PUBLICATIONS AND PROJECTS

Western Environmental Phenomenology as a Colonizing Practice: The Question of Land

2020. ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isaa189

Western environmental phenomenology analyzes nature and human experience in terms of their relational, spatial (or “placial”), and temporal dimensions. This central method has gained broad influence as a form of theoretical resistance to positivist systems that reduce the interplay of humanity, nature, meaning, and ethics to the verifiable propositions of science. However, this essay argues that Western environmental phenomenology normalizes settler colonial experience in many literatures where it is either discussed per se or applied. This normalization constitutes a colonizing practice. Colonizing practices justify, legitimize, underwrite, remain complicit with, or otherwise enhance and enact settler political power and the logics that lay claim to Native lands, relatives, and lives. This essay sketches how white supremacy saturates historical and contemporary phenomenological analyses of land.

Post-Humanist Pragmatism

2017. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 53(2), pp. 246-269. https://doi.org/10.2979/trancharpeirsoc.53.2.04

This essay argues that classical pragmatism à la John Dewey is a philosophy on its way to post-humanism. Dewey's account of non-human animals is not a mere tangent, but a central axis for his concepts of communication and language. Despite a lifelong insistence on the exceptional qualities of humans, Dewey's more expansive accounts of language are adequate for a post-humanist perspective. For Dewey to fully come to terms with the implications of Darwin and the postulate of continuity, consistency should be demanded between his theory of language and his accounts of non-human animal behavior and expression. Dewey's concept of “an experience” coincides with the theory of adaptation and the bodily ability to make new environments and change habits. Pragmatists should acknowledge that all living organisms engage in creative meaning-laden behavior as part of general life-activity.

How the Lummi Nation Revealed the Limits of Species and Habitats as Conservation Values in the Endangered Species Act: Healing as Indigenous Conservation

Paul J Guernsey, Kyle Keeler, and Jeremiah (Jay) Julius

In its recent efforts to protect the Southern Resident killer whale population in the Puget Sound and bring “Lolita” home, the Lummi Nation has revealed significant limitations to species and habitats as values in Western conservation models. Where Indigenous conservation falls outside the scope of Western science, it is often invisible to or actively suppressed by the settler state. We argue that the conservation practices of NOAA, in accordance with federal policy of the ESA, have amounted to extractive colonial enterprises, treating the whales as educational, economic, and environmental possessions while degrading the relationship of the Lummi to the whales as relatives and attacking tribal sovereignty and self-determination.

The infrastructures of White settler perception: a political phenomenology of colonialism, genocide, ecocide, and emergency

Emergencies are an element of perception. Far from a private and personal affair, perception is social, structured by a process of “inculcation.” Perception has a material-political infrastructure in the sense that it is underlain by cultural and economic conditions that refract the colonial, white supremacist, and heteropatriarchal inscriptions of “dominant” society into the quotidian understanding of events, crystalizing intentional modes in subjects, bodies, and communities. These infrastructures are dynamic and multifaceted, but their alloyed effect regulates phenomena of emergency always to the advantage of the settler colonial state and capitalist interests. Infrastructures of settler perception obfuscate the ways in which Native communities experience environmental emergencies as cycles of settler colonial violence and ecocide. Emergencies such as global warming are described as “human-caused” rather than directly linked to settler colonialism, capitalism, and white supremacy. Many uncritical deployments of the term “Anthropocene” commit a similar fallacy, implicating people who have had little or nothing to do with the planetary ecological collapse. In a white logic of death, or a “necropolitics” (Mbembe 2019), the structures of colonialism, genocide, war, and slavery represent not the beginning of crisis, but rather the end of violence and disorder. This strategy of obfuscation is employed in a variety of contexts and seen most explicitly in the context of Indian education systems that form a political project of spiritual and physical domination. In response, a politics of refusal has emerged in Native communities to form incommensurable collective experiences of emergencies, attending to the ways in which emergencies reveal the relationships between us and how these indicate differential and yet interconnected responsibilities and moral duties that implicate some of us more than others and call incommensurable communities forth to action each in their own way.