Being and Place through Gendered and Plant Relationships – Reader Response (original) (raw)

Exploring the Interconnection between Native American Land/Environment and Women

Global Regional Review, 2021

This article explores the relationship between Native American lands/environment and the women from ecocritical /ecofeminist perspectives. It has been postulated that while the Euro- American accounts of the history, culture, indigenous women and their relation with nature/land project stereotypical, negative images, Louise Erdrich, through the employment of hybrid narrative techniques combining Eurocentric and Native American modes of narration, has reconfigured the Native American women's environmental identity/subjectivity. This study conducts discourse analysis of the two richly thematic environmental narratives of Louise Erdrich to establish the interconnectivity between women and lands within the realm of ecofeminism. The primary texts explored include Tracks and Love Medicine. The study's contribution is it's highlighting the significance of the Native American Ecofeminist narratives that consider environmental issues to be human issues and thus positively affect ...

New Agriculture, New Knowledge and New Gender Roles: Sharing the Experience of an Indigenous Community

Drawing upon a field investigation conducted over the matrilineal Garo community of Modhupur sal forest, this article analyses the gendered consequences of transforming traditional agriculture. Referring to the role of state forest department, Christian missionaries and neighboring Bengali community, it illustrates how structural constraints and institutional discourses render 'new agriculture' a gendered project targeting men as the recipient of knowledge and prescribing normative gender role in agricultural activities. Ultimately, it is revealed that men are directed towards the center and women are pushed either to the margin or outside the domain of agriculture.

Storying Indigenous (Life)Worlds: An Introduction

Genealogy, 2022

The contributors of this Special Issue call attention to the much longer tradition of stories and storytelling focusing on a particular location, meaning, or history within Indigenous cultures. Furthermore, they bring into sharp focus the ways in which settler and colonial storytelling erases and explains away the Indigenous perspectives and meanings of Indigenous (life)worlds.

Prairie Relations: A Deep Ecology Told Through Native American Stories

So it is that over the past twenty-five years I have watched this deepening crisis of caring, as deteriorating families and communities have undermined the ability of children to grow and thrive well. Many of us have worked against these worsening currents and contexts, trying to help children and couples survive, become healthier. During this period there also has been an expanding crisis of ecological connection and consideration, as the use and development of the land increasingly destroys its future vitality and providence. Some of us have worked against this narrow exploitation for economic profit, trying to illustrate by example how the land might be restored and enhanced to benefit future generations. In my effort to express the crucial relationships between and among these layers, I have found hope for the children of my community and focus for my work by mapping the following layers of potential for change: Cultural Rehabilitation - restoring a community’s identity (synchrony) Family Renewal - reviving and reclaiming life’s intimacy (harmony) Ecological Restoration - recovering the land’s integrity (balance) One of my primary experiences has been that family life can be revived and reclaimed when the family is once again involved, as a family, in those traditions that historically were determined to be a part of their grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ relationship with the land, especially sustainable subsistence activities. Indeed, if done in an informed manner, a variety of foraging and gardening efforts can involve restoring the land as a fundamental method of uncovering caring … caring for the land can lead to a renewal of loving one another well. If a family, by exploring its own history of relationship with the land and with one another, can share that process of discovery and recovery with a few other families, then the possibility of restoring a sense of common purpose and identity in the community is increased. So it is such relationship with the land may be described through the stories of my ancestors who were tribal people in North America over the past 400-500 years.

"Stories are seeds. We need to learn how to sow other stories about plants," Natasha Myers in conversation with Frederike Middelhoff and Arnika Peselmann for "The Stories Plants Tell" (June 2021)

Narrative Culture, 2023

In this interview, Natasha Myers discusses her understanding of plants and the relational stories they tell. As a scholar, activist, and artist based in Toronto, Canada, Myers proposes ways to detune Western norms and forms of sense-making, to expand our sensorium, and participate with plants in the stories they tell. Calling out the colonial violence, racial injustice, and neo-Darwinism that are lurking within the stories people still tell about plants, Myers invites us to explore ways of sensing plants that can cultivate human-plant kinship, and open us up to an experience of the creativity of plant life.