“Muskrat Theories, Tobacco in the Streets, and Living Chicago as Indigenous Land” is a structurally interesting essay; it is built around the figure of the muskrat, an animal that lives in wetlands. Wetlands are typically drained as settlers arrive, and that was the case in Chicago, “formerly known as Shikaakwa, among other names of this land” (38), where what was a wetland was drained to build a city. “The filling in of wetlands–their intended erasure–can be viewed as perhaps a climatic move of settler colonialism–the attempted replacement of original lands with new land structures” (38). This drainage is an example of geographic violence (38). However, Indigenous people still live in Chicago, despite attempts at erasing them along with the region’s geography (38).
At the turn of the century, “Indigenous elders began walking the perimeter of the Great Lakes to bring awareness to the declining health of the lakes and the earth at large,” the co-authors continue (38). “Members of the Chicago inter-tribal American Indian community participated in one of these walks nearly a decade ago,” and out of that activity came a plan “to develop innovative science learning environments for Native youth, families, and community living in Chicago” (38). This paper, the co-authors state, is about survivable, which to them “means working to move our practice beyond historicized us/them dichotomies and willfully contradicting common narratives of assimilate and landless urban Indians toward longer views of our communities and our homelands not enclosed by colonial timeframes” (39).
The co-authors are Indigenous teachers from many different nations who “have learned to live, be members of families, and make community in Chicago/Shikaakwa, consciously together” (39). Their project sets out to decolonize science pedagogy by entering “Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies by (re)storying our relationships to Chicago as altered, impacted, yet still, always, Indigenous lands–whether we are in currently ceded urban territory or not” (39). The co-authors argue that “the constructions of land, simplicity or explicitly, as no longer Indigenous, are foundational implicated in teaching and learning about the natural world, whether that be in science education, place-based education or environmental education” (39). All of these are sites of struggle “because they typically reify the epistemic, ontological, and axiological issues that have shaped Indigenous histories” (39). They see these forms of education as “sites of potential transforming–forming a nexus between epistemologies and ontologies of land and Indigenous futurity,” but such transformation “will require engaging with land-based perspectives and desettling dynamics of settler colonialism that remain quietly buried in educational environments that engage learning about, with and in the land and all of its dwellers” (39).
For the co-authors, land-based science learning, which they call “an emergent form of urban Indigenous land-based pedagogies,” enables “epistemological and ontological balancing that significantly impacted learning for urban Indigenous youth and families” (39-40). Settler colonialism is entrenched in the forms of education they have identified (40). They critique place-based education and critical pedagogy; while these are competing or dichotomous discourses, the co-authors wonder about their possibilities for Indigenous liberation, since they are part of settler colonialism (40). “In our view, pathways and pedagogies that make explicit and resist the epistemic and ontological consequences of settler colonialism . . . will be necessary for viable, just, and sustainable change,” they write (41). Land-based education can do this work, but it must avoid reifying the epistemology of western knowledge and attacking Indigenous ways of knowing (41).
The “zero point epistemology” (ZPE) they see as characteristic of western knowledge “teaches conceptions of place in the service of settler colonial legitimacy,” which disavows Indigenous presence on the land and sees the land as either “fertile for human cultivation or endangered and in need of paternalistic protection” (41). Zero point epistemology sees learning as happening in the mind, rather than as connected “to one’s body and to lands” (41). “If we are to disrupt relationships to land that are constructed from the ZPE, then critical considerations of the ontological and epistemological foundations of much of the content being taken up and normalized in learning environments . . . is necessary,” they state (42).
Another way of thinking that must be disrupted are the “[d]eficit narratives of Indigenous communities,” which claim that urban spaces are not part of Indigenous homelands or sacred places (42). These stories frame Indigenous land “through postcontact dispossessions” and use “a logic of elimination” that suggests that urban Indigenous people are not truly Indigenous (42-43). They believe that developing “liberatory learning environments . . . will hinge on the ways in which constructs of culture and land, as well as the epistemic and ontological stances embedded therein, are conceptualized, encoded and facilitated” (43). Both zero point epistemology and anthropocentrism need to be disrupted; both are “destructive to Indigenous cosmologies,” which are premised on relationships with the world, not dominance over it (43). “Place-based education actively works toward being non anthropocentric,” but the co-authors believe that “accomplishing this transformation in lived practice, requires deeper consideration of the intersections between settler colonialism, the content derived from normative scientific paradigms that has been constructed around the division of nature and culture and is routinely taken up in learning environments” (43). Anthropocentrism is a way of thinking typical of settler colonialism (44). In contrast, they argue that the land is central, not its human inhabitants, and critique the ways that “mobile modernity” has disembedded people from places (44). Humans should be seen as part of ecosystems, not outside of them (44).
Next the co-authors describe their “six-year community-based design research project” (45). They discuss their methodology at length; I skipped over that part, particularly their discussion of the project’s planning phases, and landed on the issue of non-Indigenous plants and naming. They focus on common buckthorn, which was brought to North America in the early 19th century (47). That plant “is particularly destructive to woodlands and oak savanna and is considered a deeply problematic invasive species” (47). The co-authors object to the term “invasive species” because it denies a relationship to those species (47). “Thus, the term invasive species placed buckthorn, and other plants that were forcibly migrated to Chicago, outside our design principle around naming our plant relatives because while they may not have been our relatives, the term disposed them as relatives to any humans,” they write. “Further, the term failed to make visible the motivation of settlers that brought flora and fauna from their homelands to make these new lands like home–or what has been termed ecological imperialism” (47). They worked to find “a name centred in our own epistemic and ontological centers,” and began calling those species “plants that people lost their relationships with” (47). The learned more about how those plants migrated to Chicago “and their relationship with contact and colonialism” (47). “Using pedagogical language like ‘plants that people have lost their relationship with,’ ruptures the epistemology of the zero point, because it begins to always see ontology and epistemology and refuses a settler colonial narrative of and relationship to land,” they state (47-48). I find this discussion interesting, because my yard is being overrun with buckthorn, but I’m not sure that changing what I call the plant will mean anything in practical terms: I still need to remove it if I want the native species I’ve planted to survive. Otherwise they will be crowded out by the buckthorn, and that’s the only plant that will remain.
In a similar way, the researchers and research participants began thinking about their relationships to the waters as well (48). They compared natural and restored wetlands in order to make explicit “the ways in which the altering and restructuring of land in North America was and is a foundational practice in settler colonial paradigms” (48). They considered the difference between “land altering toward erasure and land altering for aiding” (48). They were particularly interested in areas that were becoming wetlands through neglect, where “plant relatives and water were remerging” in abandoned areas (48). They note that Indigenous people managed prairie areas by burning them, something that is done in prairie restorations as a way of eliminating non-native species (48). They began “to track and weave” into their thinking “the waves of ecological restructuring that has occurred in Chicago; from the filling of wetlands, to the reengineering of the direction of the Chicago river, the mass destruction of prairie lands for agriculture, to the importing of plants from other places” (48-49). “Relentless efforts to story land from long views of time and experience, and elevating the importance of and reclaiming naming practices we see as critical dimensions in urban land based pedagogies,” they state (49). They “worked to make always visible the history and change of the lands we live in, in short, land became our first teacher and our learning environments emerge from there” (49).
The point of their research, it seems, is to make sense of what plants “see” (49). This move is “a non-anthropocentric stance that ruptures normative paradigms of plants” (49). I’m not sure what that means; surely they aren’t dismissing the usual distinction between indigenous and non-indigenous plants–or are they? I wish the writing here was clearer. “In effect, re-centering our perceptual habits in Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies, we came to see land re-becoming itself and reclaim our continuing presence . . . in Chicago and Shikaakwa from narratives of deficit and disposed urban Indians,” they write (49).
“Re-storying Chicago required journeying through these layers of colonial fill, which quietly operate in teaching and learning environments to make visible dynamics of settler colonialism,” they conclude (49). Those dynamics include “the broad constructions [of] Indigenous absence and various forms of Indigenous presence,” “the constructions of lands as uninhabited or that make invisible the waves of land restructuring over time,” and “specific examples from an urban land based education project that centred Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies” (49). “As Indigenous people, we do not need to re-inhabit or learn to dwell in the places in which we have always dwelt,” they state (49). Their process was instead about “learning from land to restore(y) it and ourselves as original inhabitants–that is living our stories in contested lands and restoring land as the first teacher even in ‘urban’ lands” (49). “Narratives in which Indigenous people are absent, or relegated to a liberal multiculturalism that subsumes Indigenous dominion to occupancy, and narratives and positioning of land as backdrop for anthropocentric life, will only help to produce new narratives of territorial acquisition and fail to bring about needed social change,” they write (49). I am not sure what the word “dominion” is doing in that sentence: if Indigenous people had dominion over the land, how would Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies be different from their settler colonial counterparts? I don’t understand.
Being blind to the land would lead to a ceding of Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies, the co-authors continue (49). “Our project helped to expand the mental awakenings in our community and to build possibilities toward young people not being forced into genesis amnesia”–they cite Pierre Bourdieu here–“in the service of settler futurity,” the co-authors state. “The (re)storying of these ontologies and epistemologies meant we could move towards Indigenous identity and possibility living in our ceded lands not defined by current power paradigms of simultaneous dispossession and containment and able to resist and act on dimensions of political, sociological, and ideological prescriptions that produce them and ensure settler futures” (50). The paper ends, as it began, with the muskrat: “we believe Muskrat will dive and help re-story our lands again as we continue our paths of becoming” (50).
What to make of all of this? I’m not immediately sure. Perhaps the arrival of settlers in North America was like the arrival of the glaciers, causing similar geographic, biological, and now even climatic disruptions. But what can be done about that now? Can the land really take care of itself? Is weeding a garden–a vegetable garden or a planting of native prairie plants–really a paternalistic activity? How would that activity be different from the way Indigenous people used fire to knock back the woody plants that tend to invade grassland when they can, and instead encourage the growth of grasses that bison preferred to eat? I like their references to Doreen Massey’s notion of space as being composed of a multitude of unfinished stories, but I’m not sure how those references fit with the need to remove buckthorn (one of oh-so-many invasive species) from wetlands or forests or grasslands. Yes, buckthorn is now part of the story, but does that mean that the story must become one in which buckthorn (or leafy spurge or purple loosestrife or, hell, canola and barley) took over and left no space for anything else? I think about the issues this article raises as I walk around this city–particularly on its outskirts, which are a mixture of factories and fields of barley and wheat and canola–and wonder what it looked like here before settlers arrived. I understand that all the land is sacred, but it is so difficult to apprehend that sacredness when I’m walking past a farm-equipment factory or a field of canola, and so much easier to catch a glimpse of that sacredness when I’m on one of the few remnants of native grassland or in an aspen forest. Is there something fundamentally wrong about that response to the land, according to the authors of this essay? Is that–what? nostalgia? loss? grief?–an anthropocentric reaction, no different from the settlers who saw the grassland as an obstacle to getting rich growing wheat? (Not that they did–most of them.) I’m going to have to think more about this paper. I wish that I could figure it out immediately. But I’m not sure I can.
Work Cited
Bang, Megan, Lawrence Curley, Adam Kessel, Ananda Marin, Eli S. Suzukovich III, and George Strack. “Muskrat Theories, Tobacco in the Streets, and Living Chicago as Indigenous Land.” Environmental Education Research vol. 20, no. 1, 2014, pp. 37-55. DOI: 10.1080/13504622.2013.865113.
