Panel 17: Indigenous Lands and Visual Rhetoric in Ecomedia II (pre-formed)

Dear panelists, I am so sorry to be coming in so late to the conversation. I have been in transit these last couple of weeks relocating across the country (from sabbatical institution to home institution). The advantage of coming in late, is seeing some of the existing and invigorating discussions.

Since I had promised to be a respondent to the panels, below I have tried to provide a more general, over-arching commentary, and hope that it might also add to the excellent discussion so far.

“Thinking Across the Two Indigenous Ecocriticism SIG Sponsored panels”

As one of the initiators (along with Kyle Bladow and Aby Perez Aguilera) of the two panels sponsored by the Indigenous Ecocriticism Special Interest Group, I am delighted to respond to the papers that came in via the open call for these panels and that collectively comprise Indigenous Lands and Visual Rhetoric in Ecomedia I and II. Together these papers continue the work Joni Adamson and I set out to do in our edited collection, Ecocriticism and Indigenous Studies: Conversations from Earth to Cosmos in important ways. First, they clearly demonstrate Indigenous ecocriticism’s conversations with a range of theoretical lenses—from Matthew’s attention to bioregionalism to Vera’s gendered and queer studies approach. Second, they productively engage a diversity of media: from Vera’s attention to art installations, to Emily’s focus on drone and satellite technologies, Rebecca’s on videopoems, and the variety of cinema discussed—Matthew and Rogelio’s attention to the blurring lines of documentary and avant-garde experimentation, Aby and Felix’s focus on more explicitly political and participatory documentary, and Vera’s attention to fictional film. Third, they push us to think critically of locales beyond that of North America (and Europe). It is exciting to see the strong presence of South American representation, but also to see Felix’s essay engaging Maasai peoples in Africa and Rebecca’s attention to Oceania. Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, these papers collectively demonstrate that they respond to Sean Cubitt’s plenary talk’s closing remarks—his provocation to think of how media might help liberate us from the Anthropocene/Capitalocene.
It is on this last point that I want to say a few more words. In doing so, I do want to start by thanking not only the presenters in these two panels, but also the plenary speakers—Alexa and Sean—as well as the organizers of the conference for generating this thought-provoking space. In the spirit of symposia spaces, my response is not polished by any means, but instead offered as still forming thoughts informed by my own research interests at the intersections of Indigenous studies and ecomedia studies.
So, I begin by first considering one of Sean’s observations that also brings attention to the important role of affect that Alexa’s scholarship highlights. Sean observes that “becoming human and becoming environment” is dangerously con/subsumed by the cybernetic machinery of the Capitalocene. I read his discussion of this ‘capital cyborg’ as ultimately and terrifyingly *unfeeling*. I want to suggest that by highlighting Indigenous perspectives many of these panel papers generate resistance to the terrifying numbness of such capitalist unfeeling. Instead they draw attention to how it might feel to ‘become human and become environment’ in radically different ways than prescribed by the ‘capital cyborg’s’ single-minded focus on land, bodies, and labor as reducible to profitable resource and data.
In general, each presentation’s content encodes a means to feel outside and against the capitalist cyborg through specific attention to Indigenous ways of knowing. Just as one example, I want to highlight Rebecca’s attention to the ocean as understood through the perspectives of Indigenous Pacific Islanders. Its presence as part of these panels on “Indigenous Lands” reminds us how Indigenous understandings of land overflow narrow containers that capitalism prescribes. Captial simultaneously delimits land as property even as its discourse disaggregates land from ocean/water. Rebecca’s essay instead helps us see land as what Indigenous scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson describes as integral to Indigenous place:

“place includes animal nations and plant nations, the water, the air, and the soil—meaning the land is a part of us and our sovereignty rather than an abstract natural resource for our unlimited use. The word place includes sacred and spiritual dimensions that transcend both time and space. It includes my body, my heart, and my mind (in “The Place Where We All Live and Work Together: A Gendered Analysis of “Sovereignty” in the Native Studies Keywords 24).

All of these essays draw attention to Indigenous relations to “land” as simultaneously “place” and thus, complexly relational, concomitantly spiritual and corporeal, and inherently transgressive of capital’s attempts to bind (especially in spatial or temporal terms).
I am also impressed by how these presentations’ highlight media aesthetics as a means to generate what Indigenous literary scholar, Mark Rifkin has called “Indigenous structures of feeling”–structures which are tied to sensations of “belonging to place and peoplehood excluded from settler governance” (173 in Driscoll et al’s Queer Indigenous Studies). I am personally fascinated by how many of the presentations’ make room for such feelings—not only are we exposed to the aesthetics of the primary texts; e.g., screen shots, individual clips from films, etc., but also to the aesthetics of what the presenters chose to show and how. From the visual artistry of Matthew’s attention to the Gutzman’s Pearl Button to Emily’s decision to let the focused orality of her presentation work in concert with her audience’s *imaginaries* and memories of the DAPL conflict, and the spectrum of choices in the other presentations, I see many of these presentations remap (as some of the commentary discussion already notes), remake (in Sean’s words), and rethink (recalling, as Rogelio does, Scott MacDonald’s earliest calls for what ecocinema might do) media’s part in Indigenous sovereignty. Linking content that foregrounds Indigenous peoples’ agencies and cosmovisions of what it means to “be human” and “of” the environment, even the Prezi presentations seem to take up the tools of the ‘capitalist cyborg’ to encourage their audiences to contemplate alternative ways of becoming human and becoming environment.
The second point I want to make also links us back to the plenaries’ attention to resistance/liberation and affect concerns. It draws on Sean’s comment regarding the melancholia that the capitalist cyborg and the Capitalocene inflict on the White European “we”—the sadness of knowing that “no speech is adequate” to “speak on behalf of the oppressed.” Sean’s comments fall within larger discussions central to critical race theory and Indigenous studies; ones that are being taken up by ASLE’s graduate student reading group this summer through attention to Indigenous scholars such as Zoe Todd, Heather Davis, and Kyle Whyte. As these Indigenous scholars remind us, the terrain of “speaking on behalf of” is treacherous (often paternalistic, and, thus, as Sean suggests ultimately inadequate). Indigenous scholar Kim Tallbear in her 2014 “Standing With and Speaking as Faith: A Feminist-Indigenous Approach to Inquiry” provides a different approach, one that states: “I transfer my ethic of wanting to stand with other indigenous people—to inquire in ways that hook up with their intellectual projects in the service of indigenous sovereignty.” Tallbear, thus, articulates an activist methodology, grounded not just in ethics of care—“speaking on behalf of”—but in reciprocity, “speaking as faith.” The latter frames a form of co-constituted speech that “works in concert with” those who have otherwise been marginalized in systems of power.
One thought for us all as we reflect on the papers in these panels is to consider how they negotiate speech. By foregrounding Indigenous perspectives, I would argue, that in some shape or form, each moves us towards Tallbear’s potential. But, I encourage us all, especially the authors, to think of how, and to what extent. Such inquiry helps situate ecomedia and ecocriticism more decisively in conversation with Indigenous studies, particularly with careful attention to what it might mean to think of decolonizing methodologies as an important part of ecomedia’s project of confronting the Capitalocene.