Indigenous Peoples Specialty Group
Sponsored Session
2008 Annual Meeting
Association of American Geographers
Boston, Massachusettes, April 15-19 2008

Title:

Indigenizing Spaces: Deep-Spatial Perspectives on Place

Description:

The notion that places/spaces require "indigenizing" is a response to the dominant problem our planet faces today: most of Mother Earth's landscapes and seascapes have been extensively modified by a human cultures, essentially shaped by a Western logic and world-view, with damaging consequences to the environment and ecosystems that constitute these places. The challenge Indigenous Peoples face in this time of greatly accelerated climate change—the Age of Global Burning—is complex, but this paper argues it is fundamentally two-fold in character: first, how do we maintain deep-spatial traditions of life-connectedness to places we call home? And second, in places where environmental destruction has seriously disrupted these deep-spatial traditions, how do we restore and in some cases even imagine ways to reconstitute sustainable nature-culture nexuses to allow for the emergence of 'new' deep-spatial Indigenous traditions? This paper suggests one useful way to approach the climate-change challenge is to enact Indigenous ingenuity or Indigenuity. By doing so Indigenous Peoples can demonstrate that what much of what humankind presently faces has less to do with 'nature', but more to do with resituating culture in a nexus of nature and culture.

Anticipated Attendance:

150

Organizers:

Chairs:

Participants:

Sponsorships:

Indigenous Peoples Specialty Group