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And here's the launch! I'm writing to you from St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, the traditional homelands of the Beothuk. The province is also the homelands of the Mi’kmaw, Innu, and Inuit. The knowledge in #PollutionIsColonialism is very much grounded in this place. 1/12
When I first drafted #PollutionIsColonialism, it was about plastic. But 2 pivotal things happened @ the @4sweb mtg in Barcelona in 2016: Michelle Murphy gave a keynote about suspending damage-centered narratives & centering Indigenous "alterlife" 2/12 https://journal.culanth.org/index.php/ca/article/view/ca32.4.02
& Joe Dumit spoke about connective tissue as fundamentally relational. "Yes!" I thought. But then he was done. "But what KIND of relations?!" I thought. I left the conference early & locked myself in a hotel room near the airport & started to rewrite 3/12 #PollutionIsColonialism
This was the start of a *methodological* text abt how all things have land relations & you have to be *specific* abt relations to act well (aka ethics). There was no real paper in the hotel, so my early outline is on coasters & the back of receipts. 4/12 #PollutionIsColonialism
Overall, #PollutionIsColonialism argues that all actions- research, reading, writing, administration- have land relations, and these relations can align with or against colonialism. So let’s be intentional about this. 5/12
#PollutionIsColonialism does 4 things (I think): 1. It frames methodology as a way of being in the world, as an ethic of land relations. Colonialism & anticolonialism both have land relations. I tried to enact these ethics in the *way* the book was written (e.g. footnotes, jokes)
2. It redefines pollution *as* colonialism, not a byproduct of colonialism. Using land as a place to assimilate or store pollution (including the amounts allowed by regulation!) is a land relation where land is a resource for non-Indigenous futures 7/12 #PollutionIsColonialism
This means environmental regulation is not the opposite of colonialism. The inclusion of Indigenous ppl in pollution science is not the opposite of colonialism. Stopping non-Indigenous assumed access to land is the opposite of colonialism (aka Land Back) #PollutionIsColonialism
3. The book uses plastics as a case study to refute colonialism. Rather than seeing it as a toxic substance that must be annihilated (a brutal relation), it looks at various ways plastics *are* land, extend land, AND harm land. It's not simple. 9/12 #PollutionIsColonialism
4. #PollutionIsColonialism shows how @CLEAR_Lab_ does anticolonial science on plastic pollution. Community peer review, judgmental statistics, returning samples to the land & other examples. I try to show how anticolonial science is already here 10/12 https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/201806.0104/v1
The text is an effort at anticolonial academic writing. Eg using footnotes to thank ppl, have side conversations w/ specific audiences; annotating when scholars mark their land relations & when they don't; Canadian spelling indicates place-based knowledge #PollutionIsColonialism
Thanks for reading this far! My goal for the book is that it is *useful* and *generative* for readers. I look forward to hearing how that does (and doesn't, I'm sure) happen for others. Now I'll turn it over to hosts! 12/12 #PollutionIsColonialism
