Esme G. Murdock is Chair and Associate Professor of American Indian Studies at San Diego State University. She is currently working on her book manuscript "Blood, Bone, and Land." "Blood, Bone, and Land" is a project of public ecological (re)memory anchored in the understanding that land has memory. Her methods include both Indigenous memory/re-memory work and Black feminist witnessing. She is, thus, writing a land history of the South Carolina Sea Coast that engages in the diverse and often erased ecological histories, ecological heritages, ethnobotanical knowledges, and complex relations of Indigenous and Afro-descended peoples within the colonial complex of multiple European powers.
Her research interests include environmental justice, Indigenous and Afro-descended environmental ethics, settler colonial theory, and decolonization as land/resource rematriation. Murdock comes to this work as a descendant of enslaved Africans and European settlers in North America. Her current work explores the devastating impacts of colonization and slavery on both Indigenous and Afro-descended peoples and environments on Turtle Island. She anchors her understanding of settler colonialism, in particular, in the experiences and theorization of Native and Black communities especially toward securing decolonial futures. She often writes back to mainstream environmental discourse that attempts to “read out” colonization as the context of environmental degradation and destruction, particularly in the settler colonies of the United States and Canada. Her work centers conceptions of land and relating to land found within both Indigenous and African American/Afro-descended environmental philosophies.
In our global neocolonial and neoliberal present, so-called solutions to settler-Indigenous confl... more In our global neocolonial and neoliberal present, so-called solutions to settler-Indigenous conflict are often framed as a reconciliation achieved through a multicultural democratic society. However, this conception of resolution frequently adopts a superficial understanding of culture that ultimately understands cultural difference as reconcilable in the sense that other cultures can be folded into or made compatible with dominant cultural norms. On Turtle Island (North America), especially within the settler colonial context, such reconciliation as resolution becomes a differently fashioned form of domination as assimilation especially from the vantage points of Indigenous nations and Afro-descended peoples. This essay explores the ontological incommensurabilities of cultural difference that resist assimilation or translation into dominant Euro-Western cultural frameworks. It does this through examining the way culture and ontological orientation, or world-senses, are made and live on through various modes of cultural preservation and practice. I examine these ideas through Indigenous practices of orality, origin stories, ceremony, and cultural revitalization.
Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 2022
This article argues against Jeremy Waldron’s supersession thesis by outlining several ways in whi... more This article argues against Jeremy Waldron’s supersession thesis by outlining several ways in which the historical injustice of settler colonialism is not past, but continuous. Through engaging with both contemporary settler colonial theory and contemporary Indigenous political theories, I argue that Waldron’s understanding of historical injustice and the focus on justice in the now, which may supersede historical claims, relies on both Eurowestern epistemological and temporal frameworks that are ill-suited for understanding the continuous nature of settler colonial violence, and thus what Indigenous justice requires. As such, I explain how the supersession thesis, specifically the supersession of sovereignty, contributes to a prominent theme in western liberal political theory that attempts to fix both settler colonial injustices and Indigenous nations to an irrecoverable chronological past.
This article proceeds from the thesis proposed by Frantz Fanon that colonialism, specifically set... more This article proceeds from the thesis proposed by Frantz Fanon that colonialism, specifically settler colonialism, is a world-destroying structure that the colonized witness as a "veritable apocalypse." Settler colonialism is apocalyptic not only in the sense that it attempts to permanently destroy and make irretrievable various other Indigenous worlds and ways of being-in-the-world, but also in that it builds the settler colonial world in, on, and with Indigenous lands and bodies. I read Fanon as proposing that settler colonialism builds apocalyptic worlds with the murdered worlds of the colonized and then forces the colonized to navigate and embrace these violent and traumatic landscapes, which I call terrortories. I argue this is directly connected to Fanon's revolutionary psychiatric work and practice to decolonize and disalienate colonial medical and psychiatric facilities as structures of disablement, which requires the abolition of settler colonialism altogether.
Western dominant global conservation is generally conceived of and understood as an unqualified '... more Western dominant global conservation is generally conceived of and understood as an unqualified 'good'. The dark side of this so-called unqualified 'good' is told explicitly by listening to the testimonies of Indigenous peoples, the world over, who bear witness to and enact resistance against the practices of dispossession, eviction, and forced incorporation into a capitalist economic underclass that serve as the means of achieving 'conservation'. This article offers a limited genealogy of this exclusionary conservation. It does so through focusing on the Euro-Western values integrated into this model that are steeped in histories and continuous practices of colonial dispossession.
This chapter serves as a basic introduction to environmental justice. It begins by giving some hi... more This chapter serves as a basic introduction to environmental justice. It begins by giving some historical background to the emergence of the term “environmental justice”. It then moves on to explain environmental justice as a movement concerned with the disproportionate burdening of communities of colour with environmental ills. This history is grounded in the lived experiences and realities of the communities experiencing environmental injustice, and as such examines various forms of resistance enacted by those communities to realize environmental justice. Finally, this chapter examines the ways in which making space for diverse and rich environmental histories, heritages, and identities is a crucial aspect of moving our global community toward the realization of environmental justice for all.
Staring squarely in the face of contemporary and continuous planetary climate crisis, the questio... more Staring squarely in the face of contemporary and continuous planetary climate crisis, the questions of how to intervene and act differently, both interpersonally and ecologically, are more pressing than ever. One increasingly popular move is reframing or recontextualizing humans’ relationship to Earth and our place within our planetary ecosystem. In attempts to recuperate or return to a less harmful framework for human–nature relationships, some have tried to give familiar human concepts a less anthropocentric interpretation. One such concept is citizenship, which some try to redefine in a more ecocentric fashion by the designation “ecological citizenship.” There are two different implications attached to this move. It can mean building a stronger obligation of care and respect toward non-human beings into the duties of human citizenship. Alternatively, but perhaps with the same ends in view, it can mean legally and constitutionally incorporating the independent rights and interests of natural beings and systems into the more-than-human political and moral community by broadening the status of citizen to include them.
Lands and bodies are often conceptualized as exhaustible objects and property within settler-colo... more Lands and bodies are often conceptualized as exhaustible objects and property within settler-colonial and neoliberal ideologies. These conceptualizations lead to underdevelopment of understandings of lands and bodies that fall outside of these ascriptions, and also attempt to actively obscure the pervasive ways in which settler colonialism violently reinscribes itself on the North American landscape through the murder and disappearance of Black and Brown women's bodies. In this article, I will argue that the continual murder and disappearance of Black and Brown women in North America facilitate the successful functioning of ongoing settler-colonial systems and projects. This violence creates and reinforces the functionality of Black/Brown bodies as the territory upon which settler identity and futurity gains traction, indeed, requires.
Why decolonize knowledge and philosophy? Pascah Mungwini proposes that epistemic decolonization s... more Why decolonize knowledge and philosophy? Pascah Mungwini proposes that epistemic decolonization should be implemented to remain true to the spirit of philosophy and to the idea of humanity. Aaron Creller, Michael Monahan, and Esme Murdock focus on different aspects of Mungwini’s proposal in their individual responses. Creller suggests some “best practices” so that comparative epistemology can take into account the parochial embeddedness of universal reason. While Monahan underscores that world philosophy as a project must openly acknowledge its own incompleteness and its instantiation in different world philosophies, Esme Murdock uses Glissant’s thoughts to make a case for the right to opacity as a strategy for subverting the dominating power of Euroamerican reason. In his reply, Mungwini underscores that philosophy will be able to increase the amount of justice, beauty, and truth in this world only when its practitioners begin to exhibit genuine pluralism in their work.
Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, 2020
This paper explores the tensions between two disparate approaches to addressing hunger worldwide:... more This paper explores the tensions between two disparate approaches to addressing hunger worldwide: Food security and food sovereignty. Food security generally focuses on ensuring that people have economic and physical access to safe and nutritious food, while food sovereignty (or food justice) movements prioritize the right of people and communities to determine their agricultural policies and food cultures. As food sovereignty movements grew out of critiques of food security initiatives, they are often framed as conflicting approaches within the wider literature. This paper explores this tension, arguing that food security is based on a particular model of justice, distributive justice, which limits the sovereignty and autonomy of communities as food producers and consumers. In contrast, food sovereignty movements view food security as a necessary part of food sovereignty, but ultimately insufficient for creating food sustainable communities and limiting wider harms. Rather than viewing food security and food sovereignty as in conflict, we argue that food sover-eignty's justice framework both encompasses and entails justice claims that guide food security projects.
The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of the City , 2019
The distinction between natural and urban spaces permeates much of Western dominant political and... more The distinction between natural and urban spaces permeates much of Western dominant political and environmental philosophy. This distinction in itself need not be problematic when used as an observational or descriptive category. However, like many other distinctions in the Western dominant tradition, the urban/natural distinction takes on the form of an oppositional dualism that implies unequal, hierarchical relationships between the relata (Warren 2000; Plumwood 1994). The natural/urban dualism is also not inert because these categories are infused with certain valued assumptions that affect how the humans who wield and construct these categories move through space, as well as how they act upon the world. In this chapter, I will trace the particular genesis of the urban/natural distinction as instrumental to a particular brand of mainstream environmentalism found in the United States. I will argue that this form of mainstream environmentalism is articulated predominantly from the social location of white, upper class, cisgender men while prescribed as universal. This particular form of environmentalism undertheorizes the city and urban areas as environmental spaces for a variety of reasons, which are directly linked to the simultaneous expansion and ignoring of environmental racism in these areas. In the first section, I give a brief historical overview of ways the urban/natural dualism has been used for various ends, with special attention to how this dualism creates and maintains ideas of what is properly an environment and who is properly environmental. In the second section, I examine the birth and growth of the US environmental justice movement as a direct response to the classist, sexist, and racist character of the mainstream environmental movement and the related exclusions of those people and places experiencing environmental racism. I will focus specifically on these exclusions as they pertain to urban communities of color. Finally, in the third section, I will examine how the emphasis on urban areas as degraded environmental spaces limits the space for imagining or experiencing positive environmental encounters in these spaces.
Transitional justice is positioned as an emergent discourse to grapple with the aim, and subseque... more Transitional justice is positioned as an emergent discourse to grapple with the aim, and subsequent practices, of moving societies mired in violent political relations to more stable, democratic political relations. Increasingly, precepts of transitional justice are being applied to political reconciliatory processes in so- called liberal democratic states. This article examines limitations to transitional justice paradigms especially when applied to Indigenous-state reconciliatory processes by centering Indigenous scholarly discourse critical of both transitional justice and reconciliation processes that position Indigenous peoples, Indigenous lands, and the landed violence of colonialism as fixed in the past. The article offers an analysis of the limitations of neoliberal transitional justice and reconciliation processes that do not realize justice for Indigenous peoples and Indigenous lands by highlighting Indigenous-centered accounts of justice that promote collective capacities of Indigenous nations rooted in the ability of Indigenous peoples to experience themselves in the world in ways that center relations to land, world, and relatives (human and non-human).
'Political reconciliation' refers to processes for establishing right relations between groups th... more 'Political reconciliation' refers to processes for establishing right relations between groups that are emerging from a history coloured by violent relations. However, dominant Western, euro-descendent philosophies of political reconciliation rarely focus on ecological forms of harm or consider practices of ecological violence as constitutive of the violent relations that reconciliation hopes to repair. This article argues that the exclusion of ecological dimensions of harm from dominant Western models of political reconciliation is one way of understanding Indigenous claims of dissatisfaction with such reconciliation projects. This article analyses and contextualises these claims of dissatisfaction by focusing on how dominant Western, euro-descendent models of reconciliation in the North American context import settler-colonial commitments that obscure the primacy of ecological violence in settler–Indigenous land-based conflicts. Furthermore, this article posits that settler-colonial commitments in reconciliation models pose an obstacle to deeper forms of reconciliation, partly because these models uphold dominant euro-descendent cosmologies and conceptions of land over and above Indigenous ones. Finally, this article suggests that that the possibility of deep reconciliation exists, and requires engaging with Indigenous philosophies that place land and relations to land at the centre of right relations, thus working toward decolonising settler-colonial-infused forms of reconciliation.
Murdock, E., and Noll, S. (forthcoming). “Beyond Access: Integrating Food Security and Food Sover... more Murdock, E., and Noll, S. (forthcoming). “Beyond Access: Integrating Food Security and Food Sovereignty Models for Justice.” In Know Your Food: Food Ethics and Innovation. Netherlands: Wageningen Academic Publishers.
In Nitinikiau Innusi: I Keep the Land Alive, Tshaukuesh Elizabeth Penashue shares the intimate de... more In Nitinikiau Innusi: I Keep the Land Alive, Tshaukuesh Elizabeth Penashue shares the intimate details of her lifelong activism, advocacy, and deep love for Innu people, lands, and culture. In my estimation, there really is no better name for the memoir than Nitinikiau Innusi because it captures the extent of love, respect, and reciprocity that a steadfast and challenging journey of protecting lands, waters, and peoples requires. The memoir illustrates the range of experiences and emotions that Penashue confronts and endures while advocating for Innu lands; at the same time, the memoir also makes clear that these lands form the author's sense of identity. The most salient theme throughout the book is the conception of land not as an object or commodity but as the central being through which all is connected and made possible. Indeed, Penashue's activism and advocacy for Innu culture is intimately wrapped up with how the land is identified and what the land does. People are not separate from the land; rather people work either for or against the land, which makes Penashue's memoir and activism a touchstone text for land protection and Indigenous resistance. To understand how Penashue's advocacy works with Innu culture and land protection, it is important to examine how she understands the impact of settler colonialism and land development. Many of Penashue's entries both touch upon and also rely on an understanding of the importance of land as nutshimit. Early on, editor Elizabeth Yeoman flags the importance of nutshimit, as well as the complications in adequately translating it. Nutshimit has been translated into English as "in the bush," which may also recall words or concepts in English such as "wilderness." However, Innu leader Tanien (Daniel) Ashwini understands these translations as reductive and unable to capture what the word actually means in Innu, which is more expansively an expression of being-at-home-in-the-world or land (xxvii). The understanding of the world land in English faces the same issue, with land largely being reduced to its noun status and not as a site or process of becoming-a verb-as it is within many Indigenous philosophies, including Innu. Other conventions of English also pose issues in understanding land or nutshimit precisely because English relies on inanimate nouns to refer to animate and agential beings, such as land (Kimmerer). This often imposes an understanding that humans are the beings that do things to land and land is a passive recipient of human action. This could not be farther from the truth and from the
In our global neocolonial and neoliberal present, so-called solutions to settler-Indigenous confl... more In our global neocolonial and neoliberal present, so-called solutions to settler-Indigenous conflict are often framed as a reconciliation achieved through a multicultural democratic society. However, this conception of resolution frequently adopts a superficial understanding of culture that ultimately understands cultural difference as reconcilable in the sense that other cultures can be folded into or made compatible with dominant cultural norms. On Turtle Island (North America), especially within the settler colonial context, such reconciliation as resolution becomes a differently fashioned form of domination as assimilation especially from the vantage points of Indigenous nations and Afro-descended peoples. This essay explores the ontological incommensurabilities of cultural difference that resist assimilation or translation into dominant Euro-Western cultural frameworks. It does this through examining the way culture and ontological orientation, or world-senses, are made and live on through various modes of cultural preservation and practice. I examine these ideas through Indigenous practices of orality, origin stories, ceremony, and cultural revitalization.
Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 2022
This article argues against Jeremy Waldron’s supersession thesis by outlining several ways in whi... more This article argues against Jeremy Waldron’s supersession thesis by outlining several ways in which the historical injustice of settler colonialism is not past, but continuous. Through engaging with both contemporary settler colonial theory and contemporary Indigenous political theories, I argue that Waldron’s understanding of historical injustice and the focus on justice in the now, which may supersede historical claims, relies on both Eurowestern epistemological and temporal frameworks that are ill-suited for understanding the continuous nature of settler colonial violence, and thus what Indigenous justice requires. As such, I explain how the supersession thesis, specifically the supersession of sovereignty, contributes to a prominent theme in western liberal political theory that attempts to fix both settler colonial injustices and Indigenous nations to an irrecoverable chronological past.
This article proceeds from the thesis proposed by Frantz Fanon that colonialism, specifically set... more This article proceeds from the thesis proposed by Frantz Fanon that colonialism, specifically settler colonialism, is a world-destroying structure that the colonized witness as a "veritable apocalypse." Settler colonialism is apocalyptic not only in the sense that it attempts to permanently destroy and make irretrievable various other Indigenous worlds and ways of being-in-the-world, but also in that it builds the settler colonial world in, on, and with Indigenous lands and bodies. I read Fanon as proposing that settler colonialism builds apocalyptic worlds with the murdered worlds of the colonized and then forces the colonized to navigate and embrace these violent and traumatic landscapes, which I call terrortories. I argue this is directly connected to Fanon's revolutionary psychiatric work and practice to decolonize and disalienate colonial medical and psychiatric facilities as structures of disablement, which requires the abolition of settler colonialism altogether.
Western dominant global conservation is generally conceived of and understood as an unqualified '... more Western dominant global conservation is generally conceived of and understood as an unqualified 'good'. The dark side of this so-called unqualified 'good' is told explicitly by listening to the testimonies of Indigenous peoples, the world over, who bear witness to and enact resistance against the practices of dispossession, eviction, and forced incorporation into a capitalist economic underclass that serve as the means of achieving 'conservation'. This article offers a limited genealogy of this exclusionary conservation. It does so through focusing on the Euro-Western values integrated into this model that are steeped in histories and continuous practices of colonial dispossession.
This chapter serves as a basic introduction to environmental justice. It begins by giving some hi... more This chapter serves as a basic introduction to environmental justice. It begins by giving some historical background to the emergence of the term “environmental justice”. It then moves on to explain environmental justice as a movement concerned with the disproportionate burdening of communities of colour with environmental ills. This history is grounded in the lived experiences and realities of the communities experiencing environmental injustice, and as such examines various forms of resistance enacted by those communities to realize environmental justice. Finally, this chapter examines the ways in which making space for diverse and rich environmental histories, heritages, and identities is a crucial aspect of moving our global community toward the realization of environmental justice for all.
Staring squarely in the face of contemporary and continuous planetary climate crisis, the questio... more Staring squarely in the face of contemporary and continuous planetary climate crisis, the questions of how to intervene and act differently, both interpersonally and ecologically, are more pressing than ever. One increasingly popular move is reframing or recontextualizing humans’ relationship to Earth and our place within our planetary ecosystem. In attempts to recuperate or return to a less harmful framework for human–nature relationships, some have tried to give familiar human concepts a less anthropocentric interpretation. One such concept is citizenship, which some try to redefine in a more ecocentric fashion by the designation “ecological citizenship.” There are two different implications attached to this move. It can mean building a stronger obligation of care and respect toward non-human beings into the duties of human citizenship. Alternatively, but perhaps with the same ends in view, it can mean legally and constitutionally incorporating the independent rights and interests of natural beings and systems into the more-than-human political and moral community by broadening the status of citizen to include them.
Lands and bodies are often conceptualized as exhaustible objects and property within settler-colo... more Lands and bodies are often conceptualized as exhaustible objects and property within settler-colonial and neoliberal ideologies. These conceptualizations lead to underdevelopment of understandings of lands and bodies that fall outside of these ascriptions, and also attempt to actively obscure the pervasive ways in which settler colonialism violently reinscribes itself on the North American landscape through the murder and disappearance of Black and Brown women's bodies. In this article, I will argue that the continual murder and disappearance of Black and Brown women in North America facilitate the successful functioning of ongoing settler-colonial systems and projects. This violence creates and reinforces the functionality of Black/Brown bodies as the territory upon which settler identity and futurity gains traction, indeed, requires.
Why decolonize knowledge and philosophy? Pascah Mungwini proposes that epistemic decolonization s... more Why decolonize knowledge and philosophy? Pascah Mungwini proposes that epistemic decolonization should be implemented to remain true to the spirit of philosophy and to the idea of humanity. Aaron Creller, Michael Monahan, and Esme Murdock focus on different aspects of Mungwini’s proposal in their individual responses. Creller suggests some “best practices” so that comparative epistemology can take into account the parochial embeddedness of universal reason. While Monahan underscores that world philosophy as a project must openly acknowledge its own incompleteness and its instantiation in different world philosophies, Esme Murdock uses Glissant’s thoughts to make a case for the right to opacity as a strategy for subverting the dominating power of Euroamerican reason. In his reply, Mungwini underscores that philosophy will be able to increase the amount of justice, beauty, and truth in this world only when its practitioners begin to exhibit genuine pluralism in their work.
Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, 2020
This paper explores the tensions between two disparate approaches to addressing hunger worldwide:... more This paper explores the tensions between two disparate approaches to addressing hunger worldwide: Food security and food sovereignty. Food security generally focuses on ensuring that people have economic and physical access to safe and nutritious food, while food sovereignty (or food justice) movements prioritize the right of people and communities to determine their agricultural policies and food cultures. As food sovereignty movements grew out of critiques of food security initiatives, they are often framed as conflicting approaches within the wider literature. This paper explores this tension, arguing that food security is based on a particular model of justice, distributive justice, which limits the sovereignty and autonomy of communities as food producers and consumers. In contrast, food sovereignty movements view food security as a necessary part of food sovereignty, but ultimately insufficient for creating food sustainable communities and limiting wider harms. Rather than viewing food security and food sovereignty as in conflict, we argue that food sover-eignty's justice framework both encompasses and entails justice claims that guide food security projects.
The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of the City , 2019
The distinction between natural and urban spaces permeates much of Western dominant political and... more The distinction between natural and urban spaces permeates much of Western dominant political and environmental philosophy. This distinction in itself need not be problematic when used as an observational or descriptive category. However, like many other distinctions in the Western dominant tradition, the urban/natural distinction takes on the form of an oppositional dualism that implies unequal, hierarchical relationships between the relata (Warren 2000; Plumwood 1994). The natural/urban dualism is also not inert because these categories are infused with certain valued assumptions that affect how the humans who wield and construct these categories move through space, as well as how they act upon the world. In this chapter, I will trace the particular genesis of the urban/natural distinction as instrumental to a particular brand of mainstream environmentalism found in the United States. I will argue that this form of mainstream environmentalism is articulated predominantly from the social location of white, upper class, cisgender men while prescribed as universal. This particular form of environmentalism undertheorizes the city and urban areas as environmental spaces for a variety of reasons, which are directly linked to the simultaneous expansion and ignoring of environmental racism in these areas. In the first section, I give a brief historical overview of ways the urban/natural dualism has been used for various ends, with special attention to how this dualism creates and maintains ideas of what is properly an environment and who is properly environmental. In the second section, I examine the birth and growth of the US environmental justice movement as a direct response to the classist, sexist, and racist character of the mainstream environmental movement and the related exclusions of those people and places experiencing environmental racism. I will focus specifically on these exclusions as they pertain to urban communities of color. Finally, in the third section, I will examine how the emphasis on urban areas as degraded environmental spaces limits the space for imagining or experiencing positive environmental encounters in these spaces.
Transitional justice is positioned as an emergent discourse to grapple with the aim, and subseque... more Transitional justice is positioned as an emergent discourse to grapple with the aim, and subsequent practices, of moving societies mired in violent political relations to more stable, democratic political relations. Increasingly, precepts of transitional justice are being applied to political reconciliatory processes in so- called liberal democratic states. This article examines limitations to transitional justice paradigms especially when applied to Indigenous-state reconciliatory processes by centering Indigenous scholarly discourse critical of both transitional justice and reconciliation processes that position Indigenous peoples, Indigenous lands, and the landed violence of colonialism as fixed in the past. The article offers an analysis of the limitations of neoliberal transitional justice and reconciliation processes that do not realize justice for Indigenous peoples and Indigenous lands by highlighting Indigenous-centered accounts of justice that promote collective capacities of Indigenous nations rooted in the ability of Indigenous peoples to experience themselves in the world in ways that center relations to land, world, and relatives (human and non-human).
'Political reconciliation' refers to processes for establishing right relations between groups th... more 'Political reconciliation' refers to processes for establishing right relations between groups that are emerging from a history coloured by violent relations. However, dominant Western, euro-descendent philosophies of political reconciliation rarely focus on ecological forms of harm or consider practices of ecological violence as constitutive of the violent relations that reconciliation hopes to repair. This article argues that the exclusion of ecological dimensions of harm from dominant Western models of political reconciliation is one way of understanding Indigenous claims of dissatisfaction with such reconciliation projects. This article analyses and contextualises these claims of dissatisfaction by focusing on how dominant Western, euro-descendent models of reconciliation in the North American context import settler-colonial commitments that obscure the primacy of ecological violence in settler–Indigenous land-based conflicts. Furthermore, this article posits that settler-colonial commitments in reconciliation models pose an obstacle to deeper forms of reconciliation, partly because these models uphold dominant euro-descendent cosmologies and conceptions of land over and above Indigenous ones. Finally, this article suggests that that the possibility of deep reconciliation exists, and requires engaging with Indigenous philosophies that place land and relations to land at the centre of right relations, thus working toward decolonising settler-colonial-infused forms of reconciliation.
Murdock, E., and Noll, S. (forthcoming). “Beyond Access: Integrating Food Security and Food Sover... more Murdock, E., and Noll, S. (forthcoming). “Beyond Access: Integrating Food Security and Food Sovereignty Models for Justice.” In Know Your Food: Food Ethics and Innovation. Netherlands: Wageningen Academic Publishers.
In Nitinikiau Innusi: I Keep the Land Alive, Tshaukuesh Elizabeth Penashue shares the intimate de... more In Nitinikiau Innusi: I Keep the Land Alive, Tshaukuesh Elizabeth Penashue shares the intimate details of her lifelong activism, advocacy, and deep love for Innu people, lands, and culture. In my estimation, there really is no better name for the memoir than Nitinikiau Innusi because it captures the extent of love, respect, and reciprocity that a steadfast and challenging journey of protecting lands, waters, and peoples requires. The memoir illustrates the range of experiences and emotions that Penashue confronts and endures while advocating for Innu lands; at the same time, the memoir also makes clear that these lands form the author's sense of identity. The most salient theme throughout the book is the conception of land not as an object or commodity but as the central being through which all is connected and made possible. Indeed, Penashue's activism and advocacy for Innu culture is intimately wrapped up with how the land is identified and what the land does. People are not separate from the land; rather people work either for or against the land, which makes Penashue's memoir and activism a touchstone text for land protection and Indigenous resistance. To understand how Penashue's advocacy works with Innu culture and land protection, it is important to examine how she understands the impact of settler colonialism and land development. Many of Penashue's entries both touch upon and also rely on an understanding of the importance of land as nutshimit. Early on, editor Elizabeth Yeoman flags the importance of nutshimit, as well as the complications in adequately translating it. Nutshimit has been translated into English as "in the bush," which may also recall words or concepts in English such as "wilderness." However, Innu leader Tanien (Daniel) Ashwini understands these translations as reductive and unable to capture what the word actually means in Innu, which is more expansively an expression of being-at-home-in-the-world or land (xxvii). The understanding of the world land in English faces the same issue, with land largely being reduced to its noun status and not as a site or process of becoming-a verb-as it is within many Indigenous philosophies, including Innu. Other conventions of English also pose issues in understanding land or nutshimit precisely because English relies on inanimate nouns to refer to animate and agential beings, such as land (Kimmerer). This often imposes an understanding that humans are the beings that do things to land and land is a passive recipient of human action. This could not be farther from the truth and from the
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