Nunamii’luni quvianaqtuq (It is a happy moment to be on the land): Feelings, freedom and the spatial political ontology of well-being in Gjoa Haven and Tikiranajuk, Nunavut

Abstract

In Uqsuqtuuq (Gjoa Haven, Nunavut), we worked with Uqsuqtuurmiut (people of Uqsuqtuuq) on local priorities of caribou and well-being. We learned about the importance of relationality. In order to follow relations and their effects, we draw upon health geography concepts: therapeutic landscape and environmental dispossession. As therapeutic techniques, Uqsuqtuurmiut practice their knowledge and norms with people; animals; and the land, water and sea ice towards physical and emotional gains. They also make health discourses that can be beneficial. The social aspects of this environmental investment move beyond the individuation found in the hamlet to produce a sense of unity (or freedom) with emotional benefit. It was ultimately expressed as the happiness inherent to being ‘on the land’ and well-being. Moreover, we draw on relational materialism to illustrate not only a holistic form of well-being, but also how Uqsuqtuurmiut self-landscape encounters involve the spatialization of ontological difference. To better appreciate how this therapeutic worlding experience provides emotional gains related to self-determination, we reframe freedom from simply being the erasure of interpersonal borders to also include a sense of interdependence and collective autonomy. We further explain happiness as the therapeutic benefit of an Uqsuqtuurmiut spatial political ontology.

Animal geographies II: Killing and caring (in times of crisis)

“…Researchers engage relationality as an explicit conceptual and/or methodological approach, advancing thinking in the discipline (e.g. Gandy, 2019; Miller, 2018; Robertson and Ljubicic, 2019; Srinivasan, 2019; Wilson, 2019), and also as a broader empirical focus, through, for example, studies of the composition and functioning of cities, landscapes and oceans (e.g. Fredriksen, 2019; Satizábal and Dressler, 2019; Serrano-Montes et al, 2019; Tănăsescu, 2019; Wood, 2019).…”

Culture and the social-ecology of local food use by Indigenous communities in northern North America

“…https://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol25/iss2/art8/ The results described here also relate to the important issue of community adaptive capacity in an era of rapid environmental change (Harper et al 2019). The expectation that community harvest practices and food use will simply change as local ecological conditions change rests on environmental determinism independent of cultural factors (Robertson and Ljubicic 2019), which is equivalent to the small red space labeled as ecological relatedness in our variance partitioning analysis (Fig. 6).…”

Ȼentol Tŧe Teṉew̱ (Together With the Land)

“…Recognizing that Indigenous nations have distinct, sovereign ways of knowing and doing provides an opening to foster more complex dialogues regarding whose knowledges are being reproduced and valued in post-secondary education. Indigenous scholars have long warned us against the danger of romanticizing and essentializing Indigeneity, and we see these challenges in postsecondary classrooms when Indigenous ontologies are presented in appropriative, diluted, or tokenistic ways (Borrows, 2017;Deloria, 1969;Grande, 1999;Robertson & Ljubicic 2019). These are significant questions for students who face the paradoxical pressures of enacting holistic praxis informed by Indigenous worldviews, while at the same time learning in educational environments that are removed from the very places and relations that inform those worldviews (Borrows, 2017;Munroe et al, 2013).…”

“…Indigenous pedagogies differ from other kinds of imported, Eurowestern-centric, colonial nature-based pedagogies in that they are rooted in place-based relations held by families and nations, and require participants to enter into reciprocal relationships with local ancestral knowledge systems rooted in Indigenous governance pathways. For decades, Indigenous scholars have advocated for relational, politicized pedagogies that enhance the well-being of Indigenous peoples (Archibald, 2008;Deloria & Wildcat, 2001;Gunn Allen, 1986;Robertson & Ljubicic, 2019;Simpson, 2014). Red Pedagogy (Grande, 2000), Radical Indigenism (Garroutte, 2005), and other Indigenous resurgence frameworks provide a vital roadmap for restoring Indigenous knowledge systems that open the way for community healing and wellness.…”