ii. Place-Thought

Decolonizing Nature

Place-Thought

Vanessa Watts, in her paper Indigenous Place-Thought and Agency amongst Humans and Non-Humans, describes the creation story of the Haudenosaunee as translated by John Mohawk— “Sky Woman fell from a hole in the sky. John Mohak writes of her journey towards the waters below. On her descent, Sky Woman fell through the clouds and air towards water below. During her descent, birds could see this falling creature and saw she could not fly. They came to her and helped to lower her slowly to waters beneath her. The birds told Turtle that she must need a place to land, as she possessed no water legs. Turtle rose up, breaking through the surface so that Sky Woman could land on Turtle’s back. Once landed, Sky Woman and Turtle began to form the earth, the land becoming an extension of their bodies.” 131

Watts discusses this Creation story to discuss Place-Thought as a framework for understanding the World—the premise that land is alive and thinking and that all humans and non-humans derive agency from the extension of this premise. 132 She places Place-Thought in opposition to Eurocentric ontological framework of understanding the world, in order to point out the differences in understanding the creation of societies and how the latter colonized the former, by labelling it as “mythic” and not modern. She discusses how Europcentric epistemological and ontological frameworks exist in the abstract, and the articulation of this abstract results in a divide of “epistemological/ theoretical versus ontological/praxis.” 133 But the Place-Thought framework, as she describes it, is a literal translation of the Sky Woman’s thought and not an abstraction. The complex theories of being and existence, therefore, are not and cannot be distinct from place itself. When the Sky Woman falls on the back of a turtle, she becomes land herself, and placethought is therefore, her communication with life around her. Place-thought also gives agency to nonhumans to form “societies” and not merely ecosystems as dictated by Eurocentric thought and knowledge. 134 This understanding of agency blurs the boundaries between nature and culture, and between human/ non-human beings and the land. This blurring is rooted in what Dwayne Donald calls “ethical relationality” which he describes as “an enactment of our ecological imagination. Ethical relationality doesn’t deny that we’re different, so it’s not a way to say that we’re all the same. But it seeks to understand more deeply how our different histories and experiences position us in relationto each other. It is an ethical imperative to see that despite our varied place-based cultures and knowledge systems, we live in the world together and must constantly think and act with reference to those relationships.” 135 Donald discusses ethical relationality from the framework of Place-Thought, where the relationships that are discussed stem from the understanding of the land as being alive, and all inter- and intra-species relationships gather agecy from that fact.

The discourse of Place-Thought, as is with all Indigenous Knowledge, is often disregarded in Eurocentric frameworks, because epistemologies based in storytelling are regarded as “old” and not in conjunction with the discourse of modernity. In order to shift perceptions to regard a post-capitalist world, this thesis rejects the notion of the oikos that emerges from Eurocentric framework of understanding the world, and uses the Place-Thought lens to establish relationships between localized realities and planetary realities.

131. Vanessa Watts, “Indigenous Place-Thought and Agency Amongst Humans and Non Humans (First Woman and Sky Woman Go On a European World Tour!).” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society,2(1), 20-34. 2013. 132 Watts, 21. 133. Ibid, 23. 134. Ibid, 23. 135. Heather M. Davis, E. Turpin, and Zoe Todd, “Indigenizing the Anthropocene,” in Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies (London: Open Humanities Press, 2015), 249.

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