In this presentation George Nicholas reviews debates over the “ownership” of Indigenous heritage and provides examples of new research practices that are both more ethical and more effective. These collaborative research models, in which the community leads the research, highlight important new directions in protecting Indigenous heritage.

Originally published on Remix the Commons

The post Culture, Community, and Collaboration – New Directions for Protecting Indigenous Heritage appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Singing whales, talking trees, dancing bees, birds who make art, fish who navigate, plants who learn and remember. We are surrounded by intelligences other than our own, by feathered people and people with leaves. But we’ve forgotten. There are many forces arrayed to help us forget—even the language we speak.

I’m a beginning student of my native Anishinaabe language, trying to reclaim what was washed from the mouths of children in the Indian Boarding Schools. Children like my grandfather. So I’m paying a lot of attention to grammar lately. Grammar is how we chart relationships through language, including our relationship with the Earth.

Imagine your grandmother standing at the stove in her apron and someone says, “Look, it is making soup. It has gray hair.” We might snicker at such a mistake; at the same time we recoil. In English, we never refer to a person as “it.” Such a grammatical error would be a profound act of disrespect. “It” robs a person of selfhood and kinship, reducing a person to a thing.

And yet in English, we speak of our beloved Grandmother Earth in exactly that way: as “it.” The language allows no form of respect for the more-than-human beings with whom we share the Earth. In English, a being is either a human or an “it.”

Objectification of the natural world reinforces the notion that our species is somehow more deserving of the gifts of the world than the other 8.7 million species with whom we share the planet. Using “it” absolves us of moral responsibility and opens the door to exploitation. When Sugar Maple is an “it” we give ourselves permission to pick up the saw. “It” means it doesn’t matter.

But in Anishinaabe and many other indigenous languages, it’s impossible to speak of Sugar Maple as “it.” We use the same words to address all living beings as we do our family. Because they are our family.

What would it feel like to be part of a family that includes birches and beavers and butterflies? We’d be less lonely. We’d feel like we belonged. We’d be smarter.

In indigenous ways of knowing, other species are recognized not only as persons, but also as teachers who can inspire how we might live. We can learn a new solar economy from plants, medicines from mycelia, and architecture from the ants. By learning from other species, we might even learn humility.

Colonization, we know, attempts to replace indigenous cultures with the culture of the settler. One of its tools is linguistic imperialism, or the overwriting of language and names. Among the many examples of linguistic imperialism, perhaps none is more pernicious than the replacement of the language of nature as subject with the language of nature as object. We can see the consequences all around us as we enter an age of extinction precipitated by how we think and how we live.

Let me make here a modest proposal for the transformation of the English language, a kind of reverse linguistic imperialism, a shift in worldview through the humble work of the pronoun. Might the path to sustainability be marked by grammar?

Language has always been changeable and adaptive. We lose words we don’t need anymore and invent the ones we need. We don’t need a worldview of Earth beings as objects anymore. That thinking has led us to the precipice of climate chaos and mass extinction. We need a new language that reflects the life-affirming world we want. A new language, with its roots in an ancient way of thinking.

If sharing is to happen, it has to be done right, with mutual respect. So, I talked to my elders. I was pointedly reminded that our language carries no responsibility to heal the society that systematically sought to exterminate it. At the same time, others counsel that “the reason we have held on to our traditional teachings is because one day, the whole world will need them.” I think that both are true.

English is a secular language, to which words are added at will. But Anishinaabe is different. Fluent speaker and spiritual teacher Stewart King reminds us that the language is sacred, a gift to the People to care for one another and for the Creation. It grows and adapts too, but through a careful protocol that respects the sanctity of the language.

He suggested that the proper Anishinaabe word for beings of the living Earth would be Bemaadiziiaaki. I wanted to run through the woods calling it out, so grateful that this word exists. But I also recognized that this beautiful word would not easily find its way to take the place of “it.” We need a simple new English word to carry the meaning offered by the indigenous one. Inspired by the grammar of animacy and with full recognition of its Anishinaabe roots, might we hear the new pronoun at the end of Bemaadiziiaaki, nestled in the part of the word that means land?

“Ki” to signify a being of the living Earth. Not “he” or “she,” but “ki.” So that when we speak of Sugar Maple, we say, “Oh that beautiful tree, ki is giving us sap again this spring.” And we’ll need a plural pronoun, too, for those Earth beings. Let’s make that new pronoun “kin.” So we can now refer to birds and trees not as things, but as our earthly relatives. On a crisp October morning we can look up at the geese and say, “Look, kin are flying south for the winter. Come back soon.”

Language can be a tool for cultural transformation. Make no mistake: “Ki” and “kin” are revolutionary pronouns. Words have power to shape our thoughts and our actions. On behalf of the living world, let us learn the grammar of animacy. We can keep “it” to speak of bulldozers and paperclips, but every time we say “ki,” let our words reaffirm our respect and kinship with the more-than-human world. Let us speak of the beings of Earth as the “kin” they are.

The post Nature Needs a New Pronoun: To Stop the Age of Extinction, Let’s Start by Ditching “It” appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“On June 5, 2009, at dawn, a violent confrontation took place between police forces and a large group of Peruvian citizens declaring themselves as belonging to the Awajun-Wampis indigenous groups. The police’s objective was to break up a blockade at a major highway near the town of Bagua in the Amazonian lowlands of northern Peru. The Awajun-Wampis had taken control of the highway at a place called La Curva del Diablo (Devil’s Curve) as part of a general strike that started on April 9 that same year, organized by several Amazonian indigenous groups. They were protesting a series of legislative decrees conceding their territory to oil exploration without abiding by the Indigenous and Tribal Peoples (ILO) Convention No. 169, which requires that governments consult inhabitants of territories that corporations may approach for exploration and exploitation. Accordingly, the concession was illegal, as the protestors declared. The clash yielded more than thirty deaths between policemen and the Awajun-Wampis, according to the official count. On June 19 that same year, against the will of then president Alan García, the congress canceled the decrees. The local state ordered the arrest of a number of indigenous leaders, among them Santiago Manuin Valera, the prominent Awajun-Wampis leader. They face thirty-three counts of death. During his testimony on April 10, 2014, Manuin said:

‘The government is taking away our territory, the territory of the Awajun-Wampis people, so that we become dependent on its [form of] development. The government never asked: Do you want to develop? They did not consult us. We responded: “Cancel the legislative decrees that affect our existence as a people.” Instead of listening to our complaint, the government wanted to punish us—other peoples surrendered, we did not. The government ordered our forced eviction.‘

The event is part of what I am calling the anthropo-not-seen: the world-making process through which heterogeneous worlds that do not make themselves through the division between humans and nonhumans—nor do they necessarily conceive the different entities in their assemblages through such a division—are both obliged into that distinction and exceed it. Dating from the fifteenth century in what became the Americas, the anthropo-not-seen was, and continues to be, the process of destruction of these worlds and the impossibility of such destruction. It might very well represent the first historical apocalypse: the will to end many worlds that produced the one-world world and its excesses.

Awajun-Wampis protest in Bagua, northern Peru. Police violence sent many of the protesters to the hospital, despite a peaceful blockade of the Corral Quemado Bridge, June 5, 2009.

Scholars have discussed the Anthropocene as a transformation of humanity into a geological force capable of affecting, and possibly destroying, what we currently know as the world. The anthropo-not-seen has been sustained since its early beginnings by a human moral force—and the unseen part of its destructive dynamic can be found in how this force has been considered constructive. Counterintuitively, this particle of the word (the not-seen) does not refer only to the anthropos—’the one who looks up from the Earth’—and is capable of destroying what refuses to be made in its image. Exceeding this destruction, the anthropo-not-seen includes more-than-human assemblages, both in the usual sense (i.e., that they may include humans and nonhumans), and in the sense that these categories (human and nonhuman, and therefore species) are also inadequate to grasp such compositions, which as said above, may not become through these categories. The assemblages of the anthropo-not-seen may be translated as ‘articulated collectives’ of nature and humans, yet may also express conditions of ‘no nature, no culture.’

The antropo-not-seen was, and continues to be, a war waged against world-making practices that ignore the separation of entities into nature and culture—and the resistance to that war. The antagonism was clear in the seventeenth century: Christian clerics walked the Andes from Colombia to Argentina and Chile ‘extirpating idolatries’ that the friars conceived as ‘devil-induced worship.’ Extirpation required dividing entities into God-created nature (mountains, rivers, forests) and humans, and saving the soul of the latter. The invention of modern politics secularized the antagonism: the war against recalcitrance to distinguish nature from humanity silently continued in the name of progress and against backwardness, the evil that replaced the devil. Incipient humans became the object of benevolent and inevitable inclusion, enemies that did not even count as such. Until recently, that is.

The War is Not Silent Anymore (But it Continues Undeclared)

The expansion of markets for minerals, oil, and energy, as well as for new technologies that allow for their quick and profitable extraction, stimulate what appears to be an unprecedentedly unstoppable—and mighty—corporate removal of resources in places formerly marginal to capital investment. The construction of infrastructure (necessary to send the resources to market) sponsored by central financial institutions like the IMF, the World Bank, and new regional financial entities like the Latin American Development Bank has made even the most remote territories the object of financial investment. The reach of the current destruction of indigenous worlds is historically unparalleled; the anthropo-not-seen (the destruction of worlds and resistance to it) has acquired a scope and speed that early extirpators of idolatries and nineteenth-century explorers (turned rubber and sugar plantation investors) would envy.

Overlapping with environmental devastation and converging on Anthropocenic forces at the planetary level, the transformation of territories into grounds for investment has met with strong local opposition and forceful disagreement—transforming the silent war into a relentless demand for politics that reveals, to paraphrase and tweak Rancière, the presence of many worlds being forced into one. Digging a mountain to open a mine, drilling into the subsoil to find oil, damming all possible rivers, and razing trees to build transoceanic roads and railroads translates, at the very least, into the destruction of networks of emplacement that make local life possible. Among other demands, local worlds—labeled indigenous or not—defy the monopoly of modern practices in making, inhabiting, and defining nature. With their hopes for economic growth at stake and the sovereignty over their territorial rule threatened, national states waver between rejecting the proposal for politics that local worlds extend and ending the silent war to wage it overtly—always in the name of progress. The confrontation in 2009 in La Curva del Diablo is emblematic of the war becoming public: those who oppose the transformation of universal nature into resources and oppose the possibility of the common good as the mission of the nation-state are its enemies and deserve prison at the very least.

The cartoon Paving Bolivia shows the road across TIPNIS, which stands for “Territorio Indígena y Parque Nacional Isiboro Sécure.”

Conceptualized through the anthropo-not-seen, the war is, however, peculiar. Defending themselves, worlds whose sacrifice progress demands have publicly revealed their practices through television stations and newspapers. Thus, it has come to the attention of the public (and majoritarian derision) that nature—as the alleged grounds for the common good—is not only that. For example, warning about the destruction of its world, the Awajun-Wampis leadership has described their sibling relation to the Amazon rainforest: ‘The river is our brother, we do not kill our brother by polluting and throwing waste on it’—kinship transforms rivers, plants, and animals into entities that financial capital, infrastructure, and contamination can kill rather than ‘merely’ destroy or deplete. As ubiquitous as the war, these revelations slow down the translation of those entities into universal nature. The one-world world that Christianity and modernity collaboratively built and sustained is perhaps being challenged with an unprecedented degree of publicity for the first time since its inauguration five hundred years ago. This possibility needs to be cared for.

Uncommoning Nature: Or, a Commons through Divergence

Analogous to the Awajun-Wampis’s claim of kinship with the forest, in a dispute about petroleum extraction in a site called Vaca Muerta (Argentina) a Mapuche group declared ‘Our territories are not ‘resources’ but lives that make the Ixofijmogen of which we are part, not its owners.’ In contrast, developers from Neuquén defined Vaca Muerta as one of the states included in the alleged hydrocarbons deposit: ‘Vaca Muerta is an immense páramo [a barren cold plateau]. A desert that extends beyond what the eyes can see … It is a hostile territory that shelters enough energy to make Argentinian self-sufficient and even export gas and oil to the world.’ The stark contrast suggests that the dispute about the extraction of petroleum is also a dispute about the partition of the sensible into universal nature and culturally diversified humanity, to paraphrase Rancière and Latour, respectively.

Emphasizing the inherent relationality between local entities (humans and other-than-human beings), the dispute questions the universality of the partition: what is enacted as humans and nature is not only enacted as such. John Law calls this the capacity for both/and (rather than either/or). The interruption of the universal partition is a political and conceptual worlding event; what emerges through it is not a ‘mix’ of nature and human. Being composed as humans with nature—if we maintain these categories of being—makes each more. Entities emerge as materially specific to (and with!) the relation that inherently connects them. An example located in the Andes of Cuzco: the materiality that relates modern humans and mountains is different from that which makes runakuna (the local Quechua word for people) with Earth-beings—entities that are also mountains.

The processes questioning the universality of partitioning the sensible into universal nature and humans, of course, do not require runakuna with Earth-beings. Here is another example: in the northern Andes of Peru, a mining corporation plans to dry out several lagoons to extract copper and gold from some, and to throw mineral waste into others. In exchange, reservoirs with water capacity several times that of the lagoons would be built. Opposing the plan, environmentalists argue that the reservoirs will destroy the ecosystem of the lagoons, a landscape made of agricultural land, high-altitude wetlands, cattle, humans, trees, crops, creeks, and springs. The local population adds that the lagoons are their life: their plants, animals, soils, trees, families are with that specific water which cannot be translated into water from reservoirs, not even if more water is provided, as the mining corporation promises to do. It would not be the same water, which they defend as ‘guardians of the lagoons.’ People have died in this making-public of another instance of the war against those who oppose the translation of nature into resources. Yet the guardians of the lagoons have never said that the water is a being—it is local water, and as such, nature, yet untranslatable to H2O.

An iconic ‘guardian of the lagoons’ is a peasant woman whose property the corporate mining project wants to buy to fully legalize its access to the territories it plans to excavate. The woman refuses to sell—even for what is most likely an amount of money she will not see in her lifetime. Countless times, the national police force has attacked her, her family, even her animals—as I was writing this piece, the police destroyed the woman’s crops. The property has been under siege for more than three years now. ‘I fight to protect the lagoon’ has been one of her responses. And asserting attachment to place, she adds: ‘I am not going to stop; they will disappear me. But I will die with the land.’ Like Bartleby, she ‘would prefer not to’ sell; yet she is not politically a-grammatical, at least not in the usual sense.

Police guard the machinery of Yanacocha, the largest gold mine in South America.

Within the grammar that separates humans and universal nature, this woman can be interpreted as defending the ecosystem: an environmentalist, and thus an enemy (and a fool), or an ally (and a hero), depending on who speaks. In both cases she is a subject in relation to an object. However, the ‘refusal to sell’ may express a different relation: one from which woman-land-lagoon (or plants-rocks-soils-animals-lagoons-humans-creeks—canals!!!) emerge inherently together: an ecological entanglement needy of each other in such a way that pulling them apart would transform them into something else.

Refusing to sell may also refuse the transformation of the entities just mentioned into units of nature or the environment, for they are part of each other. The woman’s refusal would thus enact locally an ecologized nature of interdependent entities that simultaneously coincides, differs, and even exceeds—also because it includes humans—the object that the state, the mining corporation, and environmentalists seek to translate into resources, whether for exploitation or to be defended. Thus seen, she is a-grammatical to the subject and object relation—or, she is not only an environmentalist.

Occupying the same space (that ‘cannot be mapped in terms of a single set of three-dimensional coordinates’), this complex heterogeneous form (universal nature, the environment, and what I am calling ecologized nature—or nature recalcitrant to universality) allows for alliances and provokes antagonisms.

Confronted with the mining company’s proposal to desiccate the lagoons, its local guardians and environmentalists have joined forces against the mining corporation. Yet their shared interest—to defend nature, or the environment—is not only the same interest: ecologized nature and universal nature exceed each other; their agreement is also underpinned by uncommonalities. This condition shapes a possibility for an alternative alliance, one that, along with coincidences, may include the parties’ constitutive divergence—even if this opens up discussion of the partition of the sensible and introduces the possibility of ontological disagreement into the alliance. An oxymoronic condition, this alliance would also house hope for a commons that does not require the division between universal nature and diversified humans: a commons constantly emerging from the uncommons as grounds for political negotiation of what the interest in common—and thus the commons—would be.

Instead of the expression of shared relations, and stewardship of nature, this commons would be the expression of a worlding of many worlds ecologically related across their constitutive divergence. As a practice of life that takes care of interests in common, yet not the same interest, the alliance between environmentalists and local guardians (of lagoons, rivers, forests) could impinge upon the required distribution of the sensible into universal nature and locally differentiated humans, thus disrupting the agreement that made the anthropo-not-seen and questioning the legitimacy of its war against those who question that distribution. The alliance would also queer the requirement of politics for sameness and provoke ontological disagreement among those who share sameness—inaugurating an altogether different practice of politics: one across divergence.”

This article was originally published at e-flux journal 56th Venice Biennale.

Photo by Nicholas_T

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