"Water is Her Life Blood": The Waters of Bkejwanong and the Treaty-Making Process

This paper, originally presented over thirty years ago at a conference at Walpole Island, examines the waters of Bkejwanong, as reflected through the Treaty-making process, since the issuance of the Royal Proclamation of 1763. Drawing on extensive historical research and documentation, the paper offers a unique insight into Treaty negotiations surrounding Indigenous water rights and title in Canada and the United States. In doing so, it helps explain the profound importance water holds in Walpole Island First Nations’ culture, heritage, and economy, not only as a crucial natural resource, or an essential aspect of Indigenous territorial sovereignty, but moreover as the life blood of Mother Earth, the beginning and the end of life

Editorial Essay

From the depths of Dante’s Inferno to Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, subterranean and subaquatic environments have often been depicted as repositories of primordial forces and abiding secrets in the Western tradition. The much-repeated (if somewhat misleading; e.g., Copley, 2014) claim that humans have “explored” more of outer space than of Earth’s oceans points to the mystique associated with the deepest regions of this planet. Though dramatic environmental changes are becoming increasingly evident all across the face of the Earth, we surface-dwellers can scarcely fathom what has been occurring below the ground and beneath the waves. In these deep places, rising temperatures deplete aquifers and destabilize sea beds; infrastructures (both old and new) wind through vast urban undergrounds; heavy industry delves ever deeper in its search for fossil fuels, rare earth metals, and geothermal energy; and plastics and other toxic contaminants come to settle among the extremophiles inhabiting the most remote reaches of the ocean. [...

Nature Loves to Hide: Navigating Surface and Depth in the Anthropocene

While humans explore and map the subsurface environments of earth, there remain unplumbed depths of nature that cannot be so exposed. This essay argues that along with a literal sense of depth as a spatial dimension, there exists a latent depth of nature hidden to everyday perception that may nonetheless manifest in/as attentive imaginative involvement. It begins by briefly comparing the ontological assumptions of Newton and Descartes with those of Merleau-Ponty before examining how the everyday phenomenon of sunrise might be interpreted through the latter. The practice of terrapsychology is then explored as a means to deepen our engagement with(in) nature and sensitively navigate the necessary ambiguity of imaginative involvement. This latter is highlighted as a corrective to the logic of certainty and control that attempts to maintain human “progress” at the expense of more-than-human nature

Beneath Clouded Hills: A More-Than-Human Approach to “Deep England”

I’d like to tell you a story, ‘bout how England came to be… So begins a retelling of Des Grantz Geanz, a more-than-human origin tale of England (Birt & Helle, 2023), which recounts how thirty exiled giants were the first to appear on Albion’s shores, named so after the eldest. Here, they lived in harmony with the existing flora and fauna until the tyrant Brutus invaded and made them flee underground. The tale starts off Beneath Clouded Hills (Figure 1), an artist film by Verity Birt and myself, which forms part of a wider art and research project in which we explore the ambiguous term “Deep England” (Birt & Helle, 2023). [...

Deep Listening: Tending Future Soil Song

The ground is the surface we call home. Inscribed in it is a record of geologic and social life. It is a site of earthly memory. The soil is marked by the now 400-year-long social and ecological crisis of colonial capitalism. Land dispossession, the plantation model of agriculture, chattel slavery, and the imposition of these modes of extraction and unfreedom worldwide leave the planets soils severely degraded. If current rates of degradation continue, the world’s topsoil will be gone in sixty years, according to a UN official (Arsenault, 2014). [...

oceanic tauromachy

oceanic tauromachy conceives of the new ocean beyond the tropes of catastrophe and disaster, as an evocative ‘zone’ of evolution, transformation, and unforgiving change, beyond the ontology of despair. The ecological turn has transformed the oceans into complex zones. It has become an apophenic abstraction stitching together other abstractions—an abcanny zone of aberrating non-meaningfulness, of clandestine unbeing, of fractal unbecoming. oceanic tauromachy is musica universalis of residual divinity in toxicity, of lingering sanctity in erosion. Here I invoke the froth that has been gurgling out of the spasms of the sea. The new ocean has become a breeding haven for chthonic deception which has been accommodating the holy havoc of bioprospecting exploitation. The sea bed exhibits the paralysis of our unhinged telos. The ocean has lost its topos. oceanic tauromachy is a will to recover; a preamble to invite and engage a diagnostic planetarity in praxis

Invisible Fish

I’m going to describe an ongoing artistic project with the title “Invisible Fish.” This project began in 2018 as a collaboration with South African writer and director Lindiwe Matshikiza. Before I begin to describe how Invisible Fish came about, I want to set the scene by reflecting on a photograph of my daughter several years ago in an aquarium, looking at a diver cleaning the tank. I’ve had this photograph on the wall of my studio ever since I took it and, in many ways, I can trace the start of the thinking for this Invisible Fish project back to this moment. [...

Introduction to "Thinking with More-Than-Human Subsurfaces"

As part of an interdisciplinary research team called “Thinking Deep,” which looks at “novel creative approaches to the subsurface” (Royal Holloway, University of London, n.d.), we registered a growing interest in the more-than-human subsurface across art, geography and beyond. As such, we put together a call for papers for the 2023 American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting, inviting papers that give thought to the environments below our feet—environments which have been “decentred from our imagination” (Hawkins, 2020, p. 4). In response, we received a wide range of interdisciplinary presentations that were willing to think-with cave-, marine- and soil-dwelling creatures; microbial networks and other elements of the subsurface. We ran two sessions and heard from academics and artists whose research centres the theme of the more-than-human within the subsurface, and who explore the ways in which our disciplines can best engage with these underground beings, habitats, and imaginaries. [...

A Network Beneath the Soil

A Network Beneath the Soil is a short fiction story that follows a young person who is struggling with their existence in a heteropatriarchal, colonial, racial capitalist society. They transform into part of the Amanita muscaria’s mycelium, a network of fungal threads that form a symbiotic relationship with the roots of plant organisms in the forest. The character is presented with a choice: to abandon their humanity and become fungi, or continue to exist as a human. A Network Beneath the Soil looks toward mycorrhizal fungi to express what we, as humans, might learn from the symbiotic relationships that occur below the surface of the Earth