vision
“No matter what the settler colonial state says, Indigenous people are still here. We can elevate and strengthen our ongoing relationship with the land, here and now.”
— Dr. Niyokamigabaw Deondre Smiles
Spotlight
Climate change is a world-ending problem. Floods, fires, hurricanes, and heat waves threaten life and land, and could make parts of the planet uninhabitable. But when Niyokamigabaw Deondre Smiles advises his students on how to cope, one thing they recommend is to simply go for a walk. Smiles is an assistant professor of geography at the University of Victoria in British Columbia and a leader in the field of Indigenous geography. They are members of the Leech Lake Ojibwe Nation and study how Indigenous peoples have nurtured ceremonial, historical, and evolving relationships with the land in the wake of climate change.
As a colonial government Taking traditional ecological knowledge more seriouslySmiles’ work is a timely reminder that seemingly small changes in everyday life can have a huge impact on the way you think. Indigenous geographies stand in stark contrast to a worldview based on exploitation and exploitation.
Many societies have catalogued and mapped the world around them and drawn meaning from the land, but colonial ways of contextualizing the world often also used geography as a means to divide and isolate land from Indigenous peoples.
In a 2008 paperRDK Herman has studied how the field of geography has become entrenched in colonialist thinking. As a non-Indigenous person, Herman writes that this has marginalized the many ways in which the original inhabitants of the land have engaged with lakes, rivers, the sky, and the earth, and has often justified violent land dispossession under the guise of empirical, enlightened thinking.
Smiles says there are multiple indigenous geographies, as many as there are tribes in the world, but overall the field is about a worldview in which people are part of the land they inhabit, something that “modern geography” doesn’t capture. In Hawaii, for example, the native Oiwi people Consider the sea an important relative The power of attorney is given.
Although there is growing interest in tribal traditional knowledge, within academia such an approach challenges the status quo: by incorporating tribal epistemology into the field of geography, Smiles has been criticised for lacking objectivity.
“Being objective doesn’t mean we’re not passionate about these things, it just means we can 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 to get from point A to point B, Smiles’ argument is that geography can be a tool for investigating big 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 challenges what most of us understand about the field. It’s both an academic pursuit and a mindset shift: how something as simple as taking a walk can change one’s colonial worldview. Their responses have been edited and condensed for clarity.
Q. All I know about geography on a day-to-day basis is Google Maps, so what kind of academic field is geography?
A. Geography is the study of spaces and places and the relationships between the people and things that inhabit them. On its own, it sounds like a very broad field, but that’s the beauty of it. Geography is, at its core, the study of how we make sense of the spaces and places around us that we call home and through which we move; how we interpret their meaning and understand the relationships between spaces, places, and people.
So geography is about maps and spatial relationships, but it’s also about how we relate to space, which is very personal.
When I come home after a long day and see my wife and my cat, it calms me: that’s geography, because that’s my relationship with space.
Q. What is Indigenous geography? How is it different?
A. The dominant geography is that we look at space in situ and we do so in an isolated way: it is top-down and analytical.
As Ojibwe people, we have a certain obligation to the environment and the spaces we move through in our creation story. That is Indigenous geography. It’s a deep relationship to the land.
I’m not talking about Disney or Pocahontas or talking to trees or raccoons, but if something bad happens to the land, it’s bad that happens to us, the people, because we depend so deeply on the land to sustain our culture and way of life.
The beauty of Indigenous geographies is that they allow us to realize our deep interconnectedness: we are part of the environment, we are part of the space, we are not separate from it, and we should not try to separate ourselves from it.
Q. How is climate change integrated into your research and perspective?
A. Climate change can have truly devastating effects on the communities around us. Here in British Columbia, Towns like Lytton They are literally being wiped off the face of the earth by forest fires.
When you think about wild rice, which is such an important food source for us, it depends on a certain amount of water, oxygen, warm water, and no pollution. In Minnesota, we’re starting to lose all of those things.
Indigenous people are often at the centre of these events and live in remote lands that are most vulnerable to impacts.
When people say “this is the end of the world,” I laugh because it’s kind of weird and ironic. For Indigenous people, the world has already ended many times, hasn’t it? Colonists tried to eliminate us, tried to starve us. Genocide crushed our languages and cultures. This is just another end of the world, right?
What’s interesting is that Indigenous communities don’t fall prey to the fatalism found in settler frameworks.
When I study cultural responses to climate change, I point to indigenous peoples, who we should be looking at and talking about when we’re thinking about how to survive these things, because, for better or worse, we indigenous peoples have been very good at surviving things that are meant to kill us and erase us.
Q: You’re a professor of geography at the University of Victoria. How do you explain geography to your students, and how does engaging with the world in this way help fight climate change?
A. I tell my students that it’s very easy to think like this. Some of them say, “Oh, you’re going to have a ceremony?” and I say, “No, you’re just going to learn how indigenous people see the world.” It’s not super mystical, but it’s very mundane, very everyday.
Q. What would you tell them to do?
A. Be present and connected. Be intentional about where you are and move through your local space.
Q. Can you tell us more about that? How does it help with the climate change issue?
A. When people recognize that they are interconnected with the environment in many ways, they realize that there is a lot they can do to create a better world.
I want to be careful. Climate change is too individualized. It’s like, “It’s up to you to make an impact,” right? And it’s a good way to obscure the role that capitalism, corporations, and extractives have played in causing climate change.
But there is power in numbers, and even the actions of one person have a way of inspiring others, which can lead to larger, structural changes at a societal level.
— Taylor Dawn Stagner
Further exposure
Parting words
This summer, 200 people gathered for a celebration and naming. White buffalo calf born in Yellowstone National Park, fulfilling Native American prophecy — A Blessing and a Warning. Watch the video of the celebration here:
