Reflections on the (continued and future) importance of Indigenous geographies

Abstract

Over a decade ago, RDK Herman wrote on the importance of Indigenous geographies and what made it distinct from the broader field of geography of which it is a part. In this commentary, I take up Herman's provocation by making the case that Indigenous geographies will continue to be a vital part of the field of geography as it moves forward into the future, especially in the ways that we think about, re-imagine, and unsettle existing geographical thought and practices, particularly in the ways we relate to the physical and discursive spaces we move within.

Geography and Indigenous perspectives

As an Indigenous geographer, the continued viability and vitality of Indigenous geographies are both a key professional and personal interest to me. Interest in Indigenous geographies is also on the upswing amongst many in our field. There is an increasing amount of work on Indigenous topics in geography, but how do we define our subfield and outline Indigenous perspectives in geography more generally? In 2008, RDK Herman wrote an article titled, ‘Reflections on the Importance of Indigenous Geographies’. In this piece, Herman contrasts Indigenous geographies with ‘Western’ empiricist forms of geographical thought in the ways that Indigenous conceptions of space and place centre relationships across all aspects of space and place. In particular, Herman observes:

In Indigenous sciences, the world is often understood in terms of flows of energies (and sometimes entities) across a permeable boundary between manifest and unmanifest realities. Working relationships with forces deemed ‘superstitious’ or ‘irrational’ in modern science are significant aspects of social processes and healing practices. Maintaining these worldviews and practices is an uphill battle against the hegemony of modern scientific thought and the legacy of missionaries and educators who tried so hard to dismantle Indigenous knowledge systems (Herman, 2008: 75).

Herman positions Indigenous geographies as a way forward for the broader field of geography, and here I would like to take up Herman's provocation and contemplate what this might look like in the discipline. I do so via an ongoing vignette – the ways that I broach these topics in a course that I teach on Indigenous geographies.

Contact zones between empiricism and Indigenous geographical perspectives

Let us start with a brief treatment of the ways in which the field of geography has historically interfaced with Indigenous peoples. I usually begin my Indigenous geographies course with a brief treatment of what geography is and how we define it. We, as geographers, often hold fast to the central definition of our field as the study of relationships between space, place, and those who inhabit said spaces and places. I then introduce concepts of Indigeneity and the ways in which Indigenous peoples relate to space and place, using Herman's reflections as an introduction to the subfield.

At this point, students are often curious about why it is that Indigenous geographies are a pushback against concepts such as empiricism. After all, don’t we want to be able to make informed conclusions and judgements about places and spaces if we are to be good geographers? To this, I provide several responses. The first centres around the imperial project and the need for imperial/settler colonial power to make absolute judgements about space and place so that these discursive and physical attributes can be better controlled and governed (Harris, 2004; Herman, 2008; Wainwright and Robertson, 2003).

Chang (2016) writes on the ways that Kanaka (Native Hawai’ian) conceptions of geographies were immediately dismissed by British explorers, including Captain James Cook. For the British, the only way that the Kanaka could engage with the broader world was via European conceptions of exploration and voyage. Even today, Western geography's engagements with Indigenous peoples have been fraught and racked with colonial intent and lack of consent and respect – including the much-written about controversy surrounding the Mexico Indigena project, where mapping data from Indigenous territories were transmitted back to the United States Army without the prior knowledge of the Indigenous communities involved (Louis and Grossman, 2020; Mychalejko and Ryan, 2009; Wainwright, 2013). Through all of this, I make the argument that the ways in which geographers have engaged with positivism and empiricism in the Western academy are not in sync with the reality on the ground – we cannot profess to neutrality, as the very ways in which we study our field are wrapped up in dynamics of power.

At this point, my students often ask the question of how we might be able to transform these power structures into ones that are more hospitable to Indigenous thought and perspectives. I turn to the multitude of Indigenous scholars in geography and position them as possible embodiments of Herman and Douglas's argument that Indigenous geographies represent a ‘way out’ for the field.

For example, scholars such as Goeman (2009, 2013) write about the ways in which alternative cartographies, and conceptions of space and place, can and have been drawn upon by Indigenous scholars in ways that subvert the spatial realities they often find themselves within via the processes of colonialism. In particular, Goeman invokes the writings by Diné poet Esther Belin and the ways that poems created links between Belin's homelands and the urbanized experiences that Belin and many other Indigenous peoples faced in the United States during the relocation/termination era. This invocation demonstrates that Indigenous connections to place were not easily extinguished and managed to find unique ways of being expressed in ways we might not ordinarily conceive of as ‘cartographies’ or ‘geographies’, a viewpoint expressed by other Indigenous geographers (Hunt and Stevenson, 2017; Lucchesi, 2018).

I further pushback against traditional ‘empiricist’ thought in geography by bringing scholars such as Smith (2021) into my teaching – in particular, how her positioning of Indigenous relationships with the living environment in the Arctic disrupts conceptions of that space as an inherently transitory space in crisis, a viewpoint which raises the spectre of environmental determinism, especially in an era of anthropogenic climate change.

I also push the students’ conceptions of how we define a geography, using the interdisciplinary field of science and technology studies as an anchoring point for our inter/transdisciplinary dive into how we think about space. For example, in their book, Pollution Is Colonialism, Métis scholar Max Liboiron speaks about land relations and how colonialism disrupts these relations through the lens of plastic pollution (Liboiron, 2021). Although Liboiron is a geography professor (at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador), many of my students do not immediately code their book as a geographic study. However, I point out that, at its heart, it is very much a book of geography by focusing on one dynamic of the relationship to space and pointing towards how Indigenous conceptions of being in good relation to land can counter more harmful modes of engagement.

It is here where I want to turn our attention to the way that I feel that Indigenous geographies can live up to Herman's declaration that it is a way forward for the field as we head further into the twenty-first century.

The continued importance of Indigenous geographies

I believe the best work that Indigenous geographies can do for the discipline going forward is through a further unsettling (pun fully intended) of the ways in which we define our field (Iralu, 2021; de Leeuw and Hunt, 2018). As a discipline, geography seems to have gone through an identity crisis of sorts every few decades – such as the move towards quantitative methods in an attempt to make geography more of a ‘hard’ science in the background of the Cold War, or the move towards more critical, post-structuralist theory in the 1990s, to today, when many different fields are beginning to lay claim to geographic techniques, and geography departments are closing or transforming themselves into more geospatial-oriented fields (Hall et al., 2015; Smith, 1987). In the current environment, there can be a danger of clinging to dogmatic views of empiricism among certain areas of geography – particularly in the more quantitative sides of the field, which still presume that making absolute judgements about space and place, and hewing to those anchoring points of our discipline, will keep it viable going forward.

Yet the beauty of geography as a whole lies in the ways in which we can break beyond traditional geographic definitions and cartographic understandings. In this, I feel that Indigenous geographies can lead the way, since work by Indigenous scholars not only brings space and place but the interconnected relationships that Indigenous peoples carry within these spatial planes (both discursively, but also geographically, as Indigeneity is global) into conversation with one another and therefore opens up new possibilities for how we view the geographies around us.

In my class, the most common reaction that my students express as they end the course is that their understanding of geography has been expanded and that they are beginning to look at their surroundings in new ways. They speak about the relationships that they have with their environments, and that there is no one ‘geographical’ understanding that exists – but that the ways in which we relate with space and place are subject to both structures of power and relationships. This includes the relationships we hold both with each other as humans as well as with the environment and more-than-human kin around us (Larsen and Johnson, 2016). To me, this is at the heart of the arguments for Indigenous geographies; when we broaden our understanding of what geography can be, we position ourselves to be of continued relevance and service not only to academia but to humanity going forward. The future is bright for Indigenous geographies, and geography as a whole, which is something that I am personally seeing through increased engagement with the subfield within professional spaces such as the American Association of Geographers and the Canadian Association of Geographers. So, the appetite is there, and the opportunity is here – we only need the courage and the open-mindedness to embrace it.