Future rivers of the Anthropocene or whose Anthropocene is it? Decolonising the Anthropocene!

The Tlingit and Tagish First Nation peoples of the circumpolar north celebrate a rich, sophisticated, 9,000 year old storytelling culture. The Tlingit and Tagish consider themselves “part of the land, part of the water,” within which is the recognition and respect for the sentience of glaciers, rive...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Hayman, Eleanor, James, Colleen, Wedge, Mark
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 2018
Subjects:
Online Access:https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/view/30396
Description
Summary:The Tlingit and Tagish First Nation peoples of the circumpolar north celebrate a rich, sophisticated, 9,000 year old storytelling culture. The Tlingit and Tagish consider themselves “part of the land, part of the water,” within which is the recognition and respect for the sentience of glaciers, rivers, lakes, trees, salmon and other animals. This paper focuses on glaciers within the context of the Anthropocene and other colonial terracentric histories maintained by the dominant mono-cultural imaginary. How might thinking with glaciers, powerful agents in the forging of human and more-than-human identities, work to address new types of climate change realities? Looking at decolonizing realities through place-name and counter-mapping work with Carcross/Tagish First Nation, we showcase and question the rhetoric of the Anthropocene. We suggest that the “slow activism” and “narrative ecologies” embedded within Tlingit and Tagish glacial narratives have the ability to disrupt increasingly entrenched notions and narrow definitions of the Anthropocene(s) that continue to reproduce this mono-cultural imaginary.