The vision
“Indigenous people are still here, regardless of what the colonial state may say about the settler. You can lift and strengthen that ongoing relationship with the land here and now.”
– Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles, PhD
The spotlight
Climate change is a world-ending problem: Floods, fires, hurricanes and heat threaten life and land, and can make parts of the planet uninhabitable. But when Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles advises his students on what to do about it, one of the things they recommend is to simply go for a walk. Smiles is an assistant professor of geography at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, and a leader in the field of Indigenous geography. A citizen of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibewe, they explore how indigenous people have cultivated relationships with the land that are ceremonial, historic—and constantly evolving, including in the wake of climate change.
As colonial governments deal more seriously with traditional ecological knowledge, Smiles’ work is a timely reminder of how seemingly small changes to your routine can have a big impact on your point of view. Indigenous geography presents a stark contrast to a worldview based on exploitation and exploitation.
Many societies cataloged the world around them to make maps and meaning out of the land, but colonial ways of contextualizing the world also often used geography as a way to divide and sequester land from indigenous peoples.
In a 2008 paper, RDK Herman investigated how the field of geography confirms its science in colonial ways of thinking. Herman, who is not indigenous, wrote that it removed many of the ways in which original inhabitants of the land related to the lakes, rivers, sky and earth – often justifying violent land tenure under the guise of empirical and enlightened thinking.
There are several indigenous geographies, Smiles said — as many as there are tribes in the world. But collectively the field is about a worldview in which people are part of the land they are on, something that “modernist geography” fails to do. In Hawaii, for example, the native ʻŌiwi people consider the ocean an important family member which is granted agency.
Even though there is growing interest in traditional knowledge of tribes, in academia, approaches like this challenge the status quo. The incorporation of tribal epistemologies into the field of geography has accused Smiles of not being objective.
“Objectivity doesn’t mean you’re not passionate about these kinds of things. It’s about whether we can really tell the truth about what’s going on,” they said.
If the last time you were doing geography was looking at place names on a map, or directions from point A to point B, Smiles’ point is that geography can be a tool for looking at big issues like climate change through a series of relationships to examine – not only. a collection of lines drawn on a map by colonial powers.
I spoke with Smiles about how indigenous geography is shaking up what most of us understand the field to be. It is an academic pursuit, but also a shift in thinking that suggests that something as simple as a walk can change a person’s colonial outlook on the world. Their responses have been edited and summarized for clarity.
Q. My only experience with geography on a day-to-day basis is Google Maps, so what is geography as a field of study?
A. Geography is the study of the relationships between space and place and the people and things that inhabit these things. That sounds really broad on its own, but that’s kind of the beauty of geography. It is essentially how we understand the spaces and places around us that we call home, through which we move. How do we interpret their meaning, and how do we find out the relationships between spaces, between places and between people.
So geography can be maps, looking at spatial relationships. But it can also be something deeply personal, like how we interact with space.
When I come home after a long day and I see my wife and cat, I feel relaxed. It is geography because it is a relationship with space that I have.
Q. What is indigenous geography? What makes it different?
A. Dominant geography is that we perceive space in place and do so in a way that keeps us separate. It is top-down and analytical.
As Ojibwe people, in our own creation story we have certain obligations towards the environment and the spaces in which we move. This is indigenous geography. This deep relationship with the land.
I’m not talking Disney, Pocahontas, talking to trees and raccoons. But if something bad happens to the country, it is followed by something bad that happens to us as a people, because we are deeply dependent on the country to have our cultures and our way of life.
The beauty of indigenous geography is that it drives home that deep interconnectedness. We are part of the environment, we are part of a space, and we are not separate from it, nor should we try to keep ourselves separate from it.
Q. How does climate change integrate into your research and position?
A. Climate change is something that can really disastrously affect the geographical areas around us. Here in British Columbia, towns like Lytton are literally being burned off the planet due to forest fires.
I think of wild rice, an important food for us, and it relies on a certain amount of water and oxygen and water temperature and lack of pollution. In Minnesota, we are starting to see all of these things slip away.
Indigenous people are often at the center of these events, placed on marginal pieces of land, the most susceptible.
I kind of laugh a little bit in a weird, ironic way, when people say, “It’s the end of the world.” Well, for indigenous peoples the world has ended several times, hasn’t it? Settlers tried to eliminate us, tried to starve us out. Genocide knocked our language and culture out of us. It’s just another end of the world, right?
It gets interesting where indigenous communities don’t really fall into the fatalism you find in settler frameworks.
When I work around cultural responses to climate change, I point to indigenous nations. These are the people you want to look up to and talk to when it comes to how to survive these kinds of things. Because, for better or for worse, we indigenous people got really damn good at surviving things that were meant to kill and eliminate us.
Q. You teach geography as a professor at the University of Victoria. How do you explain this to students, and how does engaging with the world in this way help fight climate change?
A. I tell my students it’s very accessible to think that way. Some students are like, “Oh, are we going to do ceremonies?” And I tell them no, we’re just going to learn how indigenous people see the world. Which is not super mystical, but it is very mundane, very mundane.
Q. What do you tell them to do?
A. Be present and have connections. Deliberately see where you are and move through your local space.
Q. Can you tell me more about it? How does it help with climate change issues?
A. When people see themselves as interconnected to the environment in various ways, they realize, “There is a lot I can do to help create a better world.”
I want to be careful. There’s a lot of individualization of climate change: “It’s up to you to make an impact,” right? And it’s a good way to obscure the role of capitalism and corporations and deprivation that it has caused.
But there are some things where there is strength in numbers, and there is a way that even one individual action can help inspire others. This leads to more wholesale, structural changes on a societal level.
– Taylor Dawn Stagner
More exposure
A parting shot
Two hundred people gathered this summer to celebrate and celebrate white buffalo calf born in Yellowstone National Park, fulfilling an indigenous prophecy — a blessing and a warning. Check out some clips from the celebration here.
