Indigenous geography could change how we relate to the Earth
"Geography can be maps. But it can also be something deeply personal, like how we interact with space."
The vision
“Native people are still here regardless of what the settler colonial state might try and say. You can uplift and amplify that ongoing relationship with the land here and now.”
— Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles, PhD
The spotlight
Climate change is a world-ending problem: Flooding, fires, hurricanes, and heat are threatening life and land, and could render parts of the planet uninhabitable. But when Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles gives their students advice on what to do about it, one of the things they recommend is to simply go for a walk. Smiles is an assistant professor of geography at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, and a leader in the field of Indigenous geography. They are a citizen of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibewe, and they research how Indigenous people have cultivated relationships with the land that are ceremonial, historic — and ever evolving, including in the wake of climate change.
As colonial governments engage with traditional ecological knowledge more seriously, Smiles’ work is a timely reminder of how seemingly small changes to your routine can have a big impact on your point of view. Indigenous geography offers a stark contrast to a worldview based on extraction and exploitation.
Many societies have cataloged the world around them to make maps and meaning out of the land, but colonial ways of contextualizing the world have also often utilized geography as a way to divide and sequester land from Indigenous peoples.
In a 2008 paper, RDK Herman explored how the field of geography cements its scholarship in colonial ways of thinking. Herman, who is not Indigenous, wrote that this removes many of the ways original inhabitants of the land related to the lakes, rivers, sky, and the Earth — often justifying violent land possession under the guise of empirical and enlightened thought.
There are multiple Indigenous geographies, Smiles said — as many as there are tribes in the world. But collectively, the field is about a worldview in which people are a part of the land they’re on, something “modernist geography” fails to incorporate. In Hawai‘i, for example, the Indigenous ʻŌiwi people consider the ocean an important relative that is afforded agency.
Though there is growing interest in traditional knowledge from tribes, in academia, approaches like these challenge the status quo. Incorporating tribal epistemologies into the field of geography has gotten Smiles accused of not being objective.
“Objectivity does not mean you’re not passionate about these kinds of things. It’s about if we can really tell the truth about what’s going on,” they said.
If the last time you engaged with geography was looking at place names on a map, or directions from Point A to Point B, Smiles’s point is that geography can be a tool for examining large issues like climate change through a series of relationships — not just a collection of lines drawn on a map by colonial powers.
I spoke with Smiles about how Indigenous geography shakes up what most of us understand the field to be. It’s an academic pursuit, but also a shift in thinking that suggests something as simple as taking a walk can change a person’s colonial outlook on the world. Their responses have been edited and condensed for clarity.
Q. My only experience with geography on the day-to-day is Google Maps, so what is geography as a field of study?
A. Geography is the study of the relationships between space and place and the people and things that inhabit these things. It sounds really broad on its own, but that’s kind of the beauty of geography. It is essentially how we understand the spaces and places around us that we call home, that we move through. How do we interpret their meaning, and how do we figure out the relationships between spaces, between places, and between people.
So geography can be maps, looking at spatial relationships. But it can also be something deeply personal, like how we interact with space.
When I get home after a long day and I see my wife and cat, I feel relaxed. That’s geography, because that’s a relationship with space that I have.
Q. What is Indigenous geography? What makes it different?
A. Dominant geography is that we are observing space in place, and doing it in a way that holds us separate. It’s top-down and analytical.
As an Ojibwe person, in our own creation story we have certain obligations to the environment and the spaces we move within. That’s Indigenous geography. This deep relationship with the land.
I’m not talking Disney, Pocahontas, talking to trees and racoons. But if something bad happens to the land, that is followed up by something bad happening to us as a people, because we are deeply dependent on the land in order to have our cultures and our way of life.
The beauty of Indigenous geography is that it drives home that deep interconnectedness. We are part of the environment, we are part of a space, and we are not separate from it, nor should we try to hold ourselves separate from it.
Q. How does climate change integrate into your research and point of view?
A. Climate change is something that can really disastrously affect the geographies around us. Here in British Columbia, towns like Lytton are literally burned off the face of the planet due to forest fires.
I think about wild rice, an important food to us, and it relies on a certain amount of water and oxygen and water temperature and lack of pollution. In Minnesota, we are starting to see all these things slip away.
Indigenous people are often at the center of these events, placed on marginal pieces of land, the most susceptible.
I kind of chuckle a little bit in a weird, ironic way, when people are like, “This is the end of the world.” Well, for Indigenous peoples, the world already ended multiple times, right? Settlers tried to eliminate us, tried to starve us out. Genocide beat our language and culture out of us. It’s just another end of the world, right?
It becomes interesting where Indigenous communities don’t really fall into the fatalism that you find in settler frameworks.
When I do work around cultural responses to climate change, I point to Indigenous nations. These are the people that you want to be looking at and talk to when it comes to how to survive these sorts of things. Because, for better or for worse, we Indigenous folks have become really damn good at surviving things that were meant to kill and eliminate us.
Q. You teach geography as a professor at the University of Victoria. How do you explain this to students, and how does it help fight climate change to engage with the world this way?
A. I tell my students it’s very accessible to think this way. Some students are like, “Oh, are we going to do ceremonies?” And I tell them no, we are just going to learn how Indigenous peoples view the world. Which is not super mystical, but it is very mundane, very everyday.
Q. What do you tell them to do?
A. Be present and have connections. Intentionally see where you are and move through your local space.
Q. Can you tell me more about that? How does that help with climate change issues?
A. When people view themselves as interconnected to the environment in various ways, they realize, “There’s a lot I can do to help create a better world.”
I want to be careful. There is a lot of individualization of climate change: “It’s up to you to make an impact,” right? And it’s a good way of obscuring the role of capitalism and corporations and extraction that has caused this.
But there are some things where there’s strength in numbers, and there’s a way that even one individual action can help inspire others. It leads to more wholesale, structural changes on a societal level.
— Taylar Dawn Stagner
More exposure
- Read: about how Hawaiian activists drew on their creation story to successfully advocate for a ban on deep-sea mining (Grist)
- Read: how the green transition, dominated by a Western science mindset, threatens to make inequalities worse for Indigenous communities (Grist)
- Read: about how Indigenous peoples in Alaska are adapting to climate change (Vox)
- Read: an interview with one of the leaders of Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, a California organization working to rematriate Indigenous land (The 19th)
A parting shot
Two hundred people gathered this summer to celebrate and name a white buffalo calf born in Yellowstone National Park, fulfilling an Indigenous prophecy — a blessing and a warning. Watch some clips from the celebration here.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Indigenous geography could change how we relate to the Earth on Jul 31, 2024.