Check out my video presentation for ASLE 2021 HERE!
This was my first experience at ASLE and it was a very good one. The theme of the conference was "EmergencE/Y." I participated in the stream "Indigenous Ecocriticism" and loved the presentation of anthropologist and geographer Zoe Todd and sound artist AM Kanngieser on "Environmental Kin Studies."
This is my abstract presentation:
Of Flowers and Moss: Scientific poetics and anticolonial micropolitics in the works of Mapuche poets Leonel Lienlaf and Cristian Antillanca
In its thirst for land, settler colonialism throughout Turtle Island and Abiayala not only consists of a genocidal ongoing process and structure (Wolfe 2006; Speed 2019; Delrio 2018) but also entails environmental detriment including “biocolonialism” (Whitt 2009) and the death of entire ecosystems. The dispossession and intent of elimination of Indigenous people is one and the same with environmental injustices (Gilio-Whitaker 2019), and it is justified by Western science. However, literary criticism of Mapuche People’s creative work has yet to engage with how science plays a role in what Mapuche activist Moira Millan names “terricide,” the genocide of the land including human, non-human, and spiritual lives. It also needs to engage further with the Indigenous science underlying Mapuche poetics. Through the analysis of the works of Mapuche-Williche poets Leonel Lienlaf and Cristian Antillanca, I argue that they create scientific poetics where the Mapuche-Williche knowledge system functions as anticolonial micropolitics. In Kogen, Lienlaf presents what I call a pedagogy of the moss—aligned with Anishinaabeg Leanne B. Simpson’s ideas about land as a teacher—a way of knowing that confronts colonial myth of the inevitable extinction of Indigenous people. In Wanglen y el canto de las flores, Antillaca shows the stellar genealogy of flowers and all lives of the land based on ancient Mapuche stories, that puts forward a Mapuche self-representation against the grain of terricidal science’s appropriations. The poetic language of both authors exposes how Western “reductivist scientism” (Whitt 2009) serves settler colonialism and terricide.
Keywords: settler colonialism; terricide; Mapuche scientific poetics; Western science; Indigenous environmental justice