A Theoretical Framework for Incorporating Traditional Ecological Knowledge in Collaborative Ecosystem Management Strategies
Danielle V. Dolan
UC Davis
Indigenous communities hold a wealth of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), that could be valuable to modern ecosystem & natural resource management plans. However, the major disconnect between Indigenous and Western governance structures and worldviews inhibits this from occurring. Problems arise when applying Western methodology to Indigenous approaches, and Western professionals have difficulty accepting, understanding and applying Indigenous methodology. I hope to bridge the chasm between Indigenous and Western methods by uniting perspectives and creating a system equally representative of both. This can be done by developing a guiding framework for cross-cultural ecosystem management that synthesizes key properties expressed by Indigenous researchers with necessary and compatible components of Western ideology. The benefits of TEK can then be put into practice.
Sheila Watt-Cloutier: cool jurisprudence hailing in the heat
Duskin Drum
UC Davis
In 2006, i heard a speech on the radio titled “Defending the Right to be Cold.” The speaker was Inuit leader, diplomat and activist SheilaWatt-Cloutier. The words catalyzed changing myself slowly to become a climate justice activist. This essay will look at how her speeches weave Inuit jurisprudence and science of dwelling through national and global representative politics. This essay shall trace Watt-Cloutier’s rhetorical drift from its speech on a global political stage, back through Inuit politics and tradition, to the embodied experience of global interconnectivity through organic pollution and changed climate. i shall attend particularly to how Watt-Cloutier’s speeches hailed me andInuit Qaujimajatuqagnit, an Inuit term that includes the notions science of dwelling, jurisprudence, and the ways ‘tradition’ is used within Inuit politics. This paper attempts to invite listeners to take on Watt-Cloutier’s words by telling a story of her words taking me.
The Work of Making Home: Domestic Labor and Survivance in Lucy Young’s “Out of the Past”
Kaitlin Walker
UC Davis
In this paper I use the critical concepts of testimonio, domestic labor, and survivance to unweave the narrative threads of Lucy Young/T’tctsa’s 1941 “Out of the Past,” her autobiographical story about genocide against the Wailaki people in 1850’s California. She testifies to the violence of settler-colonial spatial production by describing her enslavement and the murder of her family members. To recognize her urgent interventions in dominant historical narratives, I read this autobiography as atestimonio. However, her narrative intervenes in history by focusing on survival rather than on violence. She describes in detail escaping from forts, reservations, and domestic slavery, and how she uses resource gathering, intimacy with the land, and community to maintain the spaces she escapes to as Wailaki home-places. I call this continual work of producing and maintaining home-places domestic labor, arguing that Young’s domestic labor enables Wailaki survivance in Northern California. More than bare survival, Gerald Vizenor defines survivance as inheriting and participating in an ongoing story. For Lisa Brooks and Mishuana Goeman, stories are maps that engage directly with Native land rights and spatial production. Young structures her story around survivance by focusing on how, in the 1850s and 1930s, she actively produces Northern California as Native space.