Wounds on This Turtle’s Back: On Feeling Extractivism and Felt Theories of Change

Abstract

This article is concerned with feeling the effects of global extractivism, with particular emphasis on the afterlife and ongoing threat of extractive industrial development in Ontario. Situated in Indigenous feminist thought and informed by Cree and Anishinaabemowin languages, this article positions the Earth as a living being, a loving Mother who intimately experiences the violences of extraction. Through Indigenous epistemologies, the authors challenge dominant settler colonial constructs that segment feeling, thought, doing, and being. In framing the impacts of extractivism as material evidence of violence, as wounds that are felt, the authors consider what feeling in relation has to do with environmental justice. They weave together Indigenous languages, stories, and philosophies to underscore the intertwined nature of thinking and felt experience, emphasizing the importance of the affective in doing things differently. Indigenous environmental justice in the push for and in the wake of global extractivism is not a struggle against human annihilation but, rather, encompasses whole structures of care rooted in love, respect, and reciprocity for all beings. Such an understanding of justice demands a collective reawakening and calls for more than just survival but good life for all. This echoing call desires a return to ways of being, knowing, feeling, and relating, which have been under attack at the same time as extractive industries bore ever further into the land. Yet the Earth continues to care for everything, while feeling and holding the weight of this world; she/they persist(s) in loving fully and giving endlessly, wanting only for there to be good life in return.

INTRODUCTION

As we have learned from older ones in our communities ¹ , from the perspective of kisik aski/giizhigookaaning ² (skyworld or the levels of sky above the Earth from which our ancestors can see us), the lands and waters cherished by our people are held with great care on a loving Turtle’s back. A long time ago this Turtle, in effort to make life anew after destruction, gave us a place to rebuild our worlds on Mikinak Ministik/Mikinaak Minising (Turtle Island). ³ They are a mother, living in accordance with how the Earth was made to be: a generous, loving giver of life. ⁴ Mikinak Ministik is cloaked in lush forests, ancient rocks, and bubbles with nipiy/nibi (water) that flows through the veins of the land, into and from the spirit world. ⁵ This Turtle teems with life, a testament to her generosity, and an extension of the light and love of kitchi manito/Gizhe Manidoo (the great, kind, loving spirit or mystery).

But if you trace a path on this Turtle’s back toward northern Ontario, you will find wounds: traces of careless and unnecessary violence inflicted by extractive industries. Operated by human hands, hearts, and minds, extractive industries and infrastructures sustain settler colonial relations to land as a thing from which to take, a commodity. ⁶ From active or abandoned mines and tailing ponds near Timiskaming, Temagami, Attawapiskat, and Cochrane, to the ever-growing explorations across Ontario’s so-called Ring of Fire—there are countless wounds across these lands, regardless of claims to remediation or rehabilitation. In many ways, these endeavors are new in terms of our history here, just a blip in the depth of geologic time. But somehow, in only a few hundred years, the caring relations that sustained life here for millennia have been constrained and, at the hands of colonial governments and industries, displaced with ones of extraction. For Indigenous nations living and resisting “the shadows of empire,” ⁷ these relations are nonconsensual. We wonder: How does this feel for the Turtle, who offered to us her back on which to live? What does this feel like for our Mother, who experiences this violence and continued, relentless threat of further violence, every day?

Indigenous nations have been living and organizing on the front lines, long resisting many forms of ongoing settler colonial empire-building, such as the mining industrial complex. ⁸ In this present moment, we grapple with escalating global extractivism and an insatiable demand for resources deemed “critical” due to capitalist consumption increasing, framed primarily by green energy transitions. Indigenous communities across northern Ontario—in areas like what has come to be called the Ring of Fire, a 5,000-km² region within Treaty 9 territory located 500 km northeast of Thunder Bay—have been actively resisting this violence. All relations are implicated in the decisions that have been made, as well as those to come. And this was foretold.

A “RING OF FIRE,” IN THE SEVENTH FIRE

According to Anishinaabe prophecies, we are presently living in a period known as the time of the seventh fire, a time characterized by dire warnings: “the rivers will run with poison and the fish will become unfit to eat.” ⁹ The seventh fire marks when the continued taking from the Earth in a rush to technological advancement, a structure brought here by colonizers, will lead to the total destruction of the Earth—“if we continue with our negligence.” ¹⁰ Life, and the challenge of living, has become tethered to projects of industrial extraction. Will we continue with this negligence?

The so-called Ring of Fire in northern Ontario encompasses nine First Nations communities: Webequie, Nibinamik, Neskantaga, Eabametoong, Marten Falls, Aroland, Long Lake 58, Ginoogaming, and Constance Lake. Proposed developments in this area also directly impact communities connected through the Attawapiskat River watershed. In the formation of the Canadian state, these northern lands were disregarded as remote, as empty of value. But today, this region faces escalating extractive and technoscientific interests, targeted since 2007 by mining exploration and the brokering of “private contractual agreements now routinely offered up as evidence of consent” ¹¹ for mining development. Driven by the collusion of corporations and settler colonial governments instrumentalizing “consultative” processes as a means to an end, these lands are now perceived to hold value: $60–120 billion worth of vital minerals, just below the surface of the Earth. This exploitative perspective, propagated by the Ontario Ministry of Northern Development and Mines, reduces a vast area of life to an “object over which mining magnates [are] dueling.” ¹² How might we all resist this reduction, this transformation of land into nonbeing? We have been taught that Mikinak Ministik/Mikinaak Minising is a place that grew on the back of a Turtle. This Turtle lives and breathes, she is “not a swamp that holds treasure to be plundered, but instead a part of the more-than-human world worthy of … attention, interest, and care.” ¹³ In the ways we have been taught, swamp places are sacred. They are inherently of great value, as they are, deeply cherished for all they contribute to life. Where waters and lands meet, integrate and interrelate, above and below the surface they overflow with life.

STILL RESISTING TERRA NULLIUS

Indigenous resistance to violence on lands consistently refuses that the north is a remote hinterland, just waiting for extractive development. This work is grounded in a depth of understanding, a felt knowing that seeks to protect all life. Although “the concept of terra nullius—or ‘empty lands’—has been repudiated by the Supreme Court [of Canada] as the basis for Crown jurisdiction … its underpinning and conjoined logic of discovery remains intact.” ¹⁴ This is evidenced in the political appetite for the Ring of Fire: settler colonial and corporate desires that will never be satisfied, prioritized at the expense of whole communities, entire networks of relationship and ways of living. Beyond the politics of governments and corporations working to obtain consent for extraction, this region has been affected by persistent social inequities and concurrent crises that speak to broader settler colonial oppression: from food and housing insecurity to unemployment, failing essential infrastructures like sanitation and sewage systems, and long-term states of emergency related to mental health, youth suicide, addictions, water safety, flooding, and fires. The complex challenges facing Indigenous communities in the region highlight the urgent need for “livelihood sufficiency” ¹⁵ through economic development, employment, and improved infrastructure. Simultaneously the governance and care, the culturally and spiritually rooted protection of Mikinak Ministik/Mikinaak Minising that has been relied on for generations, is increasingly set in tension with efforts to bring relief to the region vis-a-vis economic development. In this context, “fear of socioeconomic and cultural disruption associated with mines and roads exists alongside the desire for more opportunities for education, employment, and effective health services.” ¹⁶ Sarah Weibe reminds us that such tenuous circumstances are in fact “manufactured crises, enabled by neoliberal ideology,” ¹⁷ a key foundation of contemporary settler colonialism. Indeed, throughout Canada’s history, the living homelands and waters of Indigenous nations have been forcibly rearranged into arenas for continual reconfiguration of settler state politics to ensure unfettered access and exploration of capital, externalizing responsibilities for the devastating impacts. ¹⁸ In the Ring of Fire, in the seventh fire, Indigenous communities continue to resist annihilation in and of a place deemed not living, insisting that Mikinak Ministik/Mikinaak Minising is a home and living relation worthy of defense.

GESHKOZIYAANG (WAKING UP)

The deep and enduring impacts of ongoing settler colonialism on this Turtle’s back are striking also in the precarious state of water and food security across lands that had always sustained the people but that now are disrupted by forestry, mining, hydroelectric dams, and commercial fisheries. ¹⁹ This reconfiguration can be felt in the dusts carried downwind from mines, ²⁰ in the increased wildfires linked to rising global temperatures ²¹ and industrial emissions. ²² This planetary warming accelerates the disappearance of permafrost while, simultaneously, a slow and insidious creep of pollution infiltrates every aspect of life, ²³ leading to toxic consequences for the health of communities, lands, and waters. ²⁴ Even though we are connected to the toxic consequences of settler colonialism in our work with communities throughout northern Ontario, in our own health experiences as well as those of our relations, the magnitude of the impacts of extractive industries actually remained elusive to us for a time, hovering just beyond our reach.

The late Grand Chief of the Three Fires Midewiwin Lodge, Edward Benton-Banai taught of the “layers of insulation” that like a thick coat at once protects a person, at the levels of body/mind/heart/spirit, while also keeping us separate from experiencing the world in a direct way. ²⁵ In this time of the seventh fire, it is said, many of us will have fallen asleep. ²⁶ We may have heard about the rhythm of the drills, the roaring of machines, or detonations. We may have witnessed corporate public relations campaigns, endlessly promising more jobs that never seemed to materialize as part of the business of “extraction consulting.” ²⁷ But something has been awakening in us, stirred to move through a series of ongoing experiences: first seeing the expanse of an abandoned open pit, breathing in the smoke of extreme wildfires, walking through deforested hector, listening to aunties talk about their fears about poisoned rivers, waiting too long for rain, or driving through floods. These “alterlives” ²⁸ of global extractivism are shaking us to reckon with settler colonialism as a structure of ripping into the Earth, our Mother. The scope and scale of this violence are so overwhelming, we may insulate ourselves through abstract and disembodied encounters. But we must reckon with the violence that we, the human beings, inflict on our family, our older relatives. As Roy Moonias of Neskantaga First Nation poignantly has asked, “Mother Earth is hurting … If a big needle is pushing into your body, how would you feel?” ²⁹

The land is hurting. Every being who is shaken by the reverberations of extraction—from the millions of insects in the air, on the land, and in the water; to the many fish, and countless birds; all of the plants and all of the trees; their roots; the billions of networks of microbial life in and beyond the soil—all of these beings are older than the human and have something important to express. Are these our relatives? Will we attune to them? And we wonder, how are the wounds across the land visible to our ancestors in kisik aski/giizhigookaaning? What is felt, above and below the Earth, of this violence? And in feeling, can we act from mutuality and responsibility toward what Kyle Whyte describes as “collective continuance”? ³⁰ What theories of change rooted in mutuality and responsibility emerge, that help us feel in relation? ³¹

FEELING AND THINKING IN RELATION

In some languages, and the ways of knowing which flow from them, feeling and thinking are distinct activities that occur in different parts of the body (e.g., humans think with their brains and feel in another physical part of the body). Extended from this segmented approach to understanding life, the category “human” has been made to recast certain living beings as nonhuman. ³² To be clear, our focus on the human in this article aims to work against such anti-Black racist constructions, which situate the (White, male, straight, able-bodied, property-owning) human as the pinnacle of evolutionary development, at the same time positioning lands, waters, and older-than-human beings as “resources” for the taking—as nonbeings simply incapable of thought or feeling. Instead, we understand the often-unquestioned category of human as entangled in the structure of settler colonialism, which charts out certain sets of harmful relations. ³³ Anti-Blackness and settler colonialism simultaneously structure dominant ways of understanding what it is to be human, what it is to think and feel, and what it is to relate to land and body. Resisting these ways of relating, thinking, and feeling remains a constant practice.

When Indigenous knowledges are activated toward environmental justice, we are reminded of the possibilities before and beyond settler colonialism and how we might come to be in better relationship with ourselves, one another, with lands and waters, and with all life. Thoughts and feelings, then, can be understood beyond the segmentation of felt knowing that has been imposed, instead attuning to much older ways of living as part of vast interconnected relations of care. These older ways are wiser—not in the sense of romanticizing the past, but as in we respect our elders. Enduring Anishinaabe philosophies concerning the constitution of the human (distinguished from other beings as the youngest) share that the physical level is at the outermost layer of being; the mind is the next layer, experienced throughout one’s entire body; the heart is the third inner level; and at the center is the spirit. ³⁴ In Anishinaabemowin, the word part that refers to a feeling also has to do with thought. This may have to do with the reality of felt experience as happening throughout our whole being.

With this understanding, feeling and thinking together is an innate way of knowing within certain Indigenous conceptualizations of the world. This resonates with Indigenous feminist approaches to knowledge such as Dian Million’s work on felt theory, describing the power of Indigenous women’s life experiences with violence shared through first-hand stories. ³⁵ As articulated by Million, felt knowledge engages a “sixth sense about the moral affective heart of capitalism and colonialism as an analysis” and that: “A felt analysis is one that creates a context for a more complex ‘telling’… by insisting on the inclusion of our lived experience, rich with emotional knowledges, of what pain and grief and hope meant or mean.” ³⁶ In this way, the felt experiences of life are pathways to understanding present conditions in relation to pasts and futures, as well as how it might be that we co-create change toward other kinds of conditions.

Million’s work on felt theorizing helps us to understand that in any analysis of colonialism or other systems of violence, we must consider, carefully and with full attention, the felt experiences of those systems on life. This is an undertaking that engages the spirit, what is at the very center of felt knowing. Edward Benton-Banai would teach that “in order to heal, we must know the wound.” ³⁷ He would teach that it is the responsibility of a healer to diagnose properly. Applied in relation to felt theory, this does not mean that those seeking healing for the land or for our communities should carry out endless studies about “the wound” focused solely on damage, thus pathologizing ourselves and our relations. ³⁸ Instead, this teaching offers a more careful theory of change that emphasizes accuracy, specificity, and precision in identifying and sensing a wound. Resisting damage-centeredness is not the same thing as only ever talking about what is positive, ignoring, or failing to speak to harms. Rather, we begin from a stance of refusing violence as our structure of relating, which requires nonextractive research and community work. Toward enhancing our collective ability to perceive and feel that which settler colonialism severs relationship with and to resist and envision politics that transcend, restore, and manifest life beyond harm. Leanne Simpson similarly cautions against the tendency of academic theorizing to “just get stuck in the diagnosis or the revelation of the problem” ³⁹ and insists that Anishinaabe thought “propels us to be responsible within our individual selves, to vision and dream our way out.” ⁴⁰ Put differently, we can ask, from which perspective(s) or vantage point(s) are we thinking and feeling our questions from? What are the conditions of the wound(s), and our attending responsibilities? Knowing the wound also means engaging felt experience, for a “more complex telling.” ⁴¹ Feeling our thinking, in relation to the feelings of others, is a way of being which can teach infinitely through connections within and beyond ourselves, through all the levels of understanding above and below the Earth.

Knowing the wound

On how extractivism feels: If we, in struggles for Indigenous environmental justice, continuously draw from epistemic assumptions of Europe—which instruct us to separate feeling from thought and thought from the body—we risk perceiving the wounds on this Turtle’s back as simply the results of extraction, or perhaps we are not even aware of these wounds at all. Such thinking externalizes the older-than-human as something far away, relegated to a place without being. Settler colonial ways of knowing impose these “spatial politics” ⁴² that serve to “render certain bodies and landscapes pollutable,” ⁴³ as wastelands. As Max Liboiron writes, colonialism “is a way to describe relationships characterized by conquest and genocide,” ⁴⁴ and these include but are not limited to relationships with lands, with waters, and with bodies of those rendered less than or not human. ⁴⁵ While a felt engagement with life, in active relationship and thus also responsibility, works against settler colonial conceptualizations of land as inert, “unworthy of defense,” ⁴⁶ even “deserving of devastation.” ⁴⁷ Instead, feeling life relationally while grounded in collective responsibility forecloses ongoing violence and extraction. This, then, is our theory of change: our way of thinking and feeling toward Indigenous environmental justice—which to us, means ending all violences, against all relations. ⁴⁸ The felt experiences of all of our relatives must be attended to without contributing to further violence ⁴⁹ and, importantly, without “stealing the pain of others.” ⁵⁰ Therefore any work to understand the wounds on this Turtle’s back must care about how extraction feels, carrying into practice our felt knowing and connection to life.

The knowledges that inform our theorizing are discordant with relating to the Earth as living in a strictly metaphorical sense. As Leroy Little Bear has written, “territory is important because Earth is our Mother (and this is not a metaphor: it is real).” ⁵¹ Lands and waters are our older relatives, the Earth is our Mother, and they all have much to teach us. The traditions we draw on situate the entirety of this world in all its complex materiality and metaphysicality, both spirit and fleshiness, as animate, as being, and as older-than-human. And so, in the building of “invasive infrastructures” ⁵² to extract life—whether it is through mining, dams, or the machinery of pipelines—in this construction of ongoing settlement, all of the beings who are displaced, crushed, severed, flooded, or stolen are deserving of recognition for their own political agency. ⁵³ The pathways to acknowledge this agency, awakening us to the affective claims of all relatives, often begin in story.

As Deborah McGregor teaches, “our stories inform us about our beginnings.” ⁵⁴ Our creation stories describe how kinship with older beings came to be, establishing a foundation for the distinct systems of governance, legal orders, and healing and caring practices, which are all critical to living in accordance with original instructions. ⁵⁵ We have come to understand these instructions for life through the stories we were told as children or those stories we were denied but now can share with the children in our lives. Listening to a story with “three ears,” including “the one that is in our heart,” ⁵⁶ is a felt experience of relational engagement through mind, body, spirit, and emotion. We may receive a story more than once but are taught to listen as if we will never hear it again; we have come to understand that it is important to “really listen.” ⁵⁷ Jo-Ann Archibald has contributed meaningfully to how we think about interrelationships in the stories we have received and our obligations to one another in the stories of our lives. ⁵⁸ Here we are reminded of the impermanence of our physical presence and what is at stake in our responsibilities to one another and to all life. ⁵⁹ Storywork offers a frame for these responsibilities, as a way of growing knowledge that roots the learner (or listener) in respect, reverence, and reciprocity. With ongoing practice, it is possible to make meaning in this way, in connection with the complex felt experiences of ourselves and our relatives—and for this knowing to be carried into our work in the world.

STORYING “BEFORE”: A WORLD WITHOUT GLOBAL EXTRACTIVISM

In reflecting on water violations in amiskwaciwâskahikan (Edmonton, Alberta), a hub of major extractive industry in Canada, Zoe Todd highlights the importance of coming to know the material conditions of waters affected by oil spills in conversations with stories of “waters and fish that were once healthy and abundant and flowing.” ⁶⁰ These stories provide language for the ways things once were—materially, relationally, and otherwise: they speak of a time before settler colonial extractive violence restructured life. Knowledge of the material conditions of this before can activate our consciousness, attuning to the effects/affects of material violence in the present that reverberate across time(s) and place(s). Kim TallBear has shared that “language choices are ethical choices and are key in this project of constituting more democratic relations and worlds.” ⁶¹ In this way, how we story past relations is a constitutive feature of how we perceive and feel our way through the present.

When encountering wounds on this Turtle’s back, while also suspending the depersonalizing settler-colonial socialization to the present, we might be able to differently respond to the pain, grief, and all of what it means to be treated as dead, even when you are very much alive. Judith Butler has famously asked, “what makes a grievable life?” ⁶² ; and we insist that all our relations across and beyond Mikinak Ministik/Mikinaak Minising are more than grievable. Thinking with Augustine Park reminds us that in this settler colonial society that repeatedly denies the felt realities of Indigenous peoples, and that simultaneously consumes our pain, feeling our grief can be a transformative political resource, in that it begets a “political agenda of structural justice” concerned with “undoing the precarity to which Indigenous life is exposed.” ⁶³ In this undoing, our worlds can be remade through enduring commitments to restore the very best of how things once were: at specific kind of returning, biskaabiiyaang, returning to ourselves. ⁶⁴

The wounds on this Turtle’s back, then, ask of us to ground our thinking and feeling in the same care that is extended to us from all the levels above and below the Earth. When we can ground ourselves in this way, the choices we make will be directed toward life: miyo pimatisiwin/mino bimaadiziwin, that is, good life/living, for all our relatives. Importantly, good living is also not a metaphor; it is not an individual destination: it encompasses whole systems of balanced relations. It cannot be about personal success or good feeling, while at the same time, relentless extraction is violencing our family. It cannot be only for some, just for those who are in power, those whose lives are deemed grievable in settler society. Good life can never be at anyone else’s expense and that includes every being within and above the Earth, sky, star, and spirit realms; those who make up the land, those who sustain life underground and in the waters. Good life for all relations, to us, is what it would mean to actualize Indigenous environmental justice.

We insist that is possible to yearn for before without romanticizing the past. It is possible to work for this before, with careful and critical attention to the complexities and urgencies of now. The stories we rely on, those that constitute the basis of our systems of knowledge, are maintained foremost through Indigenous languages. Because of these stories, because of the work of those who are sustaining our languages, we know that there are times in our long histories when human people became distracted from life, overtaken by greed and selfishness. There are times when we lost our way. And at these times, we were given healing systems and practices. ⁶⁵ At these times, it was our older-than-human relatives who stood up for us. We feel this in the Anishinaabe story of (re)creation, which speaks to a cataclysmic flood and multiscalar loss: but with the Muskrat’s bravery, generosity, and sacrifice—in collaboration with the Turtle, who offered her back—the whole world was made anew. This is how we choose to understand life, as a network of relationships where the land resurges from the depths. ⁶⁶ These enduring stories invite and nourish hope, belief, and trust in our relatives. We are asked to have faith in the Muskrat, the Turtle, in the birds, and all of the animals; the rocks and the mineral nations; the plant beings, all the medicines. As we think of these ones, so too we are called to attend to the spirits who take care of the waters and those deep underground; all who give of themselves so that there can be life. We must hold ourselves to their example, their absolute generosity and care. From this place, we can feel the enormity of the consequences of our actions, reverberating through all relations at every level above and below the Earth.

FELT THEORIES OF CHANGE IN ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE

Felt theories of extractivism uncover a “critical and devastating knowledge, one that lucidly exposes the somatechnical and necropolitical governance” of the settler colonial state, ⁶⁷ although this is not their sole purpose, nor our sole theory of change. Exposing violence can never be enough, as if raising awareness or documenting damage will alone bring an end to violence. ⁶⁸ On the contrary, felt theories help us to remember a whole-being affective attunement to life. And like all felt theories, the overwhelming sensations brought about by extractivism hold potential to “upend hegemonic understandings” ⁶⁹ of the conditions of being human/being alive in this age marked by both vast planetary violence and enduring Indigenous resistance to such violence, to “make viscerally known new knowledges about living and dying under [and resistance beyond] … the technologies of colonialism.” ⁷⁰ Felt theorizing resists a reductive view of the physical, engaging broader and deeper sensibilities of that which is (at least at present) indescribable and intangible but very much present and alive—even continuing past what we know as death. ⁷¹ We witness this spirit-centered approach to protecting life in the resistances of Indigenous communities across Ontario and across this Turtle’s back. In Treaty 3 territory, for example, amid continued mercury poisoning and advocacy for remediation, calls for granting legal personhood to the Wabigoon River and the Nibi Declaration have advanced governance centered in deep love and recognition of the [spiritual and material life] of water. ⁷² Here, our languages are helpful to ground our understandings. Far beyond what can ever be known through colonial renderings of spirituality, Cree and Anishinaabemowin offer the concept of manito/manidoo as a way of referring to that which animates not only language but all of life.

As we have been taught, at the center of our being—and also of the universe—is manito/manidoo, as part of a mysterious connected whole: traveling outward in ongoing spirals and sparks, always moving in a circle toward life. Attuning to the manito/manidoo of everything is not passive, but it is a materially and relational grounded practice: a land pedagogy ⁷³ carried out every day through the actions and relations of living as part of a whole ecosystem. Sustaining these systems in balance, as our nations ensured before, is a felt undertaking that is attuned to the whole. Jim Dumont, Gichi-Ayaa’aa/Eastern Doorway Chief of the Three Fires Midewiwin Lodge, teaches that we must do things physically “in order to feel it spiritually.” ⁷⁴ He explains:

There is an energy by which everything is created … it always validates life … And that energy is what in English we call love, that energy of caring and kindness. The desire to live life is what we were given. This desire is … [the] emotional drive that we have to live this life in its finest expression of being. ⁷⁵

Feeling life, then, is engagement through manito/manidoo with all our relations. And, the “energy by which everything is created” ⁷⁶ is love, caring, and kindness. So, when we ask what does extractivism feel like to all life, and how might life want to feel otherwise, we are inviting what Million suggests is the “the politically unspeakable.” ⁷⁷ The youngest beings on this Earth, the humans, do feel the complex violence of extractivism in grief and psychological distress, in literal embodied suffering in the wake of environmental violence. ⁷⁸ Our bodies feel in relationship to the conditions of land. And so, we can seek to attune to how the land, how this great and loving Turtle and all our relatives actually feel from continued extraction, from relentless drilling, digging, and displacement of life. We can listen to what the lands and waters are saying, including in expressions of imbalance or toxicity. We need to be in relationship to do this listening. In doing so, we can come to understand the mining industrial complex and its hyperextractive operations as violence, as abuse against all life. This evokes relational responsibilities in defense of and care for those relatives who still remember how things were before.

BECOMING OTHERWISE: ON WHY AND HOW WE CARE

We, the youngest beings in creation, are all responsible for and to the wounds inflicted on our Mother, on the back of this Great Turtle. We are responsible for defending this Turtle and protecting her as part of reawakening the relations and enduring structures of care that sustained so many Indigenous nations and confederacies within whole, reciprocally connected ecosystems for millennia. And to do this, we do not necessarily need to be idealists about the future; we do not need to romanticize solutions or simply think that our actions, individual and collective, will be sufficient to escape the consequences of global extractivism. So much harm has been done, the harm continues, and we must reckon with our complicity. As Jairus Victor Grove reminds us, “change of this magnitude will exceed us.” ⁷⁹ But this, what might be perceived as pessimism, does not make us nihilists. Attuning to the affective present is of critical importance to life, as a duality of physical and spiritual existence. Quite distinct from a nihilist view, feeling-in-relation makes clear that “even if there is no way out, so to speak, sadism is not the only condition for persisting.” ⁸⁰ Feeling in relation does not necessary guarantee restoration, remediation, or repair, but these practices at the heart of felt theorizing in this context, as thinking/feeling/doing are not separate in our understanding.

There are those who believe that extractive industrial development in the so-called Ring of Fire is inevitable. It is difficult not to feel this way when Ontario’s Premier publicly committed to “drive the bulldozers himself” ⁸¹ to build roads for mining in the region, and his government seeks to fast-track approvals against Indigenous jurisdiction. But Indigenous peoples will never stop resisting the supposed inevitability of the settler colonial state, extractive industries, and capitalist consumption. We know that there are better structures than settler colonialism. There are lifeways beyond global extractivism. Our people have lived these before and can live them again. In this time of the seventh fire, it is said “a new people” will emerge who choose to feel, and act from a felt engagement with life. Informed by the wisdom of elders and ancestors, of children and those yet to come, we are all bringing into being the kind of justice that flows from feeling our relations: “Protect the land that gives us life!”; “Take care of and keep the land.” ⁸²

Caring relations are all around and within us. The medicines are still growing, still giving of themselves even where mines have been abandoned, at roadsides ⁸³ , or in the cracks of concrete ⁸⁴ . The waters still love us, even as “we continue with our negligence” ⁸⁵ and cause them further harm. Our relatives persist in their generosity and care toward life. This love can feel so profoundly distant especially in the disconnection, pain, and burnout involved in surviving the ongoing violence of colonialism. But if we can come to attune, feel, and care in accordance with what we were given, we are awakening to the relations that have always sustained us. They are waiting for us.

Being and relating otherwise in the present will shape the future, though we may not know exactly how. Moving in time differently, holds the generative possibilities of many unknown futures. Tending carefully to our relations in the present, again not at the expense of others, affirms that all life deserves dignity and care. And life, it is an experience of the spirit and of the physical. The land gives, the water loves because that energizing, activating force of life cares about us. This is our family. We can live in accordance with our older relatives today: we can “find other practices, bodily dispositions, emotions, grief rather than rage, compassion rather than revenge, and determination rather than resignation.” ⁸⁶ Our relatives deserve this from us. And we imagine, this is something like hope. As Erica Violet Lee (Cree) has written:

There is nothing and no one beyond healing … to provide care in the wastelands is about gathering enough love to turn devastation into mourning and then, maybe, turn that mourning into hope … Hope, then, is knowing there is more to living than surviving; believing that some worlds must exist for us beyond survival. ⁸⁷

To protect and defend those with whom we have nourished attachment is to act from love, and even if this kind of love begets risk. We do not agree with theories of change that situate anthropogenic fears of planetary doom as ultimately motivating, as able to drive the transformations that are needed. But reawakening to and acting from love for Mikinak Ministik/Mikinaak Minising just might. To feel love, as Jim Dumont says, is to “touch life directly.” ⁸⁸ In this way, as the youngest beings in creation, we are tasked with living life as fully and completely as we possibly can, seeking miyo pimatisiwin/mino bimaadiziwinn not only for ourselves but for all of our relatives too. Miyo pimatisiwin/mino bimaadiziwin is a structure of care, spanning generations all the way back to the very beginning and all the way forward beyond imagination. Woven through all relations—care, kindness, and love are how life wants to be.