Feeling our way: Towards a decolonial conservation practice
This is the second blog in a three-part series I created as my culminating assignment for a first-year class called “Transformational Change Methodologies” (a required course for the Social Practice and Transformational Change PhD program at the University of Guelph taught by Dr. Carla Rice). I have chosen to share my project publicly in the spirit of co-learning and reciprocity. While it feels vulnerable to do so, I believe we are all always in a state of becoming. With humility, I offer this messy, partial, and in-process piece.
In this blog I share a bit of the theory that is guiding my inquiry. See the first blog for background on myself and the context for my work, and the third blog for my early thinking about my methodology and methods.
“I can’t tell you how many times Chad or a Knowledge holder or Ktunaxa tell me something and I think I hear them and understand. And then one day I’ll be talking to them and they say the same thing (sometimes after numerous times) and I tilt my head to the side and give an ahhhh….
And they can see me do that. And they’ll see it goes from my head to my ʔa·kiǂwi·. And I actually understand it from a completely different perspective. ”
The quote above was shared by Kerri Garner (settler-Canadian) during a recent webinar hosted by the Conservation through Reconciliation Partnership (2023). Kerri is working on the Qat’muk Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area on behalf of the Ktunaxa Nation. During the webinar she was reflecting on what is required of settlers and settler organizations who are seeking to create ethical relationships with Indigenous governments, communities, and organizations. Kerri describes a moment in her own learning journey when her comprehension moved from her head to her heart. This move from cognitive understanding to embodied and felt knowledge is a pivotal moment for Kerri, her relationship with the Ktunaxa, and her work. Rice et al. (2022) contend that knowledge (and ignorance) are intimately connected to emotion, arguing that “it is is impossible to commit to a thought alone as the very act of attaching to an idea indicates that emotion is somehow operating” (pg. 4). For Kerri, this moment of shift opened new possibilities, not only for greater cross-cultural understanding and connection, but for collective political action. As a white settler-practitioner, this feeling is familiar to me. I’ve felt these moments of shift in my own learning and professional experience. When my understanding moves from my mind into my body, I can sense that new worlds are possible. Not just in the future, but they are possible here and now. Kerri’s story and my own personal experience has inspired me to think more deeply about the role of settler emotion in transforming conservation practices.
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This webinar, from the Conservation through Reconciliation Partnership, explored stories and examples of relationships between Indigenous governments and conservation sector organizations. The stories highlight tensions as well as pathways to build, strengthen, or renew relationships.
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In this video, American poet Mary Oliver (white settler), reads her poem Wild Geese. This poem is typical of Mary Oliver’s work - she brings us back to our bodies, and reminds us of our kinship relationships with more-than-human beings. I like the line “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves”.
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This song is a cover of Willie Dunn’s song “I Pity the Country” by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. It’s a critique of the colonial state and anti-Indigenous racism. The song shows how hate moves in ways that impact not only the singer, but the land, water, individual settlers and settler society itself.
What is affect theory?
Despite its popularity in the social sciences, affect theory is difficult to describe. While I am at the beginnings of my thinking about affect, I am coming to understand that affect theory can be interested in the physical, psychological, material, social, cultural, philosophical, and political dimensions of emotional experiences and their effects. Affect can be described as an ‘intensity’ that comes from an encounter that causes a feeling or moment of shift (Let’s Talk about Art and Culture, 2021). Ephemeral and sometimes beyond the realm of the conscience thought, this feeling is embedded in a set of ongoing processes and within a broader social context (Wetherell, 2012). Critical affect studies in the humanities and social sciences explores “the complex interrelations of discursive practices, the human body, social and cultural forces, and individually experienced but historically situated affects and emotions” (Zembylas, 2014, pg. 397). Rice et al. (2022) explain that “feminist theorists have long argued for the political importance of embodied knowledges to help understand “the fleshy, the sensory, the felt, the yet-to-be languaged” (pg. 13-14). For the purposes of my project, I am interested in critical orientations to affect and emotion. More specifically, I am interested in how affect and emotion can both foreclose and open moves towards a decolonial conservation practice in Turtle Island/Canada.
Affect, emotion, and possibilities for social change
Thinking with Haraway (2016), this digital story “stays with the trouble” of settler responsibilities for decolonization. I share a personal experience of intervening in settler-colonial narratives. The questions that ground this story are similar to the questions that drive my research interests. Once we (settlers) can recognize epistemic erasure, how do we take steps to address it? How can we help? What are our responsibilities? What ethical frameworks guide us? What does accountability look like?
The ending of this story is unsatisfactory and viewers are left with a feeling of unresolved discomfort. How might settlers avoid taking action to avoid such feelings? How might this foreclose possibilities for transforming Indigenous-settler relations? These are all necessary questions to explore if, as Harraway suggests, we are to “live and die well with each other in a thick present” (2016, pg. 1).
My project will bring into conversation the work of three scholars, each of whom offer a different perspective on affect and its role in social change movements, including decolonial movements. First, I will be thinking closely with Sara Ahmed, a critical scholar whose work is at the intersection of feminist, queer, and race theory. Ahmed asks the question “what do emotions do?” in her influential book, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004). Drawing on the work of David Hume (1964) to explain how emotions leave “impressions” or marks on bodily surfaces, Ahmed explains how these impressions help define the boundaries of bodies in relation to other bodies and surfaces (2004, pg. 4). When we bump up against a table and feel pain, we’re reminded of where our bodies end and others begin (Ahmed, 2004, pg. 24). Emotions mediate our relations between the personal and the social by shaping our sense of self and our perception of others (pg. 24). Not only are emotions relational, for Ahmed (2004), emotions are active. They are not situated in objects or subjects, but rather move between them (pg. 8). Emotions can also cause us to move by either bringing us closer to others or causing us to turn away and become closed off. When certain emotions circulate, they gain intensity and ‘stick’ to ideas, things, and bodies (both individual or collective). Ahmed (2004) calls this process the “affective economy”, drawing a comparison to the way capital accumulates value through it’s circulation (pg. 46).
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This webpage, published by the The Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, provides a description of Sorry Books. Sorry Books were a response to the Australian Bringing them home report, which details the findings of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children.
Sarah Ahmed (2004) argues that Sorry Books have exposed the failure of the Australian nation-state to live up to its ideals. Saying sorry for what has happened in the past allows the nation to be absolved and celebrated in the present (pg. 112-113).
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This document is a personal reflection I created for a class on feminist, gender, sexuality, and other critical perspectives for rethinking the human. I was promted to reflect on what my gender feels like and whether it has changed over time. The process helped me better understand Sara Ahmed’s articulation of affect theory and the “impressions” that are left on us.
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This book, by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, provides a series of exercises that help readers divest from “modern-colonial desires that cause harm”. The metaphor of hospicing invokes the necessary death (and, for some, grieving) process we must collectively undertake if we are to truly divest from harmful structures and transform our relations. I’m curious about what role grief might play in transforming conservation practices.
Ahmed’s thinking about what emotions do brings important insights into how affect can contribute to the formation of collective identities, how we become invested in social norms, and how those relations are imbued with power. For example, Ahmed (2007) describes how whiteness orients bodies in specific ways, creating habitual patterns that become the background for social action. Rice et al. (2022) draw on Ahmed’s analysis to explain how “knowledge and ignorance bind white settler social bodies together through emotion and how, given their embodiment, these affects are difficult to disrupt” (Rice et al., 2022, pg. 5). Crucially, Ahmed shows the relevance of affect in our social change and justice movements by demonstrating how “the sedimentation and movement of affect in and through individual and social bodies that block and/or open possibilities for change” (Rice et al., 2022, pg. 28). Ahmed (2004) explains that analysis of emotions allows us to address how we “become invested in particular structures such that their demise is felt as a kind of living death” (pg. 12). Even when we challenge our emotional investments we can become stuck and must be vigilant to the ways in which this can happen (Ahmed, 2004, pg. 19).
My project will also engage the work of Michalinos Zembylas, a critical scholar whose work is situated at the intersections of decolonial theory, affect theory, and education studies. Zembylas (2018) theorizes white discomfort as a social and political affect that produces colonial structures and practices (pg. 88). Using the Deleuzian concept of an assemblage to consider “the complex ways in which flows of affect, material elements and discourses coalesce to form social phenomena that are beyond the individual subjective responses, feelings, and sensibilities”, Zembylas (2018) brings our attention to what race, racism and whiteness do, rather than what they are (pg. 89-90). This approach sees the affective, material and discursive assemblage of race, racism and whiteness taking shape as specific events that are situated within larger structures and requires specific and nuanced analysis of how white discomfort and other affective responses emerge from particular relations at the micro (individual) and macro (white colonial structures and practices) levels (Zembylas, 2018, pg. 90). Zembylas (2018) advocates for pedagogies of discomfort, which encourage learners to engage in critical inquiry to interrogate cherished values and beliefs. Through this interrogation, discomforting feelings can be engaged to challenge assumptions and practices that perpetuate systemic inequities (pg. 93). The following three strategies are proposed by Zembylas (2018) to ensure pedagogies of discomfort are well aligned the decolonial project:
White discomfort must be situated within the broader history and context of settler-colonialism and white discomfort should be considered as the product of specific affective, cultural and political processes.
Humanist approaches that uphold colonial binary logics should be challenged while elevating Indigenous and other subjected knowledge systems.
An ethics of critical affect should be adopted. This approach recognizes the link between colonialism and affects and advocates for ‘small practices of every day activism’ (pg. 97-98). These strategies should be used to help address the risk of sentimentalizing white discomfort.
A photo of a mural of Lee Maracle located on Simcoe Street in Tkaronto/Toronto. Credit: Artist Tannis Nielson
Finally, my project is also informed by the work of Athabascan scholar Dian Million who brings forward a theory of ‘felt knowledge’. Million (2009) argues that feelings are theory because they offer important insights into lived experiences (pg. 61). Moreover, feelings are never only an individual experience because they are “culturally mediated forms of knowledge” (Million, 2009, pg. 61). This embodied or felt knowledge is disruptive: it breaks down divisions between “the private and public, the micro and the macro . . . illustrating how social structures are an outcome of [e]motionally [e]mbodied [p]ractices” (Million, 2009, pg. 71). Million draws on stories created by Indigenous feminists like Lee Maracle (Sto:lo) to illustrate how felt knowledge of settler colonialism is often communicated through stories as a practice which either “reifies settler colonial structures or offer an ‘otherwise’ as a powerful tool for social change” (Million, 2014, pg. 72). Like Ahmed, Million (2009) argues that emotions exist outside of objects. From Million, emotions are embodied responses to situations that they come “from” a body rather than being “about” a body (pg. 72). As explained by Rice et al. (2022) Million’s work shows how the felt and embodied testimonies of Indigenous women, who embody the intersections of heteropatriarchy and settler colonialism, “carry the potential to move settlers’ psyches and worldviews” (pg. 5).
I have just started learning about affect theory and emotion, and admittedly, I am still unclear about the distinction between the two (scholars use the terms in different ways). Regardless, I am excited about the possibilities critical engagement with emotion can reveal. Together, Ahmed, Zembylas and Million provide important insights into how emotions are both cultural and historical, coming together with race and racism. They also provide nuanced analysis of the ways emotions move (or get stuck) that can either reify both settler identity and the structures of settler-colonialism, or open possibilities for transformation. For the purposes of this assignment, I have not written deeply about decolonial theory but decolonial thinkers and practitioners deeply inform my project’s orientation. I have attempted to weave decolonial perspectives throughout.
“Mother nature corrects us with a firm but loving hand, and then we don’t have to fight her, or fight climate. We have to learn to respect her again. And so, for me this is the gift of sacred urgency. ‘Urgency’ is a word that inspires, for some people, anxiety. And there is an urgent need to act, still. But sacred urgency takes away that anxiety. It provides us with a moral and philosophical approach that will encourage all of us to be our best selves in the years to come, for what we’re going to leave behind for our grandchildren and our great grandchildren.hatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.”
The above quote from Eli Enns was shared during a recent Conservation through Reconciliation Partnership (CRP) meeting. I’m curious about the distinction Eli makes between ‘urgency’ and ‘sacred urgency’. He suggests that bringing the sacred into our work will remove anxiety (and perhaps, by extension, fear), ensuring that we act with care for the benefit of future generations.
(Enns, E. personal communication. February, 2023).
Affect, Emotion and Decolonial Conservation Practice
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The World Wildlife Foundation’s (WWF) symbolic wildlife adoption program enables supporters to ‘adopt’ a charismatic animal, like a polar bear. In return for their donation, supporters receive a plush animal and information about the animal’s habitat and behaviour.
The fundraising campaign relies on the positive emotions supporters will associate with charismatic animals like polar bears and red pandas. However, the WWF program is also designed in a way that draws comparisons to symbolic adoption programs for children in the Global South. I am curious about the implications of this design choice. Is the target audience presumed to be white donors, because environmentalism is predominantly white (see Curnow & Helferty, 2018)? I also wonder about the role of emotion in this choice, and whether the program is designed to invoke feelings of pity and guilt. Zembylas (2018) argues that pity is the “socially acceptable emotional display white people can display towards people of colour, rather than displaying anger or resentment out of concern that they might be called racists” (pg. 92). How does this campaign draw on the emotions of white donors and to what effect?
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This campaign, by Nature Canada, positions human development as the cause for environmental degradation and suggests that creating more ‘protected areas’, which separate humans from non-humans, is the path forward. The campaign invokes feelings of fear and love to motivate supporters to act: “…prevent environmental catastrophe, we must take urgent action to protect the nature we know and love before it’s too late”.
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Similarly, this video by the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, stresses the importance of urgent action to prevent biodiversity loss. The video uses fear and hope as motivators to encourage supporters to urge Crown governments to protect more land and waters.
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This video, by the Indigenous Leadership Initiative, “recognizes generations of Indigenous women’s leadership on the land” and shows how Indigenous women are leading the way in protecting lands and waters across the country. The video emphasizes caring relationships, kinship with land and water, and reinvigorating Indigenous knowledge systems, legal orders and governance. The message is one of healing and hope.
Environmental conservation is an emotionally charged sector. The campaigns and videos I have collected on the right show that while the sector is galvanized by a deep love for land, water, plants, and animals, in the face of biodiversity decline and climate change, fear is a strong emotional current underlying conservation practices. Sara Ahmed (2004) argues that discourses of fear are interested in with the preservation of “me”, “what is” and, sometimes, with “life itself” (pg. 64). The video from the Indigenous Leadership Initiative offers a juxtaposition to the first three campaigns, emphasizing multi-generational and multi-species love, care, and connection based in what Nishnaabeg scholar, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, calls “grounded normativities” (Simpson, 2017). As a settler scholar who is embedded in an Indigenous-led partnership seeking to support transformational change within the conservation sector, I am left wondering what role fear and love might play in opening or foreclosing moves towards a decolonial conservation practice amongst settler conservationists.
While my literature review has not been exhaustive, it seems as though cultural and political analyses of affect, emotion, and embodiment are limited in the field of political ecology. Pratt (2022) has examined the role of practice and emotion in collective environmental work, and Pereen (2019) has applied Ahmed’s (2004) concept of affective economy to understand how attachments to ‘wilderness’ enable political mobilizations. With the movement to advance Indigenous-led conservation and transform the conservation sector I am wondering about the role of emotion in cultivating a decolonial conservation practice. In their influential 2012 article, Eve Tuck and Wane Yang emphasize that within settler colonialism, “land is what is most valuable, contested, required” (pg. 5). A decolonial conservation practice, therefore, must have the rematriation of Indigenous land and life as its primary goal and objective (Tuck and Yang, 2018, pg. 9). To this end, a decolonial conservation practice requires moves away from:
hierarchical and dualistic colonial logics;
human-centered ontologies; and
centralized sources of power.
Instead, a decolonial conservation practice must:
center logics of connection, relationality and reciprocity;
cultivate a sense of responsibility for an extended web of relations;
power must be distributed amongst many-to-many connections; and
land rematriation should be actively pursued. In the absence of rematriation, Indigenous governance should be elevated. (Roth & Bishop, 2021).
I need to conduct a more fulsome literature review, but it seems that much of the current scholarship in political ecology tends to focus on challenging and changing colonial logics and practices in conservation (Carroll, 2014; Moola & Roth, 2019; Whyte, 2018; Willems-Braun, 2004; Youdelis et al., 2020). While this is important, I hope that my project will make a contribution by drawing on critical Indigenous, queer, and feminist theory and methodologies to “bring the body back in” by exploring the importance of affect and emotion as part of cultivating a decolonial conservation practice (Rice et al., 2022, pg. 27).
Works Cited
Ahmed, S. (2004). The cultural politics of emotion, second edition. Edinburgh University Press.
Ahmed, A. (2007). A phenomenology of whiteness. Feminist Theory, 8(2), 149-168. http://10.1177/1464700107078139
Australian Institute of Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander Studies. (2021, November 4). The Sorry Books. Australian Institute of Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander Studies. https://aiatsis.gov.au/explore/sorry-books
Bishop, A. (2022, November 26). White Washing [Video]. https://www.allisonbishop.ca/mywork/research-and-making.
Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society. (2022, October 18). Take action to protect 30% of land and ocean in Canada! [Video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rp-WNwSU5Yg
Carroll, C. (2014). Native enclosures: Tribal national parks and the progressive politics of environmental stewardship in Indian Country. Geoforum, 53, 31-40. http://doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2014.02.003
Chircop, P. (2019, January 18). Mary Oliver reading ‘Wild Geese” [Video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfayiBoaXE8
Conservation through Reconciliation Partnership. (2022, November 8). Building Ethical Partnerships for Indigenous-led Conservation [Video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwi6qX5UKFw&t=620s
Conservation through Reconciliation Partnership. (2023, January 24). Organizational change and reconciliation within ENGOs [Video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsI6Ie4NdFg
de Oliveira, V.M. (2021). Hospicing modernity: Facing humanities wrongs and the implications for social activism. North Atlantic Books.
*Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the Trouble. Duke University Press.
Indigenous Leadership Initiative. (2021, March 8). Indigenous women: Leading on the land [Video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nt-MtNb93KQ
Let’s Talk About Art and Culture. (2021, June 8). What is affect theory? [Video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuKIqF72Bwo
Million, D. (2009). Felt theory: An Indigenous feminist approach to affect and history. Wicazo Sa Review, 24(2), 52-76. http://doi.org/10.1353./wic.0.0043
Million, D. (2014). There is a river in me: Theory from life. In A. Simpson & A. Smith. (Eds.), Theorizing Native studies. Duke University Press.
Moola, F., & Roth, R. (2019). Moving beyond colonial conservation models: Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas offer hope for biodiversity and advancing reconciliation in the Canadian boreal forest. Environmental Reviews, 27(2), 200-201. http://doi:10.1139/er-2018-0091
Nature Canada. (n.d.). Defend nature: End the extinction. Nature Canada: All campaigns. https://naturecanada.ca/defend-nature/how-you-help-us-take-action/protect-wildlife-habitat/
Pereen, E. (2019). The affective economies and political force of rural wilderness. Landscape Research, 44(7), 834-845. https://doi.org/10.1080.01426397.2018.1427706
Pratt, K. (2012). Rethinking community: Conservation, practice, and emotion. Emotion, Space, and Society, 5, 177-185. http://10.1016/J,EMOSPA.2011.08.003
*Rice, C., Dion, S.D., Fowlie, H. & Breen, A. (2022). Identifying and working through settler ignorance. Critical Studies in Education, 63:1, 15-30, http://10.1080/17508487.2020.1830818
Roth, R. & Bishop, A. (2021). Conservation through Reconciliation in Canada: cultivating a decolonial conservation practice. [Through an interrogation of the Conservation through Reconciliation Partnership, this paper outlines what a decolonial conservation practice might look like and their potential for transformation. American Association of Geographers. Seattle (virtual) April 10.
*Simpson, L.B. (2017). As we have always done: Indigenous freedom through radical resistance. University of Minnesota Press.
Simpson, L.B. (2021). I pity the country [Song]. On Theory of ice [album]. Gizhiiwe Music.
*Tuck, E. & Yang, W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society 1, (1), 1-40
Tuck, E. & Yang, W. (2018). Born under the rising sun of social justice. In E. Tuck & W. Yang (Eds.), Toward what justice? Describing diverse dreams of justice in education. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351240932.
Wetherell, M. (2012). Affect and emotion: A new social science understanding. SAGE Publications Ltd.
Whyte, K. (2018). Settler Colonialism, Ecology, and Environmental Injustice. Environment and Society, 9(1), 125-144. http://doi:10.3167/ares.2018.090109
Willems-Braun, B. (2004). Buried epistemologies: The politics of nature in (Post)colonial British Columbia. Annuals of the Association of American Geographers, 87(1), 3-31. http://doi.org/10.1111.0004-5608.00039
World Wildlife Fund. (2023). Adopt a Polar Bear. World Wildlife Fund Gifts. https://gifts.worldwildlife.org/gift-center/gifts/Species-Adoptions/Polar-Bear
Youdelis, M., Nakoochee, R., O'Neil, C., Lunstrum, E., & Roth, R. (2020). "Wilderness" revisited: Is Canadian park management moving beyond the "wilderness" ethic? Canadian Geographer-Geographe Canadien, 64(2), 232-249. http://doi:10.1111/cag.12600
Zembylas, M. (2014). Theorizing “difficult knowledge” in the aftermath of the “affective turn”: Implications for curriculum and pedagogy in handling traumatic representations. Curriculum Inquiry, 44(3), 390–412. https://doi.org/10.1111/curi.12051
*Zembylas, M. (2018) Affect, race, and white discomfort in schooling: Decolonial strategies for ‘pedagogies of discomfort’. Ethics and Education, 13(1), 86-104. http://10.1080/17449642.2018.14287
Note: Sources with an asterisk * were listed as mandatory or recommended from the Transformational Methodologies Lab course taught by Dr. Carla Rice (SOPR PhD program, University of Guelph).