Abstract
This chapter promotes Indigenous poetry as a resource for teaching sustainability in secondary school English. Following the UN’s “bleak” 2019 report that global warming has crossed a “tipping point” (UN Environment Program, 2019), interdisciplinary connections between the teaching of language, culture, and environmental citizenship have become more relevant than ever (Basseler, 2014. Environmental Learning: Ökodidaktische Konzepte für den Englischunterricht. Frendsprachliche Unterricht—English, 129: 2-8; Bürgener & Barth, 2018. Sustainability Competencies in Teacher Education: Making Teacher Education Count in Everyday School Practice. Journal of Cleaner Production 174(10): 821-826; Gadotti, 2010. Reorienting Education Practices towards Sustainability. Journal of Education for Sustainable Development, 4(2): 203–211). Indigenous poetry from North America foregrounding non-human-centered “nature” yields relevant insights into both sustainability and English, especially when informed by Indigenous poetics including métissage, described by Donald as “enact[ing] ethical relationality as a philosophical commitment” (2012, 535), and holophrases. Thus, this chapter aims to extend recent developments in Indigenous poetics into the secondary English classroom. These texts’ “ethics of being in and with nature” (Rauscher, 2014. On Common Ground: Translocal Attachments and Transethnic Affiliations in Agha Shahid Ali’s and Arthur Sze’s Poetry of the American Southwest. European Journal of American Identity 9(3): 1-19, 2) break down the Western received dichotomy of “natural”/ human. By trusting poetry to motivate transformative (Burns, 2015. Transformative Sustainability Pedagogy: Learning from Ecological Systems and Indigenous Wisdom. Journal of Transformative Education 13(3): 259-76) sustainability learning, teachers re-invigorate the literary genre with relevant, interdisciplinary power. Furthermore, Indigenous poetry’s portrayal of “care, victimhood and hope” (Lindroth & Sinevaara-Niskanen, 2016. The Biopolitics of Resilient Indigeneity and the Radical Gamble of Resistance. Resilience 4(2): 130-145, 130) teaches difference by encouraging wholeness.
We were held in the circle around these lands by song, and
reminded by the knowers that not one is over the other, no
human above the bird, no bird above the insect, no wind above the grass.
Harjo 2019, lines 17–20
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
Ecofeminism aligns in interesting ways with this approach: Donna Haraway’s natureculture is a useful conceptual tool for breaking down the essentialist, dualistic split between “human” and the “natural” (Haraway 2003).
- 2.
So does Clark’s observation of Robert Harrison (1992) echoing Martin Heidegger’s privileging art and literature as sites where human subjects are discovered to be essentially “other” than their non-human “environments” (Clark 2011, 61). This chapter intervenes against this by reading literature that re-weaves these artificially bifurcated elements.
- 3.
As Fikret Berkes has pointed out, this “sentimental fallacy … [can lead to] exaggerated claims of native ecological knowledge and wisdom,” like the apocryphal native ecology of Chief Seattle, demythologized by Paul Wilson’s 1992 article (Berkes 1999, 146–8). This phenomenon has taken on the shorthand term “ecological Indian” (Clark 2011, 122).
- 4.
Indeed, “ideological mystification” of the “Ecological Indian” is a trope I hope I have avoided. I join with Joni Adamson (2001), Greg Garrard, and others in suspicion “of any attempts to make [Indigenous people] figures of ecological piety and authenticity” (Garrard 2012, 145). If they have transformed landscapes, any changes to environments have always taken place “within the terms of their own cultural cosmos” (Garrard 2012, 145), making their contributions to Western ecocriticism free of the burdens of Judeo-Christian human supremacy over “nature.”
- 5.
Demonstrating poetry’s flexibility to adapt to new media landscapes, Trygve Skaug has parlayed his Instagram poetry into a recent string of bestselling published titles in Norway for teens and adults.
- 6.
Since the 1990s, a movement for environmental justice has become part of political messaging in the United States’ Democratic Party.
- 7.
Far from a neutral administrative tool, as the Irish playwright Brian Friel illustrates in Translations (1980), mapping always consolidates colonial power over subjugated lands (Edwards 2008, 85).
- 8.
According to McLeod, poetry involves mamâhtâwisiwin, “the process of tapping into the Great Mystery” (McLeod 2014, 91).
- 9.
For Clark, Leopold’s mid-twentieth-century anthropomorphizing of birds and reveries on land ownership somewhat dilutes his environmental message (Clark 2011, 77–84).
- 10.
Interestingly, George Perkins Marsh’s Man and Nature (1864) was perhaps the “first major modern work suggesting that human activities were leading to negative effects of the environment” (Botkin 1990, 32).
- 11.
Indigenous poetry as an appropriate response to what Polly Higgins (2010) and others have termed “ecocide” is supported, too, by Amitav Ghosh. He judges imperialism and capitalism to be similarly implicated in our global environmental crisis (Ghosh 2017, 87). Historical questions of social justice can thus be extended to problems of environmental degradation, on Indigenous lands as well as elsewhere.
- 12.
Since this genre is not necessarily a traditional Indigenous form, it exhibits what might be termed a “hybrid” aesthetic, suggesting a correspondence in literary form with Dumont’s notion of Métis identity.
- 13.
Mark Watson (2010) and Daniel Francis observe the tendency to romanticize Indigenous people as irrelevantly frozen in the past, and absent from contemporary urban settings. Nixon, by making her poetic speaker a member of the Indigenous urban diaspora, challenges this.
- 14.
Ecofeminism also critiques and deconstructs hierarchical dualisms wherein “the feminine, women, nature, and other subordinated groups … [are deemed] not to possess rationality and autonomy” (Philips and Rumens 2016, 2). Already in 1980, Fisher notes that in modern Indigenous literature “woman, once so strong in Indian life, no longer has the power even of the trickster to transform the Indian’s condition into a sane existence” (Fisher 1980, 13).
- 15.
These central ideals for sustainability studies are bolstered by Tol Foster’s “relational regionalism” (Neuhaus 2012).
- 16.
That King’s and Howard’s national context—Canada—may be seen to extend to other parts of North America is evident from the boundary crossing done by figures such as Dumont’s forebear Gabriel Dumont (Dumont 2014, 83).
- 17.
Similar to this chapter’s efforts to engage sustainability via poetry, Robert Azzarello points out that Scofield and others who write queer Indigenous texts are integrating two fields which have heretofore struggled to intersect: queer and ecocritical studies (Azzarello 2012).
- 18.
- 19.
“Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests; snug as a gun” (Heaney 1966, 2953, lines 1–2).
- 20.
“Métis” can describe “any person of mixed Indian-white ancestry who identified him- or herself and was identified by others as neither Indian nor white, even though he or she might have no provable link to the historic Red River métis” (Peterson and Brown 2001, 5).
References
Adamson, J. 2001. American Indian Literature, Environmental Justice, and Ecocriticism: The Middle Place. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Agyeman, J., et al. 2002. Exploring the Nexus: Bringing Together Sustainability, Environmental Justice, and Equity. Space and Polity 6 (1): 77–90.
Azzarello, R. 2012. Queer Environmentality: Ecology, Evolution, and Sexuality in American Literature. Burlington: Ashgate.
Basseler, M. 2014. Environmental Learning: Ökodidaktische Konzepte für den Englischunterricht. Frendsprachliche Unterricht—English 129: 2–8.
Berkes, F. 1999. Sacred Ecology: Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Resource Management. Philadelphia: Taylor and Francis.
Botkin, D. 1990. Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the Twenty-first Century. New York: Oxford University Press.
Buell, L. 1995. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bürgener, L., and M. Barth. 2018. Sustainability Competencies in Teacher Education: Making Teacher Education Count in Everyday School Practice. Journal of Cleaner Production 174 (10): 821–826.
Burns, H.L. 2015. Transformative Sustainability Pedagogy: Learning from Ecological Systems and Indigenous Wisdom. Journal of Transformative Education 13 (3): 259–276.
Cariou, W. 2014. Edgework: Indigenous Poetics as Re-placement. In Indigenous Poetics, ed. N. McLeod, 31–38. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
Carlassare, E. 1994. Essentialism in Ecofeminist Discourse. In Ecology: Key Concepts in Critical Theory, ed. C. Merchant. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press.
Carroll, C., and A. Lawson (2017) “New Media, Activism, and Indigenous Environmental Governance: Politics and the Minnesota–Wisconsin Wolf Hunt,” in S. Monani and J. Adamson (eds). Ecocriticism and Indigenous Studies, New York: Palgrave, pp. 119-135.
Clark, T. 2011. The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dumont, M. 2014. The Pemmican Eaters. In Indigenous Poetics in Canada, ed. N. McLeod, 83–87. Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier University Press.
———. 2015. The Pemmican Eaters. Toronto: misFit Books.
Edwards, J. 2008. Postcolonial Literature: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
Emmet, R., and D. Nye. 2017. The Environmental Humanities: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fisher, D. 1980. The Third Woman: Minority Women Writers of the United States. New York: Houghton Mifflin.
Gadotti, M. 2010. Reorienting Education Practices towards Sustainability. Journal of Education for Sustainable Development 4 (2): 203–211.
Garrard, G. 2012. Ecocriticism. London: Routledge.
Getsy, D. (Ed.). (2016). Queer. MIT Press.
Ghosh, A. 2017. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Gottlieb, R., ed. 1996. This Sacred Earth: Religion, Nature, Environment. New York: Routledge.
Haraway, D.J. 2003. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Vol. 1. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.
Harjo, J. 2019. Bless This Land. World Literature Today 93 (4): 34–35.
Heaney, S. 1966. Digging. In Norton Anthology of English Literature, ed. J. Ramanzani and Stallworthy, vol. 2. New York: Norton.
Higgins, P. 2010. Eradicating Ecocide: Laws and Governance to Prevent the Destruction of Our Planet. London: Shepheard-Walwyn.
Howard, L. 2019. Poetry, Place, and Indigenous Identity: Armand Garnet Ruffo and Liz Howard Discuss the Magic of Finding Good Poems in Unlikely Places. Walrus.
Janss, C., and C. Refsum. 2005. Lyrikkens Liv: Innføring i Diktlesning. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.
Justice, D.H. 2018. Why Indigenous Literatures Matter. Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier Press.
King, T. 1990. All My Relations: An Anthology of Contemporary Canadian Native Prose. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart.
Leopold, A. 1968. A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lindroth, M., and H. Sinevaara-Niskanen. 2016. The Biopolitics of Resilient Indigeneity and the Radical Gamble of Resistance. Resilience 4 (2): 130–145.
McCall, S. 2012. Diaspora and Nation in Métis Writing. In Cultural Grammars of Nation, Disapora, and Indigeneity in Canada, ed. C. Kim et al., 21–41. Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier University Press.
McKegny, S. 2014. Writer-Reader Reciprocity and the Pursuit of Alliance through Indigenous Poetry. In Indigenous Poetics in Canada, 43–60. Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
McLeod, N. 2014. Cree Poetic Discourse. In Indigenous Poetics in Canada, ed. N. McLeod, 89–103. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
Mebratu, D. 1998. Sustainability and Sustainable Development: Historical and Conceptual Review. Environmental Impact Assessment Review 18 (6): 493–520.
Morton, T. 2007. Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: University of Harvard Press.
———. 2016. Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence. New York: Columbia University Press.
Neuhaus, M. 2012. Reading the Prairies Relationally: Louise Bernice Halfe and ‘Spacious Creation,’. Canadian Literature 215: 86–102.
———. 2015. The Decolonizing Poetics of Indigenous Literatures. Regina, Sask.: University of Regina Press.
Nixon, L. 2018. niya. In Nîtisânak. Montreal: Metonymy Press.
Peterson, J., and J. Brown. 2001. The New Peoples: Being and Becoming Métis in North America. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press.
Philips, M., and N. Rumens. 2016. Introducing Contemporary Ecofeminism. In Contemporary Perspectives on Ecofeminism, ed. M. Philips and N. Rumens, 1–16. London: Routledge.
Ramanzani, J., and J. Stallworthy. 1966. Headnotes to Seamus Heaney. In Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. 2, 2951–2952. New York: Norton.
Rangel, N. 2016. An Examination of Poetry for the People: A Decolonizing Holistic Approach to Arts Education. Educational Studies 52 (6): 536–551.
Rauscher, J. 2014. On Common Ground: Translocal Attachments and Transethnic Affiliations in Agha Shahid Ali’s and Arthur Sze’s Poetry of the American Southwest. European Journal of American Identity 9 (3): 1–19.
Root, J. 1996. Come as You Are: Sexuality and Narrative. New York: Columbia University Press.
Rose, W. 1981. Six Poems. Frontiers 6 (3): 20–23.
Russo, B. 2019. Critical Indigenous Studies: Engagements in First World Locations by Aileen Moreton-Robinson. American Indian Quarterly 43 (2): 244–247.
Ryan, L., & Smith, N. (1976). Trugernanner (Truganini) (1812–1876). In Australian Dictionary of Biography.
Rødnes, K.A. 2019. Skjønnlitteratur og Bærekraft: Et Bidrag fra Norskfaget. In Bærekraftdidaktikk, ed. A. Kvamme and E. Sæther, 61–75. Fagbokforlaget: Bergen, Norway.
Scofield, G. 1996. Native Canadiana: Songs from the Urban Rez. Vancouver, B.C.: Polestar.
———. 2009a. Love Medicine and One Song / Sâkihtowin-Maskihkiy êkwa Pêyak-Nikamowin. Wiarton, Ont.: Kegedonce Press.
———. 2009b. Dissertation. In Kipocihkân: Poems New and Selected. Gibsons, B.C: Nightwood Editions.
———. 2019. Thunder through my Veins: Memories of a Métis Childhood. Toronto: Anchor Canada.
Scudeler, J. 2006. ‘The Song I Am Singing’: Gregory Scofield’s Interweavings of Métis, Gay, and Jewish Selfhoods. Studies in Canadian Literature / Études En littérature Canadienne 31 (1): 129–145.
Shiva, V., and M. Mies. 2014. Ecofeminism. London: Zed Books.
Smith, L.T. 2012. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous People. New York: Zed Books.
Smith, T., and J.M. Fiore. 2010. Landscape as Narrative, Narrative as Landscape. Studies in American Indian Literatures 22 (4): 58–80.
Strauss, S. (1992). Historical Record Be Damned, They Sell Environmentalism by Co-opting Chief Seattle, Globe and Mail, February 8, 1992.
Surraliés, A., and P.G. Hierro, eds. 2005. The Land Within: Indigenous Territory and the Perception of Environment. Copenhagen: Iwigia.
Tatonetti, L. 2014. The Queerness of Native American Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Tooth, R., and P. Renshaw. 2009. Reflections on Pedagogy and Place: A Journey into Learning for Sustainability through Environmental Narrative and Deep Attentive Reflection. Australian Journal of Environmental Education 25: 94–104.
Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. (2015). Honoring the Truth, Reconciling the Future: Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, www.trc.ca.
United Nations Environment Program. (2019). Emissions Gap Report, https://wedocs.unep.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.11822/30797/EGR2019.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
Viswanathan, G. 2015. Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. New York: Columbia University Press.
Walshe, N. 2017. An Interdisciplinary Approach to Environmental and Sustainability Education: Developing Geography Students’ Understandings of Sustainable Development Using Poetry. Environmental Education Research 23 (8): 1130–1149.
Watson, M. 2010. Diasporic Indigeneity: Place and the Articulation of Ainu Identity in Tokyo, Japan. Environment and Planning 42 (2): 268–284.
Wilson, P. 1992. What Chief Seattle Said. Lewis and Clark Law School, Natural Resources Law Institute News 3 (2): 12–15.
Willinsky, J. 1998. Learning to Divide the World: Education at Empire’s End. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Womack, C.S. 1999. Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Steinman, K. (2022). Indigenous Poetry and Sustainability: Troubling Anthropocene Logic Through Kinship and Holistic Care. In: Kleppe, S.L., Sorby, A. (eds) Poetry and Sustainability in Education. Palgrave Studies in Education and the Environment. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95576-2_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95576-2_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-95575-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-95576-2
eBook Packages: EducationEducation (R0)