Reading recommendations by The Goose team on race, colonization, and the environment

Angus, Siobhan

Defraeye, Julien

Follett, Alec

Garcia Chua, Rina

Girvan, Anita

Huebert, David

Kinder, Jordan

English

Wilfrid Laurier University

The Goose Volume 19 Number 1 Article 5 9-1-2021 The Goose Picks: Race, Colonization, and Environment Anita Girvan Julien Defraeye St. Thomas University Alec Follett David Huebert Jordan Kinder See next page for additional authors  Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons Follow this and additional works at / Suivez-nous ainsi que d’autres travaux et œuvres: https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose Recommended Citation / Citation recommandée Girvan, Anita, Julien Defraeye, Alec Follett, David Huebert, Jordan Kinder, Rina Garcia Chua, and Siobhan Angus. "The Goose Picks: Race, Colonization, and Environment." The Goose, vol. 19 , no. 1 , article 5, 2021, https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol19/iss1/5. This article is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion in The Goose by an authorized editor of Scholars Commons @ Laurier. For more information, please contact scholarscommons@wlu.ca. Cet article vous est accessible gratuitement et en libre accès grâce à Scholars Commons @ Laurier. Le texte a été approuvé pour faire partie intégrante de la revue The Goose par un rédacteur autorisé de Scholars Commons @ Laurier. Pour de plus amples informations, contactez scholarscommons@wlu.ca. The Goose Picks: Race, Colonization, and Environment Authors Anita Girvan, Julien Defraeye, Alec Follett, David Huebert, Jordan Kinder, Rina Garcia Chua, and Siobhan Angus This book review is available in The Goose: https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol19/iss1/5 The Goose Picks:  Race, Colonization, and Environment    Elements of Indigenous Style by Gregory Younging  Brush Education Inc, 2018.  Beyond being simply a style guide in the tradition of American Psychological Association (APA), the Chicago Manual of Style, and Modern Language Association (MLA), this guide provides a substantive and ethical re-consideration as to how Indigenous voices, literatures, and lands may be honoured and amplified in writing, publishing, and artistic and scholarly pursuits. Pointing out common settler-colonial errors—like the use of the past tense when referring to Indigenous people and extractive settler relationships with Indigenous artists and communities—but also providing case studies and examples of Indigenous-led projects that have worked, Younging provides a timely intervention into colonial business-as-usual. The guide centers the notion and practice of Indigenous cultural rights, as determined in specific Nations and communities and also features more general rights and principles in, for example, the United Nations Declaration on the Right of Indigenous Peoples. Each chapter gives an important historical context and names the enduring colonial legacies, then gives examples or cases and ends with a style principle. Younging provides a total of 22 of these grounded principles which guide prospective relations, writing, and artistic or scholarly practices. Reading this book along with Daniel Heath Justice’s Why Indigenous Literatures Matter (2018) has contributed to my understanding of how grounded stories, protocols, and community provide key orientations to healthy futures for larger-than-human relations.   - Anita Girvan (Book Reviews editor)   Kukum by Michel Jean. Montréal: Libre Expression, 2020.  Écrivain, chef d’antenne et journaliste d’enquête à Radio-Canada, Michel Jean, auteur originaire de Mashteuiatsh/Pointe-Bleue, au Québec, rend hommage dans Kukum (2019) à son arrière-grand-mère, Almanda Siméon, en mettant en récit son acculturation progressive à la communauté innue des bords de Pekuakami/lac Saint-Jean, au tournant du XXe siècle. Kukum propose de réhabiliter symboliquement cet espace mythologique du moyen Nord, sur les rives qui ont vu naître le canonique Maria Chapdelaine (1913) de Louis Hémon, en partie responsable en ces lieux d’une sclérose de l’imaginaire littéraire québécois et ce, depuis plus d’un siècle. Le récit de Jean fait ainsi renaître ce qu’il qualifie d’« Atlantide innue » (p.115), mais 1Girvan et al.: The Goose PicksPublished by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2021joue également le rôle contrepoids à l’époque glorifiée de la drave, véritable désastre environnemental pour les populations innues du Pekuakami. La Péribonka, rivière affluente du lac, « étouff[e] sous le poids des troncs [et] vom[it] la forêt » (p.165). L’auteur souligne ainsi la dépossession collatérale des pratiques traditionnelles liées au territoire, auxquelles viennent se substituer, de manière assez brutale, les pratiques extractivistes du colonisateur, guidées par un progrès tout relatif. Deux conceptions fondamentales de la vie s’opposent ainsi dans l’espace du Pekuakami, rendu exigu au tournant du XXe siècle, et dans le roman de Michel Jean : celle de la circularité inhérente au mode de vie autochtone, face à la linéarité de celles des Blancs, martelée comme inéluctable pour les populations autochtones. Comme le dit si bien l’auteur, « [l]es plaies laissées par la colonisation guérissent peu à peu, mais les cicatrices restent visibles. » (p.223)  - Julien Defraeye (Directeur du contenu francophone/French Editor)   Environmental Justice and Racism in Canada by Andil Gosine and Cheryl Teelucksingh Emond Montgomery, 2008.  Andil Gosine and Cheryl Teelucksingh’s Environmental Justice and Racism in Canada: An Introduction (2008) is—according to the book’s publisher—the “first of its kind in Canada.” For that, it holds a special place in the study of the environment in Canada. More personally, the book was central to my growing understanding of environment, race, and colonialism in Canada. It helped me turn my dissertation from a project broadly focused on environmental literature to one that considered writer-activism, environmental justice, and settler-Indigenous relation building. Although now published over a decade ago, Gosine and Teelucksingh’s is a volume that I return to for their definitions of key terms and history of the preeminently US based EJ movement, but also for their close attention to how environmental injustices and their amelioration manifest uniquely in the Canadian context. Andil Gosine’s latest book, Nature’s Wild: Love, Sex and Law in the Caribbean (2021), extends his critique of colonial legacies and furthers his thinking and artistic practice across the divides of species, genders, sexualities and borders. Cheryl Teelucksingh also continues to interrupt in e-race-sures of environmental thought and activism in Canada with major contributions including: “Dismantling White Privilege: The Black Lives Matter Movement and Environmental Justice in Canada” (Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies, vol. 5, no. 2, 2018, pp. 304).     - Alec Follett (Co-editor)   Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect by Mel Chen  Duke University Press, 2012.  Through the startlingly original, robust, and carefully articulated governing conceptual paradigm of “animacy,” Chen’s sophisticated analyses of key issues around race, environment, disability, affect, and linguistics open astonishing windows onto complex intersectional 2The Goose, Vol. 19, No. 1 [2021], Art. 5https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol19/iss1/5networks. Drawing on a broad range of archives—from environmental disease to the “racialized animality” of J.L. Austin’s linguistic monkey play to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill to the 2007 “Chinese lead toys panic” in the U.S. (90; 15)—Animacies uses a queer of color approach to emphasize the co-implication of environmental discourse and forms of subjection and taxonomization, illuminating the countless ways that matter is “shaped by race and sexuality” (5). This book, which I read at a pivotal moment of my Ph.D. studies, helped me to begin a long and ongoing journey of navigating the myriad, complex ways environmental categories and regimes of toxicity are entangled with discursive state projects of racialization. What I love most about this book is its method; it couples politically vital analyses with creative readings and aesthetic illuminations, always approaching its material through surprising, inventive, and unexpected conceptual swerves, always vigilant in its resistance to hierarchical thinking and its cultivation of trans-species forms of care.  - David Huebert (Co-editor)   “Defend the Treaties - Beaver Lake Cree Nation,” by RAVEN Trust.  https://raventrust.com/campaigns/defend-the-treaties/. Accessed 18 July 2021.  In partnership with RAVEN, an organization that helps to raise legal defence funds for Indigenous Peoples, the Beaver Lake Cree Nation is currently challenging the Canadian and Albertan governments for their sanctioning of extractive enterprise that has wreaked havoc on the human and more-than-human world across Treaty 6 territory. Specifically, the Beaver Lake Cree Nation asserts that the cumulative ecological consequences of resource extraction breaches clauses of Treaty 6 that guarantee rights to hunt, fish, and other land-based cultural practices since territorial lands and waters have been contaminated and rendered into sacrifice zones. The trial is an historic one. As RAVEN’s description of the case puts it, the Beaver Lake Cree Nation “are the first community to ever be granted a trial in relation to the cumulative impacts this industry has had on inherent Treaty rights” (“Defend the Treaties”). Bringing into sharp focus the environmental racism that animates the settler colonial Canadian extractive state apparatuses, this case confronts and challenges the inequities produced by slow violence in ways that highlight the ultimate failure of the Canadian state in upholding the agreements and relationships that made its formation possible in the first place.  - Jordan B. Kinder (Copy editor)   Race, Space, and the Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society by Sherene Razack.  Between The Lines, 2002.   Sherene Razack’s edited collection, Race, Space, and the Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society, is not a book that I would personally have encountered if it was not for my extensive research into the discourse of “space” beyond the environmental humanities. Razack is, I firmly believe, one of the most stellar scholars of Canadian academia and her Introduction to this 3Girvan et al.: The Goose PicksPublished by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2021collection is written with such sharpness and clarity. Her main argument is that spaces are created and produced by dominant social hierarchies, and as such enact into law oppressive spatial arrangements that affect racialized bodies. Reading the introduction to this edited collection changed the way I look at spaces and bodies, especially those that are shaped and reshaped a certain way by the monolithic white settler society. The connections that are teased out in this collection are provocative—from white settler mythologies, racial projects of mapping, and borders, among others. Though it has been some time since this collection was published, the discourses in the book still reverberates loudly today.   -Rina Garcia Chua (Poetry editor)   Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton and Commerce in the Atlantic World by Anna Arabindan-Kesson. Duke University Press, 2021.  Anna Arabindan-Kesson’s Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton and Commerce in the Atlantic World focuses on cotton to explore colonization, the slave trade, and commerce in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. A striking reconsideration of the visual culture of Blackness through an analysis of representations of cotton, Arabindan-Kesson shows how Blackness and cotton became framed as resources to be extracted or expropriated. Exploring both historical and contemporary art, including work by Hank Willis Thomas, Lubaina Himid, and Yinka Shonibare CBE RA, Black Bodies, White Gold is a thoughtful, rigorous meditation on materiality, meaning, and memory. While not specifically a work of eco-criticism, Arabindan-Kesson’s methodologically innovative emphasis on materiality, land, labor, and value has significant insights for environmental studies, showing how vision materially shapes the world.  - Siobhan Angus (Co-editor)    4The Goose, Vol. 19, No. 1 [2021], Art. 5https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol19/iss1/5

The Goose Picks: Race, Colonization, and Environment

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The Goose Picks: Race, Colonization, and Environment

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