500229

2013

CGJ21110.1177/1474474013500229Cultural GeographiesEditorial

Editorial

Indigeneity and ontology

cultural geographies
2014, Vol 21(1) 1926
The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/1474474013500229
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Emilie Cameron

Carleton University, Canada

Sarah de Leeuw

University of Northern British Columbia, Canada

Caroline Desbiens
Universit Laval, Canada

This special issue grew out of a specific moment in time. It was conceived at the annual meeting
of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) in 2010, at a moment in which geographers,
including cultural geographers, were growing increasingly interested in ontology.1 That year,
Sarah de Leeuw, Emilie Cameron, and Jessica Place had organized a series of sessions entitled
Geographies of Response that aimed to bring together scholars interested in rethinking conventional understandings of power and resistance in colonial contexts. The various papers that formed
that session (including one by Caroline Desbiens, co-editor of this special issue) aimed to explore
the ways in which the responses of Indigenous peoples to historical and ongoing colonization
might be thought of outside of the binaries inherited from European philosophy, in which Indigenous peoples appear as either victims of colonization or heroically resistant.
The papers and discussions were interesting and lively, but what struck us, as the conference
unfolded, was the stark contrast between the ways in which ontology was being discussed in sessions aiming to unpack the intellectual and political merits of an ontological turn in the discipline,
and the ways in which the ontological was being mobilized by scholars primarily grounded in
colonial and decolonizing studies. For the latter group of scholars, concepts like being, connection to land, culture, and tradition, have long been eyed with suspicion. Building on decades of
activism and critical scholarship, the affiliation between race, nature, humanism, and empire has
made critical scholars wary of mobilizing any kind of essential Indigenous nature or experience
in their work.2 To invoke Indigenous ontologies, for these scholars, is to tread on intellectual terrain
that is heavily shaped by colonial inheritances and interests. It is not so much that critical colonial
scholars do not acknowledge that Indigenous ontologies are distinct; rather, they are wary of how
Indigenous knowledges, beliefs, and practices are represented and mobilized within colonial structures of knowledge production, and have thus tended to shy away from directly engaging Indigenous
ontologies as subjects of research.
While some scholars have approached the notion of Indigenous ontologies with caution, others have found themselves turning to accounts of Indigenous knowledges and practices as evidence of ontological pluralism and as sources of new modes of thought. Indeed, whereas in
previous years the sessions sponsored by the Indigenous Peoples Specialty Group of the AAG

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have been primarily attended by scholars working directly on issues related to Indigenous peoples, colonization, and decolonization, in Washington we noted a number of colleagues whose
work was grounded in other settings, and who were themselves immersed in the disciplines
ontological turn, increasingly drawn to sessions on Indigenous issues, just as we found ourselves intrigued (and, at times, somewhat alarmed) by the implications of the ontological for our
own work, and for the work of our colleagues. This, then, was the context in which a special
issue inquiring into the connections between Indigeneity and ontology was born. We aimed to
bring together a collection of scholars whose work was in some way grappling with the intersection of these terms. We wanted to make sense of the growing interest among scholars across the
social sciences and humanities in the ontological and think through what it might mean for our
work. The following year, at the AAG meeting in Seattle, Emilie Cameron, Sarah de Leeuw, and
Caroline Desbiens organized a series of sessions investigating the intersection of Indigeneity and
ontology, and this special issue emerges from the presentations, conversations, and interventions
that unfolded at that meeting.3
Our shared inquiry was informed by a series of questions. What, we asked, does it mean to
attend to the ontological in studies of Indigenous practices and politics, particularly at a moment
when geographers remain overwhelmingly non-Indigenous? What is at stake in the uptake of
Indigenous ontologies as sources of evidence for broader theoretical inquiry, and in what ways
might a geographic turn toward Indigenous ontologies retrench, rather than redress, colonial forms
of knowledge production? What might the insights of scholars grounded in anti-colonial,
Indigenous, feminist, queer, and critical race frameworks have to offer those scholars who are taking up the concept of ontology today? If, for some geographers, it is considered politically and
intellectually dangerous to freely mobilize notions like Indigeneity as though this is a stable and
whole concept, free of the politics of its historical and ongoing production, what might this refusal,
this hesitancy, offer at a moment when we appear to be witnessing a revival of culture, being,
and the human? In other words, far from having a clear sense of what the intersection of the
Indigenous and the ontological might be or ought to be, this special issue has been characterized,
from the start, by a good deal of wariness. We have questioned its political and intellectual implications throughout, and even as this lively collection of papers goes to press, we have as many questions and concerns as ever.
Some of our concerns are beautifully evoked by Sarah Hunts piece, which we find to be a helpful and necessary refusal of the entire undertaking of somehow bringing the Indigenous and the
ontological together for scholarly inquiry. Her essay grows from an intervention she offered from
the audience at the end of the last Indigeneity and Ontology session in Seattle, and it forces the
reader (as it did her fellow audience members and presenters) to confront a crucial question: in
whose name does a group of mostly non-Indigenous geographers gather to question the intersections of Indigeneity and ontology, and for what purpose? On what footing, for whose lives, and for
whose benefit? Is it to further the project of self-formation as experts? What do our words allow
to flourish, and what do they thwart? Hunt describes the dancing and shapeshifting her movement
through academic spaces as Kwakwakawakw and geographer demands. She points to the ways in
which every enactment of Indigeneity within the academy also involves forms of silence, forgetting, and illegibility, and thus unsettles any claims to know Indigenous ontologies. Indigenous
ontologies radically destabilize academic and colonial forms of knowledge, she notes, but the
potential for Indigenous ontologies to unsettle dominant ontologies can be easily neutralized as a
triviality, a case study or a trinket, as powerful institutions work as self-legitimating systems which
uphold broader dynamics of (neo)colonial power. In articulating her deep personal and scholarly
interest in the tensions shaping this special issue, and the subtle yet powerful transformations

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required of her as she moves through the academy as an Indigenous woman, Hunt carves a path
between acknowledging and honouring Indigenous ontologies and being mindful of the capacity
for academic appropriation, misrepresentation, and manipulation.
Indeed, a number of papers in this collection aim to critique a longstanding habit among geographers of thinking with a profoundly colonial, homogenized, depoliticized understanding of
Indigeneity. Stylized understandings of Indigenous peoples have been mobilized in the creation
and articulation of geographic thought for decades. As Cameron, de Leeuw, and Greenwood note,
for example, Yi-Fu Tuan offered Indians, Eskimos, Mongoloid peoples, and Aborigines as
examples of peoples whose close connections with nature differentiated them from modern, urban
populations, and Robert Sacks theorization of territoriality was developed through reference to
Chippewa territorial practices, which were framed as opposite to, and less developed than,
European territorial practices.4 Are similar processes at work in contemporary engagements with
the ontological?
Juanita Sundberg (2014) queries the invocation of Indigeneity in posthumanist scholarship, and
suggests that Indigenous ontologies are both radically silenced and selectively invoked in posthumanist scholarship as figures of superstition, primitivity, magic and navet. She suggests that the
supposed heterogeneity of human and nonhuman assemblages at stake in posthumanist scholarship
is, in fact, well within the orbit of Eurocentered epistemologies and ontologies. Posthumanist writings, for example, continuously refe[r] to a foundational ontological split between nature and
culture as if it is universal, (emphasis in original) and conceptualize the heterogeneity of the
assemblages to which they turn in Eurocentric terms; a point also made by Blaser (2014).5 Sundberg
develops her claims through the identification of two silences enacted in posthumanist geographic
scholarship that she finds significant silence about location and silence about Indigenous epistemes arguing that these silences work to enact Eurocentric theory as universal and leave unchallenged invocations of non-dualist ontologies as magical, primitive, nave, superstitious and Other.
Both moves are profoundly colonial, Sundberg argues, and in order to move toward decolonizing
posthumanist engagements in geography, Sundberg suggests that geographers must learn to
locat[e] our body-knowledge in relation to the existing paths we know and walk, must learn to
learn about multiplicity, and enact forms of walking with others.
Mario Blaser (2014) is similarly concerned with how the Indigenous and the ontological have
been taken up in recent scholarship. Blaser makes the important point that, depending on what is
meant by ontology, the stakes of any ontological turn can be quite different, and the results of
bringing Indigeneity into conversation with ontology will also differ. He points to two different
modes of engaging ontology in recent scholarship: one, an increasing interest in notions of
more-than-human agency in geography, which he finds to be rather conservative in its engagement with ontological pluriversality, and two, ethnographic theorys reinvigorated engagement
with radical alterity, in which he finds more radical possibility. Not only does recent work in
ethnographic theory offer an important critique of the limits of poststructuralist and postcolonial
engagements with Indigeneity, he argues, but its engagement with ontology is also more nuanced
than an easy replacement of culture with ontology. It is crucial, Blaser argues, that scholars
mobilizing the notion of ontology unpack their understanding of the term and its affiliation with
understandings of culture. To merely replace culture with ontology is to risk reproducing the
political and intellectual traps of cultural analysis that have been critiqued in the past, and to
miss the radical critique inherent in taking different ontologies seriously. Similarly, to make the
move of engaging different ontologies without thoroughly interrogating the ontological frame
from within which that analysis proceeds is, Blaser argues, to risk reasserting modern ontological claims to knowledge.

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Blasers essay also offers some theoretical and conceptual leads for scholars who remain wary
of any efforts to represent Indigenous knowledges and practices. Although poststructuralist and
postcolonial approaches to Indigeneity have emphasized the dangers of essentialized, racialized,
colonial forms of representation and their affiliation with imperial formations, Blaser suggests that
the resulting hesitancy to engage Indigenous ontologies may well retrench colonial modes of
knowledge production, to the extent that it is itself informed by modernist ontologies and a comfortable . . . assumption that the subaltern cannot speak. Blaser points to the evolution of related
debates in anthropology, where scholars have observed that concerns about othering Indigenous
peoples can lead to an equally problematic saming. If othering involves attributing to the objectified other a difference that reinforces the primacy of the self, he observes, saming denies the
objectified other the right to her difference and subjects her to the laws of the self. Ethnographic
theorys re-engagement with radical alterity, he argues, interrupts these forms of saming by taking
on colonial Eurocentric ways of categorizing the world. What is radical about recent work in this
vein, he argues, is that the challenge is done at the level of ontology, more specifically through
taking other ontologies seriously. In Blasers terms, taking Indigenous ontologies seriously necessarily involves confronting the partiality of modernist ontologies and particularly the notion that
there is just one reality. The challenge is not to catalogue and confirm different forms of worlding,
Blaser argues, but rather to engage the pluriverse as a heuristic proposition, . . . an experiment in
bringing itself into being. Blaser thus proposes a political ontology concerned not so much with
confirming the truth of an external reality, but with reality-making, including its own participation
in reality-making.
Similarly, in a recent essay by Julie Cruikshank, the risks of not meaningfully attending to
Indigenous ontologies are considered, even while she recognizes the enormous political, intellectual, and epistemological challenges of such engagement. She considers the kinds of problems that can arise when visiting strangers, asking questions about what we call nature, may
interpret puzzling or unfamiliar accounts as beliefs or myths, or more politely respect them
as culture rather than paradigms based on long-term, engaged relations with other active
beings.6 It is this failure to take seriously the broader framework within which knowledge
claims emerge that Cruikshank probes, and the tendency to make sense of epistemological and
ontological difference only in terms of relativism. What is at stake is not that different cultures
have different perspectives on the same phenomenon, Cruikshank insists (a relativistic claim),
but rather that northern Indigenous ontologies open to perspectivism, the idea that the world is
inhabited by a range of beings human and non-human who all apprehend that world from
distinct vantage points . . . From this framework, animals, humans and even features of landscape have points of view, exhibit agency, and engage in reciprocal responses.7 This much more
radical understanding of Indigenous ontologies unsettles ascriptions of cultural distinctiveness,
and calls into question the entire framework within which Indigenous knowledges are integrated into various forms of research. Indeed, as Tyler McCreary and Richard Milligan demonstrate (2014), the selective and strategic integration of Indigenous ontologies into assessments of
major resource development projects can have more profound political effects than outright
rejection of Indigenous knowledges and claims.
But if some scholars call for a more serious and radical engagement with Indigenous ontologies,
others problematize the very nature of what non-Indigenous scholars tend to recognize as
Indigenous. Sarah de Leeuw (2014) reminds us that any move to take Indigenous ontologies seriously must not only reckon with the radical challenge Indigenous knowledges and practices offer
to the foundational assumptions structuring the ontological turn, but must also query the association of Indigeneity with land, resources, and territory. Indigenous ontologies, she argues, are not

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wholly restricted to this realm, particularly in contexts of longstanding and ongoing colonial intervention. Why, she asks, does so much cultural geographic engagement with Indigenous ontologies
emphasize human/non-human relations, relations with the land, and relations with natural
resources? What of the ontological dimensions of Indigenous childrens experiences of child
apprehension, or other more embodied, intimate experiences of colonization? She turns her attention to the apprehension of Indigenous children through the child-welfare system in British
Columbia, Canada, and asks how an idealized and romanticized association between Indigeneity
and the land (operative not just in academic research but in broader settler colonial contexts) relates
to assessments of Indigenous families and parenting within child-welfare institutions and policies.
How does this supposedly more authentic realm of Indigeneity structure understandings of contemporary Indigenous families, assessments of child neglect and abuse, and the resulting overrepresentation of Indigenous children in the care of British Columbias Ministry of Children and
Family Development? How does the common sense notion that Indigenous children need protection from their families relate not just to ongoing colonial histories and geographies, but also to the
very structures of thought and practice underpinning assessments of neglect, abuse, and wellbeing? Not only, de Leeuw argues, have cultural geographers interested in Indigenous ontologies
failed to substantially reckon with the intimate, embodied geographies of Indigenous children and
the intervening effects of colonization on these geographies, but this failure is symptomatic of a
broader colonial conceptualization of Indigeneity that rationalizes the apprehension of children
from unfit Indigenous homes. It is not only Indigenous ontologies about human/non-human relations that might radically unsettle geographic research, de Leeuw insists, but also the ontologies
that emerge from within racialized, colonial experiences of poverty, violence, and dispossession.
Jean-Sbastien Boutet (2014) challenges any homogenous understanding of Indigenous ontologies by looking at the roles and actions of Innu individuals during the exploration phase and subsequent establishment of mining activities in Shefferville, Quebec. As Boutet underlines, the Innu
did not uniformly oppose resource development in their ancestral homeland as, for example, the
Crees did in the 1970s in the face of hydroelectric development, or the Sheshatshiu Innu of Labrador
in their opposition to large-scale energy and militarization projects. In taking seriously Indigenous
peoples relations with land, culture, and territory and with industrial labour, Boutets study demonstrates that the appropriation of Indigenous homelands by exogenous actors involves a multiplicity of encounters that are unique to every place, every people, and every era. In a context of
dispossession, resistance, marginalization and acculturation, what other complex, mixed or ambiguous responses emerge in each individual life, practice, or adaptation? At a time when Indigenous
peoples are required to demonstrate a longstanding, traditional relationship with a defined territory
in order to secure their standing in comprehensive land-claim negotiations or environmentalassessment processes, these nuances may seem politically risky; yet drawing them takes us to the
very heart of the dualistic ontologies colonialism (both historical and contemporary) keeps reaffirming. Boutets approach proposes to decentre these ontologies that typically assign traditionalism and industrialism to separate, racialized categories, and to query the totalizing explanatory
power of both triumphalist and critical accounts of Indigenous relations with industrial
capitalism.
Caroline Desbiens and tienne Rivard also draw their analysis from the context of industrialization in Northern Quebec. They examine different periods of development in the ancestral lands of
the Cree (Eeyou Istchee) and the Innu (Nitassinan), and the treaty processes these distinct phases
of territorial planning have set in motion. Looking at cross-cultural negotiations, partnerships, and
investments, they take a critical approach to analyze the possibilities and constraints that frame
multiethnic planning. The channels of decision-making concerning land-and-resource planning in

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Northern Quebec serve as an example of the ontological status of the state and the economy. Using
the concept of mtissage, Desbiens and Rivard explore how Indigenous and non-Indigenous
knowledges, while remaining ontologically varied and imbued with very different expressions of
power, might be understood to be co-constructed through such ontologies. While mtissage is often
understood as a process where territorialities intermix to become hybrid and/or generate a third
space beyond dualism, power is differentiated by the active or passive nature of cross-cultural
exchanges, as well as by the direction of these flows. As Northern industrialization underscores,
Indigenous and non-Indigenous territorial ontologies are not separate but coextensive if frictional and still somewhat unbalanced spaces, with the result that cultural and industrial activities
necessarily overlap in the same geography.
Similar tensions around land use and territory are at stake in Northern British Columbia where,
as Tyler McCreary and Richard Milligans article addresses, imbalanced negotiations are unfolding
between diverse Indigenous communities, state governments, and multinational resourceextractive companies. Anchored in fieldwork along a proposed diluted-bitumen pipeline corridor
in Northern BC and engagement with industry literatures, McCreary and Milligan posit that within
an ever-expanding neoliberal politic, acceptable and recognized Indigenous ontologies are
being forcibly reshaped, without consent and with considerable resistance. Many Indigenous leaders and governments in Northern British Columbia have opposed pipeline development on their
as-of-yet untreatied lands. Federal law in Canada, moreover, stipulates a duty to consult with
Indigenous peoples prior to development. It is precisely in this climate of mandated consultation,
however, that particular boundaries are arising in attempts to define, make legible, delineate, and
manage Indigenous ontologies so they become recognizable to state and capitalist interests. In a
line of argument that resonates with Glen Coulthards critique of the limits of state recognition as
a political goal,8 McCreary and Milligan probe the limits and dangers of inclusion, and argue that
the problem with the inclusion of Carrier Sekani Aboriginal Traditional Knowledge in the
Enbridge pipeline application is not simply that it fails to translate Indigenous geographies with
sufficient detail, but rather, that the terms of recognition normalize an ontology in which
Indigenous difference becomes, above all, a different way of knowing, not a way of being on the
land that makes that land something different, that renders that land subject to other modes of not
just use but also governance. Without explicitly interrogating industry and government efforts to
define and clearly locate Indigeneity, the move toward recognition will instead work to re-establish a terra nullius open again to development but mildly constrained by discrete, localized, patches
of Indigeneity. They insist, as do others in this special issue, that in seeking to solidify Indigenous
ontologies and make them legible the interests of capital are secured.9
If there is any point on which the papers in this special issue seem to converge, it is that identifying, delimiting, representing, and mobilizing Indigenous ontologies is politically fraught, both
within and outside the academy, and that it unfolds in an always, already political sphere. In conclusion, then, we return to the cautions offered in Sarah Hunts essay. At a time when geographers
appear to be increasingly interested in Indigenous ontologies, we must continue to pose questions
about the nature, scope, motivation, and impacts of this line of research. As her parallel with feminist geographic scholarship suggests, to the extent that research investigating Indigenous knowledges, experiences, and concerns is undertaken by non-Indigenous peoples in largely colonial
institutions, it is always at risk of being grounded in, emerging from, and ultimately upholding
non-Indigenous ontologies, epistemologies, methodologies, and axiologies.10 As much as nonIndigenous geographers might be committed to decolonizing the discipline, such an orientation
involves more than a shift in theoretical focus. It demands a shift in which bodies, which knowledges, and which ways of knowing are at stake in the academy,11 as well as committed engagement

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in political struggles. It is not only geographers that seek to identify and mobilize Indigenous
ontologies, moreover, but also bureaucrats, multinational corporations, government agencies,
national constitutions, non-profit organizations, Indigenous governments, and others. As geographers, then, we must acknowledge that recent turns to Indigenous ontologies are profoundly partial, both in the sense that geographic scholarship is only one sphere within which Indigenous
ontologies are at stake, and that geographers are always at risk of themselves reproducing (neo)
colonial ways of knowing and being, whether through romanticized returns to the Indigenous, by
refusing to take Indigenous ontologies seriously, or, perhaps more importantly, in ways that we
cannot and do not know.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank all the contributors to this special issue, as well as those who presented papers and
commented on papers at the conference sessions that spurred this collection. Special thanks to Danielle
DiNovelli-Lang, Kevin Gould, and Jessica Place for conversations that shaped this project, and to
Tim Cresswell and Dydia DeLyser for their editorial support.

Notes
1. Recent publication records confirm this trend. A search of geographic publication trends in Web of
Knowledge shows a marked increase in the term ontology from almost no incidences in the 1990s to
a peak of 40 publications per year in 2008. [Search carried out on 21 February 2013, with search terms
ontolog* in title and geograph* in topic. Total 284 records].

2. See, for example, Kay Anderson, Race and the Crisis of Humanism (London and New York: Routledge,
2006); Vine Deloria Jr, Red Earth, White Lies (New York: Scribner, 1995); Derek Gregory, The Colonial
Present (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004); Donald Moore, Jake Kosek and Anand Pandian (eds), Race, Nature,
and the Politics of Difference (Durham, MD: Duke University Press, 2003); Andrea Smith, Conquest:
Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2005); A. Stoler,

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3.

4.
5.

6.
7.

8.
9.

10.
11.

cultural geographies 21(1)

Race and the Education of Desire (Durham, MD: Duke University Press, 1995); Linda Tuhiwai Smith,
Decolonzing Methodologies (London: Zed Press, 1999).
We note that while geographers working across the Americas were involved in early iterations of this
undertaking, non-Indigenous authors from Canada have been predominant throughout, and this has certainly shaped the tone and scope of the special issue.
E. Cameron, S. de Leeuw and M. Greenwood, Indigeneity, in Rob Kitchin and Nigel Thrift (eds),
International Encyclopedia of Human Geography (London: Elsevier, 2009), pp. 3527.
As Blaser writes, if the heterogeneity of always emerging assemblages troubles the political, the very
heterogeneity of these heterogeneous assemblages troubles it even more. What kinds of politics and what
kinds of knowledges does this troubling demand? This is one of the crucial questions that a conversation
between ontology and indigeneity should bring to the fore.
J. Cruikshank, Are Glaciers Good to Think With? Recognising Indigenous Environmental Knowledge, Anthropological Forum, 22(3), 2012, p. 246.
Cruikshank, Are Glaciers Good to Think With?, pp. 2445. Cruikshank is drawing, here, on Viveiros
de Castros influential work on perspectivism, as well as a larger body of scholarship in the coloniality/
modernity tradition that has also shaped the contributions of others in this special issue, including Blaser,
McCreary and Milligan, and Sundberg. See E. Viveiros de Castro, Perspectival Anthropology and the
Method of Controlled Equivocation in TipitI, Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland
South America, 2, 2004, pp. 322; M. de la Cadena, Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual
Reflections beyond Politics, Cultural Anthropology, 25, 2010, pp. 33470.
See G. Coulthard, Subjects of Empire: Indigenous Peoples and the Politics of Recognition in Canada,
Contemporary Political Theory, 6, 2007, pp. 43760.
Although the authors do not directly take this up, there are resonances between their paper and recent
critiques of the limits of formalizing Indigenous cosmologies in the constitutions of Bolivia, Equador,
and other Left Turn Latin American states. Murat Arsel argues, for example, that far from ensuring
the protection of Indigenous lands from extractive activities, the enshrinement of Indigenous ontologies
into the Equadorian constitution has been accompanied by a further entrenchment of the territoriality
and commercialisation of nature and the ongoing expansion of mining, even while it has also offered
other possibilities. M. Arsel, Between Marx and Markets? The State, the Left Turn and Nature in
Ecuador, Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie, 103(2), 2012, pp. 15063.
Shawn Wilson, Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods. (Halifax and Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 2008).
For a fuller discussion see, for example, Rauna Kuokkanen, Reshaping the University: Responsibility,
Indigenous Epistemes, and the Logic of the Gift (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007).

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