Indigenous
Peoples Specialty Group Selected Sponsored sessions, |
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Jay Johnson & Brian Murton, University of Hawai‘i "Colonialism and Place in Settler Colonies: Indigenous Agency and the Construction of Nature in the Contact Zone" One of the characteristics of modernity has always been its’ autocentric picture of itself as the expression of universal certainty. This is nowhere more apparent than in discussions about Nature, where the impact and contributions of regions beyond Europe have barely begun to enter scholarly awareness. Among geographers some preliminary attempts have been made to recognize Indigenous agency, but they have focused on either one of two possible tracks; resource management and environmental transformations or textual analysis of narratives of exploration and scientific discovery. Our interest here is in re/placing the Native; both informant and scholar, within this construction of nature, ending a temporal, spatial and textual dis/placement which has denied the agency of Indigenous voices within discussions of Nature. This dis/placement of Indigenous voices came at a moment in time when Western thought was dichotomizing (nature from culture, space from place, etc.) creating separations and uneven relationships between the dualisms. In this paper we intend to begin healing the separation and uneven relationship between culture and nature through two examples. In the first, an early 19th century explorer’s narrative in New Zealand, our focus is on re/placing the native informant within a European colonial account and the second example focuses on the writings of a contemporary Native American scholar whose work demonstrates the indivisibility of nature, culture and place in Indigenous thought. Email: jayj (at) hawaii.edu
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