TY - JOUR
T1 - Do Berries Listen? Berries as Indicators, Ancestors, and Agents in Canada's Oil Sands Region
AU - Baker, Janelle Marie
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
PY - 2021
Y1 - 2021
N2 - In this paper I discuss how being a student of Northern Bush Cree traditions has revealed some possibilities for understanding how berries listen, and respond to, living in, and on, the edge of areas of extreme extraction. Members of Fort McKay First Nation and Bigstone Cree Nations tend to their relationships with the sentient landscape and its entirety of living beings through respectful speech, behaviour, and harvesting practices. The agency of those living beings is expressed through their decisions as to whether or not humans can encounter, harvest, and share in their substance. By examining relationships of reciprocity between the human and other-than-human animal world from a post-humanist perspective, this paper seeks to expand upon traditional indicators of contamination resulting from the large-scale industrial development of the Athabasca oil sands in First Nations’ traditional territories, and to value and share some observations and knowledge of Cree Elders and knowledge holders.
AB - In this paper I discuss how being a student of Northern Bush Cree traditions has revealed some possibilities for understanding how berries listen, and respond to, living in, and on, the edge of areas of extreme extraction. Members of Fort McKay First Nation and Bigstone Cree Nations tend to their relationships with the sentient landscape and its entirety of living beings through respectful speech, behaviour, and harvesting practices. The agency of those living beings is expressed through their decisions as to whether or not humans can encounter, harvest, and share in their substance. By examining relationships of reciprocity between the human and other-than-human animal world from a post-humanist perspective, this paper seeks to expand upon traditional indicators of contamination resulting from the large-scale industrial development of the Athabasca oil sands in First Nations’ traditional territories, and to value and share some observations and knowledge of Cree Elders and knowledge holders.
KW - Athabasca oil sands
KW - Northern bush Crees
KW - berries
KW - other-than-humans
KW - post-humanism
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85086662143&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/00141844.2020.1765829
DO - 10.1080/00141844.2020.1765829
M3 - Journal Article
AN - SCOPUS:85086662143
SN - 0014-1844
VL - 86
SP - 273
EP - 294
JO - Ethnos
JF - Ethnos
IS - 2
ER -