular, well-educated humans’ to allow for ‘moments of meth-odological naivete.’42 By this, Bennett means humans ought to postpone the tendency to interpret thing power solely in relation to human agency so as to linger, to ‘cultivate the ability to discern nonhuman vitality, to become perceptually open to it.’43 Further on, however, Bennett expresses an anxiety that fostering vital materialism via the ‘capacity for naiveté’ risks – and here she cites W.J.T. Mitchell – ‘the taint of superstition, animism, vitalism, anthropomorphism, and other pre-modern attitudes.’44 Even as Bennett advocates attention to the power of things, she worries that taking such things seriously risks tainting the rationality of secular humans with the stain of ‘pre-modern’ magic. In order to avoid this risk, while still attending to materialism, Bennett engages what she terms a ‘rich archive in Euro-American political theory.’

In calling forth imaginaries of modern, well-educated Selves and naive, superstitious Others, Bennett enacts colonial gestures of superiority that cast others outside the sphere of intellect and knowledge production. This is also to say that Bennett’s text calls forth the non-modern Other as

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capable of giving ‘things’ their due as co-producers of daily life, but incapable of producing knowledge relevant to theorizing materialism. Ultimately, Bennett’s chapter is underpinned by and enacts an anxious Eurocentric and humanist framing of the human as modern, rational, autono-mous, and nature transcendent; carefully kept outside the category of the human are those classi-fied as superstitious animists.

To summarize, the performances identified here – silence (about location as well as existing Indigenous or ‘non-western’ scholarship) coupled with very particular ways of summoning Indigeneity – are power-laden. Such performances are governed by and ultimately uphold what Bruno Latour calls the modern constitution (with ‘Modernity’ implicitly and sometimes explicitly marked as a Eurocentric myth). Central to the modern constitution are two Great Divides, the Internal and the External.45 To paraphrase, Latour argues that the modern practice of separating nature from culture is foundational to dividing ‘us’ from ‘them,’ moderns from primitives: ‘We’ moderns set ourselves apart from ‘them’ because ‘we’ see ourselves as capable of distinguishing between nature and culture, science and society while ‘they’ remain mired in nature.46 In the texts analyzed here, divisions between us and them are called forth in relation to a nature/culture binary in terms of capacity to produce legitimate, modern (as opposed to magical and pre-modern) knowl-edge about the political significance and vitality of nonhumans.

As a consequence of such practices, Anglo-European scholarship is the only tradition truly alive in posthumanist theorizing. Here, I use the word alive in the sense put forward by Dipesh Chakrabarty in Provincializing Europe.47 Chakrabarty argues that western scholarship treats think-ers who are long dead (e.g. John Locke, Karl Marx, Max Weber) as intellectual contemporaries without historicizing them or placing their conceptual frameworks in their European (and colonial) intellectual contexts. In contrast, scholars from other intellectual traditions – he refers to Sanskrit, Persian, or Arabic – are treated as truly dead, material for either historical or ethnographic research only. As a consequence, Chakrabarty contends, epistemologies or ontologies embedded in other worlds are not alive to us as resources for critical thought today.48

Ultimately, the exclusive focus on Anglo-European thinkers in posthumanist theorizing enacts the world as universe, meaning the ontological assumption of a singular reality or nature, about which different cultures offer distinct interpretations. For Blaser, the notion of universe equates ontology with culture and supports the anthropological claim that different perspectives on the world may be understood through and reduced to Eurocentric categories.49 As Latour delineates, the modern constitution frames the true nature of reality as discernable by and through western science; from this perspective, ‘culture is negotiable whereas the environment is not.’50 Following Blaser, I suggest that the assumption of a universe is inherently colonial, in that it ‘sustains itself through performances that tend to suppress and or contain the enactment of other possible worlds.’51 Radical alterity is contained and reduced to sameness.

Scholars identified with the modernity/coloniality framework offer the concept of the pluriverse as a strategy for moving away from the universalizing and colonizing notion of the universe.52 For Blaser, the pluriverse entails imagining the performative enactment of multiple, distinct ontologies or worlds, which ‘bring themselves into being and sustain themselves even as they interact, inter-fere, and mingle with each other’ under asymmetrical circumstances.53 As outlined in the next section, enacting the pluriverse is a crucial goal of decolonizing geographical engagements.

Decolonizing posthumanist geographies

In this section, I compliment the critique outlined above by proposing three steps towards decolo-nizing geographical engagements with posthumanism. My goal is to offer bodies of thought and

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practice that support the broader political and intellectual projects of posthumanist scholarship, which I interpret to mean advancing methodological approaches that demonstrate the ways in which sociality is co-produced by a multiplicity of entities. To this end, I primarily build on con-ceptualizations of walking the world into being offered by the Zapatistas. An ‘insurgent political imagination,’ Zapatismo has been a significant source of inspiration, learning, and transformation for me as well as others.54 I begin with a brief outline of walking, followed by a more precise dis-cussion of how the Zapatista movement theorizes walking as an important practice in building the pluriverse, a world in which many worlds fit. In building on ideas of walking worlds into being, my intention is not to enact a linear or prescriptive imaginary; paths meander, intersect, circle around, fade away, and begin again. Finally, in what follows, I use the term ‘we’ as an invocation and invitation to the reader – who, given the demographics of the discipline, is most likely white – to walk, ask, listen, and converse.

Walking is identified as an important practice in the performative coproduction of knowledge and space.55 ‘We make our world in the process of moving through and knowing it.’56 Indeed, as research in Indigenous American communities illustrates, trails, paths, and tracks mark and bring into being important cognitive connections and social interactions.57 Moreover, as David Turnbull points out, trail walking is intertwined with storytelling, narratives that call forth and enact connec-tions between people, place, and practices in time and space.58

I posit walking as key to decolonizing in order to highlight the importance of taking steps – moving, engaging, reflecting – to enact decolonizing practices, understanding that decolonization is something to be aspired to and enacted rather than a state of being that may be claimed.59 In addition, attention to walking – the embodied and emplaced movements involved in producing worlds – may help to foster recognition of the multiplicity of knowledge systems. As we humans move, work, play, and narrate with a multiplicity of beings in place, we enact historically contin-gent and radically distinct worlds/ontologies.60

The Zapatista movement advances a performative notion of walking in relation to social trans-formation. For instance, at the 1996 Encounter for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism in Chiapas, Subcomandante Marcos’ welcome address stated: ‘We brought forth the war in the year zero and we began to walk this path that has brought us to your hearts and today brings you to ours.’61 Here, Marcos is suggesting that the Zapatista movement is enacted through walking; the journey is the destination, and the world is brought into being through everyday praxis. Walking also is embodied in the principle of ‘preguntando caminamos’ or ‘asking we walk,’ which suggests that the move-ment is enacted through a dialogic politics of walking and talking, doing and reflecting.62 In other words, the path to social change must be walked and talked.

Building on this concept, I suggest a first step to decolonizing posthumanist engagements in geography: locating our body-knowledge in relation to the existing paths we know and walk. Gayatri Spivak uses the term homework to describe the activity involved in identifying the coordi-nates of one’s location.63 For Spivak, homework entails a self-reflexive analysis of one’s own epistemological and ontological assumptions; in other words, examining how these have been naturalized in and through geopolitical and institutional power relations/practices. Doing home-work is a key practice in unlearning that which one has learned; unlearning privilege, especially the privilege of sanctioned ignorance that allows the perpetuation of silence about on-going colo-nial violence.

For non-Indigenous inhabitants of white supremacist settler societies like the US and Canada, homework may involve learning about ‘the colonizer who lurks within.’64 In the discipline of geography, this process entails analyzing the coloniality of power, knowledge and being, meaning ‘long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture,

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labor, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations.’65 Coloniality is enacted in the discipline of geography in multiple ways, such as knowledge production that has contributed to the surveillance and dispossession of Indigenous peoples.66 As a case in point, I note Cole Harris’ critical reflections on the ways in which settler assumptions informed a paper he published in 1985, entitled ‘Industry and the Good Life around Idaho Peak.’ In a 1996 republication of the paper, Harris writes: ‘my proposition that no Native people had ever lived near Idaho Peak is absurd, and grows out of the common assumption, with which I grew up, that a mining rush had been superimposed on wilderness.’67 The concept of wil-derness has and continues to play a significant role in the erasure of Indigenous epistemologies.68 While geographers have contributed to historicizing and locating the wilderness concept, few have initiated sustained engagements with Indigenous (and other non-western) epistemologies, ontolo-gies, and methodologies.69 As a consequence, Anglo-Eurocentric concepts retain their place as the only ones that matter in posthumanist thought.

In short, homework starts from where we are but the goal is to move beyond identity politics to take responsibility for the epistemological and ontological worlds we enact through the paths we walk and talk. Along these lines, doing homework may create the conditions for transformation by allowing ourselves to ‘go out of our minds,’ Johannes Fabian’s term for ‘leaving one’s comfortable psychological, political, and discursive place’ to engage others.70 Building on the idea of leaving one’s comfort zone, I turn to step two.

Step two builds on the concept of walking with, put forth by the Zapatistas in the 2005 Sixth Declaration of the Selva Lacandona as an invitation to others to walk with the Zapatistas.71 The concept has (at least) two meanings. In one sense, walking with means ‘reciprocal respect for the autonomy and independence of organizations’ involved in the struggle; in other words, respect for the multiplicity of life worlds.72 Step two, then, involves learning to learn about multiplicity. Kuokkanen emphasizes the difference between learning to know the other and learning as an engagement with the other (that also may entail learning from the other). For Kuokkanen, the ‘will to know implies an enclosure, a hegemonic monologue, and the colonial logic of domination.’73 Hence, Kuokkanen cautions against the multiculturalist approach to learning, as in appreciating the other’s difference; ultimately, this framework serves to uphold the universality of Eurocentric knowledge. Instead, Kuokkanen calls for learning as ‘participatory reciprocity,’ which frames knowledge as a social activity and entails learning to perceive and receive Indigenous epistemes as part of the geopolitical present.74

For geographers intent on enacting the political and intellectual objectives of posthumanist theorizing, walking with entails serious engagement with Indigenous epistemologies, ontologies, and methodologies. Doing so in a humble manner that treats Indigenous people as political subjects – rather than objects of research – entails following Indigenous protocols, principles, and methodologies.75 While the specifics may vary, Indigenous protocols and methodologies pose challenges to western research practices and institutional expectations in multiple ways, especially the importance placed on co-developing research agendas designed to ‘recognise the struggles of Indigenous peoples to preserve and further their knowledges and the affirmation of their rights to sovereignty over political, economic and cultural resources.’76

Watson and Huntington offer an inspiring example of walking with.77 In an innovative, co-authored paper, Watson (a non-Indigenous academic geographer) and Huntington (an Athabascan hunter and gatherer) describe Koyukon hunting practices to demonstrate how Indigenous intellec-tual traditions may ‘productively contribute to discussions of the ethical and political implications of posthumanism.’78 The paper treats Koyukon knowledge as ‘equal to that of Western science’ without subsuming its spiritual and ethical dimensions.79 The authors accomplish these goals by

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co-narrating their movements and conversations through the physical and epistemic spaces shared during a moose hunt. In engagements such as this, walking and learning are crucial to developing the ‘multiepistemic literacy’ so crucial to pursuing the stated political goals of posthumanist thought.80

The principle of walking with also redefines solidarity: in the Sixth Declaration, walking with the Zapatistas is framed as engaging in activism wherever one is living in support of a common struggle against neoliberalism and for democracy, liberty, and justice. Hence, step three entails walking with in the sense of political engagement. I think of walking with as a form of solidarity built on reciprocity and mutuality, walking and listening, talking and doing. Walking with entails engagement with Indigenous communities and individuals as intellectual and political subjects, colleagues in the practices of producing worlds. How one engages will take a variety of forms and will be different for everyone.

Engagement may involve a commitment to including Indigenous scholarship on knowledge systems, political theory, and sociality in research and teaching practices.81 Taking this work seri-ously is a vital step in enacting the world as pluriversal and fostering different ways of thinking about and interacting with those cast as nonhuman. This mode of engagement is particularly impor-tant for those of us committed to posthumanist political objectives, such as forging methodologies to study how socio-political collectives come into being in ways that address the many beings involved in such co-productions.

Engagement also may involve direct collaboration with Indigenous groups as allies in pursuit of political goals shared in common. Such collaborations, for instance, may work towards decolo-nizing the university by featuring Indigenous conceptions of human-animal relations, as have Watson and Huntington, while also transforming knowledge production practices by writing in a style that represents multiple locations and experiences. Decolonizing also is the aim of (non-Aboriginal academics) Kate Lloyd, Sarah Wright and Sandie Suchet-Pearson’s collaboration with four generations of Yolngu women from northern Australia. Inspired by the relational ontology enacted by Yolngu, the authors include Bawaka Country as co-author; at Bawaka, the authors write, ‘non-humans – landscapes, seascapes, animals, winds, sun, moon, tides and spirits such as Bayini, a spirit woman of Bawaka – constantly shape and influence our research collaboration.’82 While research collaborations such as theirs are co-organized to co-produce knowledge useful to fostering Indigenous self-determination, walking with may entail stepping away from research projects if and when the researcher’s goals do not line up with community interests, capacity, or political goals.83

Finally, walking with also may entail taking direct action. For instance, in Canada, the Idle No More movement calls upon all people ‘to join in a revolution which honors and fulfills Indigenous sovereignty which protects the land and water.’84 The movement began as a grassroots effort by First Nations ‘to educate First Nations people on the multitude of legislation put forward by the Harper government that they feel is a direct attack on the rights of First Nations.’85 In a series of actions across the country, First Nations have called upon non-Indigenous allies to stand with them in solidarity.86 Putting our bodies on the line, when invited, enacts the world as pluriverse by standing for Indigenous ways of being in the world.

In sum, locating the self, learning to learn, and walking with are steps towards enacting ways of being in the world that advance posthumanist politics as well as broader goals of decolonizing the discipline of geography. Steps such as these entail recognizing the asymmetrical histories that sanction ignorance and erasure as well as adopting protocols for fostering dialogue and solidarity. For instance, Lloyd, Wright and Suchet-Pearson describe how enacting Indigenous research proto-cols led to centering Indigenous ontologies in all aspects of the collaborative project, which, in

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turn, entailed radically reframing academic practices by calling forth academic subjects as rela-tional and accountable rather than individuals and enact research as a ‘more-than-human event.’87

Concluding comments

This paper stems from my worries about the tendency in posthumanist theorizing to treat Anglo-European theory as the only body of work relevant to ontological questions about nature and cul-ture. As outlined here, I am concerned about the ways in which posthumanist texts enact universalizing claims and, as a consequence, reproduce colonial ways of knowing and being by further subordinating other ontologies. Inspired by Indigenous and decolonial theorizing, I put forward steps for decolonizing geographical engagements with posthumanist thinking. To chip away at the veneer of universality enacted in posthumanist knowledge performances, I suggest locating theoretical approaches in biographic, historical, and geopolitical terms and marking as provincial what is otherwise naturalized as universal. In addition, I explore various dimensions of walking with as strategies to transform the spaces and subjects fashioned in and through knowledge production practices by fostering ‘multiepistemic literacy’ and political engagement.

Ultimately, decolonizing posthumanist geographies implies making political choices about the worlds we wish to enact, choices for some ways of living together over others. Although decoloniz-ing demands political choices, it is not an individual act; as both posthumanist and Indigenous theorizing suggest, we take steps and chart new paths in relation to and alongside a multiplicity of beings at all times. The exciting and challenging task ahead involves walking and talking the world into being as pluriversal. A world in which the multiplicity of living beings and objects are addressed as peers in constituting knowledges and worlds.

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this paper were delivered at the Fourth Annual Cascadia Critical Geographies Mini-Conference, UBC-Okanagan in 2009 and the 2011 Annual Meeting of the AAG. I thank audience members for insightful questions and comments. In addition, I am truly grateful to Emilie Cameron, Sarah de Leeuw, and Caroline Desbiens for their leadership in organizing this special issue and guidance in the revision process.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declares that there is no conflict of interest.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

1 As noted below, I use the term posthumanism to signal a diverse body of work by authors who may or may not identify with the label. On the relationship between dualist constructions of nature and culture and colonialism, see Val Plumwood, Feminism & the Mastery of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1993). On the colonial present, see B. Willems-Braun, ‘Buried Epistemologies: The Politics of Nature in (Post)colonial British Columbia’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 87, 1997, pp. 3–31.

2 For reviews of recent work, see: R. Panelli, ‘More-than-Human Social Geographies: Posthuman and Other Possibilities’, Progress in Human Geography, 34, 2010, pp. 79–87; In addition, see R-C. Collard,

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‘Cougar – Human Entanglements and the Biopolitical Un/Making of Safe Space’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 30, 2012, pp. 23–42; R-C. Collard, ‘Cougar Figures, Gender, and the Performances of Predation’, Gender, Place & Culture, 19, 2012, pp. 518-40; J. Dempsey, ‘Tracking Grizzly Bears in British Columbia’s Environmental Politics’, Environment and Planning A, 42, 2010, pp. 1138–56; S. Hinchliffe, M. Kearnes, M. Degen and S. Whatmore, ‘Urban Wild Things: A Cosmopoliti-cal Experiment’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 23, 2005, pp. 643−58; K. Hobson, ‘Political Animals? On Animals as Subjects in an Enlarged Political Geography’, Political Geography, 26, 2007, pp. 250−67; S. Whatmore, Hybrid Geographies: Natures, Cultures, Spaces (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2002); A. Watson and O.H. Huntington, ‘They’re Here – I Can Feel Them: The Epistemic Spaces of Indigenous and Western Knowledges’, Social and Cultural Geography, 9, 2008, pp. 257–81.

3 B. Latour, The Politics of Nature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). 4 Panelli, ‘More-than-Human Social Geographies’; Watson and Huntington, ‘They’re Here – I Can Feel

Them’, p. 258. 5 The term posthumanism is used in a number of other ways; for details, see C. Wolfe, What is Posthuman-

ism? (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); B. Braun, ‘Modalities of Posthumanism’, Environment and Planning A, 36, 2004, pp. 1352−5; N. Castree and C. Nash, ‘Posthuman Geographies’, Social & Cultural Geography, 7(4), 2006, pp. 501−4. My own approach is primarily influenced by K. Anderson, Race and the Crisis of Humanism (New York: Routledge, 2007); K. Barad, ‘Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28(3), 2003, pp. 801−31; D. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); B. Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

6 J.M. Blaut, The Colonizers Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History (New York: The Guilford Press, 1993); E. Dussel, ‘Eurocentrism and Modernity’, in J. Beverley, M. Aronna and J. Oviedo (eds), The Postmodernism Debate in Latin America (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 65−76.

7 I agree with Lawrence Berg that the term ‘white supremacist’ is more accurate to describe ‘present con-ditions in white settler societies like Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the USA as well as former European imperial powers like Germany, the UK, and Spain’, L. Berg, ‘Geographies of Identity I: Geog-raphy – (Neo)liberalism – White Supremacy’, Progress in Human Geography, 36, 2012, pp. 508−17. In making this argument, Berg is drawing on bell hooks as well as The Companion to African-American Philosophy. Broadly speaking, the term implies a social system in which whites have overwhelming control over power and resources.

8 W.S. Shaw, R.D.K. Herman and G.R. Dobbs, ‘Encountering Indigeneity: Re-Imagining and Decolonizing Geography’, Geografiska Annaler, 88(3), 2006, pp. 267–76 (268). See also J.T. Johnson, G. Cant, R. Howitt and E. Peters, ‘Creating Anti-colonial Geographies: Embracing Indigenous Peoples’ Knowledges and Rights’, Geographical Research, 45, 2007, pp. 117–20.

9 Watson and Huntington, ‘They’re Here – I Can Feel Them’; L.T. Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (New York: Zed Books, 1999); M. Kovach, Indigenous Methodolo-gies: Characteristics, Conversations, and Contexts (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009); R. Kuokkanen, Reshaping the University: Responsibility, Indigenous Epistemes, and the Logic of the Gift (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007); R. Pualani Louis, ‘Can You Hear Us Now? Voices from the Margin: Using Indigenous Methodologies in Geographic Research’, Geographical Research, 45, 2007, pp. 130−9.

10 Shaw et al., ‘Encountering Indigeneity’, p. 273; Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies; W. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).

11 Wolfe posed this question in relation to posthumanism; Wolfe, What is Posthumanism?, p. xvi. 12 Shaw et al., ‘Encountering Indigeneity’, p. 270; S.C. Larsen and J.T. Johnson, ‘In Between Worlds:

Place, Experience, and Research in Indigenous Geography’, Journal of Cultural Geography, 29, 2012, pp. 1−13.

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13 Kuokkanen, Reshaping the University, p. 57. Kuokkanen draws on Foucault in her understanding of episteme to mean ‘a lens through which we perceive the world; we use it to structure the statements that count as knowledge in a particular period.’

14 The notion of a ‘pluriversal world’ is advanced in the modernity/coloniality framework. See R. Gros-foguel, ‘Transmodernity, Border Thinking, and Global Coloniality: Decolonizing Political Economy and Postcolonial Studies’, Eurozine, 2008, available at <http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2008-07-04-gros-foguel-en.html>. A. Escobar, Territories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life, Redes (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); M. Blaser, Storytelling Globalization from the Chaco & Beyond (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); M. Blaser, ‘The Threat of the Yrmo: The Political Ontology of a Sustainable Hunting Program’, American Anthropologist, 111, 2009, pp. 10–20. The term was put forward earlier in G. Esteva and M.S. Prakash, Grassroots Post-Modernism: Remaking the Soil of Cultures (New York: Zed Books, 1998).

15 Zapatista Army of National Liberation, ‘Fourth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle’, 1996, <http://struggle.ws/mexico/ezln/jung4.html>.

16 T. Olesen, ‘Globalising the Zapatistas: From Third World Solidarity to Global Solidarity?’, Third World Quarterly, 25, 2004, pp. 255−67.

17 J. Sundberg, ‘Diabolic Caminos in the Desert & Cat Fights on the Río: A Post-Humanist Political Ecol-ogy of Boundary Enforcement in the United States-Mexico Borderlands’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 101, 2011, pp. 318−36, p. 321.

18 D. Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003), p. 4.

19 Whatmore, Hybrid Geographies; Hinchliffe et al., ‘Urban Wild Things’; N. Castree, ‘Environmen-tal Issues: Relational Ontologies and Hybrid Politics’, Progress in Human Geography, 27, 2003, pp. 203−11. On epistemologies of segmentation, see D.P. Dixon and J.P. Jones, ‘My Dinner with Derrida, or Spatial Analysis and Poststructuralism Do Lunch’, Environment and Planning A, 30, 1998, pp. 247−60.

20 Panelli, ‘Social Geographies: Encounters with Indigenous and More-than-White/Anglo Geographies’, Progress in Human Geography, 32, 2008, pp. 801–11; Larsen and Johnson, ‘In Between Worlds’; special issue of Geographical Research, 45, 2007, focused on ‘Indigenous Peoples’ Knowledges and Rights’; special issue of Geografiska Annaler B, 88, 2006; Panelli, ‘More-than-Human Social Geographies’; Watson and Huntington, ‘They’re Here – I Can Feel Them’.

21 J.T. Johnson and B. Murton, ‘Re/Placing Native Science: Indigenous Voices in Contemporary Construc-tions of Nature’, Geographical Research, 45, 2007, pp. 121–9. See also Plumwood, Feminism & the Mastery of Nature; Shaw et al., ‘Encountering Indigeneity’.

22 F. Apffel-Marglin (ed.), The Spirit of Regeneration: Andean Culture Confronting Western Notions of Development (New York: Zed Books, 1998); G. Cajete, A People’s Ecology: Explorations in Sustainable Living (Santa Fe, NM: Clear Light Publishers, 1999); G. Cajete, Native Science: Natural Laws of Inter-dependence (Santa Fe, NM: Clear Light Publishers, 2000); P. Cole, ‘An Academic Take on “Indigenous Traditions & Ecology”’, Canadian Journal of Environmental Education, 3, 1998, pp. 100−15; V. Deloria Jr, God Is Red: A Native View of Religion (Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 2003 [1973]); D.W. Gegeo and K.A. Watson-Gegeo ‘“How We Know”: Kwara’ae Rural Villagers Doing Indigenous Epistemology’, The Contemporary Pacific, 13, 2001, pp. 55−88; L. Little Bear, ‘Jagged Worldviews Colliding’, in M. Battiste (ed.), Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2000), pp. 77–85; R.M. Roberts and P.R. Wills, ‘Understanding Maori Epistemology: A Scientific Perspective’, in H. Wautischer (ed.), Tribal Epistemologies: Essays in the Philosophy of Anthropology (Brookfield: Ashgate, 1998), pp. 43–77; and Kuokkanen, Reshaping the University. Cajete argues that such work should not be viewed as exemplifying a coherent, ahistorical and placeless cosmology, but rather as situated stories of ‘complex human relationships in complex interaction with nature’ (Cajete, Native Science, p. 82).

23 Barad, ‘Posthumanist Performativity’; Blaser, Storytelling Globalization; J. Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York: Routledge, 1993).

24 D. Turnbull, ‘Maps, Narratives and Trails: Performativity, Hodology and Distributed Knowledges in Complex Adaptive Systems – An Approach to Emergent Mapping’, Geographical Research, 45, 2007, pp. 140–9, p. 147.

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25 W. Mignolo, ‘Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and Decolonial Freedom’, Theory, Culture & Society, 26, 2009, pp. 159−81; W. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territorial-ity, and Colonization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995).

26 Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies; Kovach, Indigenous Methodologies; Larsen and Johnson, ‘In Between Worlds’.

27 Wolfe, What is Posthumanism?, p. xiv. 28 Johnson and Murton, ‘Re/Placing Native Science’; Plumwood, Feminism & the Mastery of Nature;

Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance. 29 For some exceptions, see work mentioned in Panelli, ‘More-than-Human Social Geographies’; also see

articles mentioned in Larsen and Johnson, ‘In Between Worlds’. 30 Sundberg, ‘Diabolic Caminos in the Desert’. 31 The term ‘more-than-human’ is drawn from Whatmore, Hybrid Geographies. 32 B. Braun and S.J. Whatmore (eds), Political Matter. Technoscience, Democracy, and Public Life (Min-

neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). 33 Braun and Whatmore, Political Matter, p. xx. 34 Johnson and Murton, ‘Re/Placing Native Science’; Panelli, ‘‘More-than-Human Social Geographies’; R.

Howitt and S. Jackson, ‘Some Things Do Change: Indigenous Rights, Geographers and Geography in Australia’, The Australian Geographer, 29, 1998, pp. 155−73.

35 Kuokkanen, Reshaping the University, p. 6. 36 Braun and Whatmore, Political Matter, p. x. 37 See endnote 15 for an incomplete listing of such work. 38 Braun and Whatmore, Political Matter, p. xiv. 39 The same may be said about Isabelle Stengers’ contribution, which is based on the premise that ‘we

may have to face the eventual demands of beings that were comfortably put away as creatures of human imagination,’ such as goddesses, dijinns, and spirits. In calling forth a ‘we’ who do not believe in god-desses, the chapter implicitly alludes to a ‘them’ who do; I. Stengers, ‘Including Nonhumans in Political Theory: Opening Pandora’s Box’, in Braun and Whatmore (eds), Political Matter, p. 4.

40 Braun and Whatmore, Political Matter, p. xiv. 41 J. Bennett, ‘The Naive Ambition of Vital Materialism’, in Braun and Whatmore (eds), Political Matter,

p. 36. Emphasis in original. 42 Bennett, ‘The Naive Ambition of Vital Materialism’, p. 52. 43 Bennett, ‘The Naive Ambition of Vital Materialism’, p. 49. 44 Bennett, ‘The Naive Ambition of Vital Materialism’, p. 53. 45 B. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 46 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, p. 99. 47 D. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 2007). 48 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, p. 6. 49 Blaser, ‘The Threat of the Yrmo’. 50 Blaser, ‘The Threat of the Yrmo’, p. 15. 51 Blaser, ‘The Threat of the Yrmo’, p. 16. 52 See endnote 14. 53 M. Blaser, ‘Ontology and Indigeneity: On the Political Ontology of Heterogenous Assemblages’, cul-

tural geographies, 2012, p. 7, doi: 10.1177/1474474012462534. 54 A. Khasnabish, ‘Anarch@-Zapatismo: Anti-Capitalism, Anti-Power, and the Insurgent Imagination’,

Affinities: A Journal of Radical Theory, Culture, and Action, 5, 2011, pp. 70−95, p. 71. 55 T. Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London: Rout-

ledge, 2000). D. Turnbull, Masons, Tricksters and Cartographers: Comparative Studies in the Sociology of Scientific and Indigenous Knowledge (London: Routledge, 2003).

56 Turnbull, ‘Maps, Narratives and Trails’, p. 142. 57 Turnbull, ‘Maps, Narratives and Trails’.

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58 Turnbull, ‘Maps, Narratives and Trails’. See for instance, K. Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1996).

59 My thoughts on decolonizing were significantly influenced and enriched by comments made during the key note presentation and subsequent panel discussion of the Decolonizing Cascadia? Rethinking Critical Geographies 7th Annual Regional Mini-Conference, University of British Columbia, November 2012. Thanks to Sarah de Leuux, Margo Greenwood, Glen Coulthard, Sarah Hunt, and Harsha Walia.

60 Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places; Blaser, Storytelling Globalization. 61 Subcomandate Insurgente Marcos, ‘Opening Remarks at the First Intercontinental Encuentro For

Humanity and Against Neoliberalism’, in J. Ponce de León (ed.), Our Word Is Our Weapon: Selected Writings (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002), p. 103.

62 J. Holloway and E. Peláez (eds), Zapatista! Reinventing Revolution in Mexico (London: Pluto Press, 1998), p. 164.

63 G. Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues (New York: Routledge, 1990). See also K. Visweswaran, Fictions of Feminist Ethnography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).

64 P. Regan, Unsettling the Settler Within: Indian Residential Schools, Truth Telling, and Reconciliation in Canada (Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press, 2010), p. 11. For a discussion of the complexities of negotiating between different kinds of colonial experience, such as that of First Nations community members in British Columbia and a member of the South Asian (Indian) diaspora, see K. Heikkilä and G. Fondahl, ‘Co-Managed Research: Non-Indigenous Thoughts on an Indigenous Topon-ymy Project in Northern British Columbia’, Journal of Cultural Geography, 29, 2012, pp. 61−86. For debates about the positionality of people of color in relation to First Nations in Canada, see B. Lawrence and E. Dua, ‘Decolonizing Antiracism’, Social Justice, 32, 2005, pp. 120−43; and N. Sharma and C. Wright, ‘Decolonizing Resistance, Challenging Colonial States’, Social Justice, 35, 2008, pp. 120−38.

65 N. Maldonado-Torres, ‘On the Coloniality of Being’, Cultural Studies, 21, 2007, pp. 240−70, p. 243. Here, Maldonado-Torres is building on other authors in the modernity/coloniality research group, including W. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Bor-der Thinking (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); and A. Quijano, ‘Coloniality of Power, Knowledge, and Latin America’, Nepantla: Views from South, 1, 2000, pp. 533−80.

66 Howitt and Jackson, ‘Some Things Do Change’. 67 C. Harris, The Resettlement of British Columbia: Essays on Colonialism and Geographical Change

(Vancouver, BC: UBC Press, 1996), p. 194. 68 Willems-Braun, ‘Buried Epistemologies’; but see A. Lehtinen, ‘Politics of Decoupling: Breaks between

Indigenous and Imported Senses of the Nordic North’, Journal of Cultural Geography, 29, 2012, pp. 105−23.

69 For some exceptions, see endnote 19. 70 J. Fabian, Anthropology with an Attitude: Critical Essays (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,

2002) cited in Larsen and Johnson, ‘In Between Worlds’, p. 5. See also J. Fabian, Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000).

71 Zapatistas, Sixth Declaration of the Selva Lacandona, 2005, <http://www.zcommunications.org/sixth-declaration-of-the-selva-lacandona-by-subcomandante-marcos>.

72 Zapatistas, Sixth Declaration. 73 Kuokkanen, Reshaping the University, p. 117. 74 Kuokkanen, Reshaping the University, p. 118. 75 Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies. With few exceptions, geographical research with a focus on Indig-

enous people tends to frame them as objects of research and, according to Hodge and Lester, uses a colonial and researcher-centric model in its ‘conceptualization, development, structure and boundaries’ and is characterized by the ‘exclusion of an Indigenous conceptual method of explanation’; P. Hodge and J. Lester, ‘Indigenous Research: Whose Priority? Journeys and Possibilities of Cross Cultural Research in Geography’, Geographical Research, 44, 2006, pp. 41−51 pp. 44, 46.

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76 Johnson et al., ‘Creating Anti-colonial Geographies’, p. 199. In a frank and insightful paper, Heikkilä and Fondahl present the unexpected challenges that arose throughout a co-managed research project with band council and community members to document toponymic information on First Nation land, which would then be used to develop an outdoor science camp curriculum for the Nation’s youth; Heikkilä and Fondahl, ‘Co-Managed Research’. See also Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies.

77 Watson and Huntington, ‘They’re Here – I Can Feel Them’. 78 Watson and Huntington, ‘They’re Here – I Can Feel Them’, p. 258. 79 Watson and Huntington, ‘They’re Here – I Can Feel Them’, p. 257. 80 Kuokkanen, Reshaping the University, p. 155. 81 In Unsettling the Settler Within, Regan suggests settlers study Indigenous counter-narratives of law,

diplomacy, and peacemaking (p. 14). 82 K. Lloyd, S. Wright, S. Suchet-Pearson, L. Burarrwanga and Bawaka Country, ‘Reframing Development

through Collaboration: Towards a Relational Ontology of Connection in Bawaka, North East Arnhem Land’, Third World Quarterly, 33, 2012, pp. 1075−94, p. 1087.

83 Hodge and Lester, ‘Indigenous Research’; S. D. Leeuw, E.S. Cameron and M.L. Greenwood, ‘Participa-tory and Community-Based Research, Indigenous Geographies, and the Spaces of Friendship: A Critical Engagement’, The Canadian Geographer / Le Géographe canadien, 56, 2012, pp. 180–94.

84 Idle No More, Mission and Plan of Action, <http://www.idlenomore1.blogspot.ca/p/blog-page_11.html>.

85 Idle No More, < http://www.idlenomore1.blogspot.ca/2012/12/first-nations-to-hold-nationwide.html>. 86 The movement was sparked by legislation put forward by the Harper government that will unilaterally –

without consultation and consent – alter sections of the Indian Act and disregard treaties signed with First Nations. In addition, Omnibus Bill C-45 will affect the Canadian Environmental Protection Act and the Navigable Water Protection Act and, therefore, will potentially affect all inhabitants of the nation-state.

87 Lloyd et al., ‘Reframing Development through Collaboration’, p. 1088.

Biographical noteJuanita Sundberg is Associate Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia. Her current research, funded by the Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Council, examines how nature is enlisted to constitute the boundary between Mexico and the United States.