Allying Environmental, Indigenous and Arts-Based Approaches to Improve Relationships with the Earth and Her First Peoples
This work sees the task of human communication as overcoming our inherent inability to know each other’s minds by expanding our own, to create what John Durham Peters calls “new ways to relate and to make worlds with each other.” That inability seems especially evident in the complex, daunting task of the HSS to help improve an increasingly polarized world deeply enmeshed in extractivist, environmentally disastrous business-as-usual. But it’s also present in ‘reconciliation’ work involving Indigenous Peoples and those who came to their territories as uninvited visitors, personally or ancestrally. My research recognizes the need to address and redress human colonization of the Earth’s ecosystems and Her First Peoples together, and with enhanced communication tools. I bring into dialogue three ways of knowing and being that many may consider ‘alternative’ to ‘mainstream’ socio-economic models—environmental, arts-based and Indigenous. I seek to encourage a more ethical, holistic, community-oriented public discourse, to help chart new directions in government policy and law. I draw on three formats: a book setting out the analytical and practical foundations for dialoguing environmental, arts-based and Indigenous approaches; a feature-length documentary film fleshing out those ideas; and pedagogy enacting them. Accordingly, this session shares my learning in a format blending a public talk, film-festival screening and classroom lesson. In addition to reporting findings, I seek to engage Big Thinking delegates interested in emerging multidisciplinary and multimedia paths to envisioning, conducting and sharing HSS research, both within the academy and with the greater Canadian public beyond it.