Abstract
As a discipline, geography has been complicit in colonising processes. Colonial cartography gridded the world and made it possible to transform place into property, dispossessing Indigenous peoples in settler states across the world. And as Soren Larsen and Jay Johnson remind us in this book, quoting Patrick Wolfe, dispossession is ‘a structure not an event’ and the politics of settler colonialism continue to unfold. Contemporary geography engages with this along at least three axes: continuing to be part of colonial processes, active resistance to and examination of those processes, and an Indigenous radicalisation of geography. Being Together in Place considers all of these, but is fundamentally ground-breaking on the third, presenting an ontological reconceptualisation of place.
This is incredibly important work. The knowledge systems informed by the European Enlightenment continue along the path of industrial capitalism, daily presented with graphs of dysfunction and ‘planetary boundaries’. Larsen and Johnson argue that ‘to be recognized by place is a summons to responsibility resulting in a spiritualized politics of inclusive and life-supportive relationships in support of our continued coexistence’. That complex sentence reflects the book’s themes of the agency of place, the sacred dimensions of that agency, and the contemporary necessity for response. This is difficult material to write: in a secular society words like ‘spiritual’ are loaded with baggage, both religious and cynical, but Larsen and Johnson skillfully negotiate this terrain, although the failure of the English language results in some large hyphenated neologisms.
Being Together in Place has three empirical sections examining contested places in The United States, Canada and Aotearoa/ New Zealand, framed and extended through the introduction and conclusion. The exploratory structure of the book is reflected in the opening parts of each section, which present lyrical narratives for each place. The empirical work is detailed and nuanced, reflecting decades of field experience by each author in these places, and each presents a coherent and comprehensive picture of Indigenous-settler engagements. They span ‘remote’ (northern British Columbia) to urban (freeway development near Kansas City, Oklahoma) and in between (Waitangi Treaty Grounds, Aotearoa/New Zealand). While the detail of each place is meticulously unpacked, their importance is more in how they inform the larger argument that the authors make.
The authors follow pathways from different sources to come to an understanding of the relationship between humans, nonhumans and place, ‘the difficult, never-settled issues of our being together’. This entangled being-together-in-place is our ‘messy, more-than-human coexistence in the pluriverse’. Larsen and Johnson recruit a series of theoretical positions, many from Indigenous scholars, but also from Victor Turner’s classic framing of ‘the liminal’ to Timothy Morton’s recent conceptualisation of ‘charnel grounds’, both challenging and extending these perspectives to better contextualise their position.
They argue convincingly for a position of humans as the ‘junior sibling’, part of ‘something far greater it does not completely understand’, in genealogical relationship to the ‘first-born’ status of place, our apical ancestor. This is true in both an evolutionary sense as well as within Indigenous ontological framing. Place, both terrestrial and oceanic, was first, humans entered very much later, and settler-colonists even later still (in Australia, settler-colonial presence is less than 0.5 per cent of Australia’s documented human presence).
Seriously understanding this position of junior sibling and all that it entails requires humility and vulnerability. The West’s recent discovery of the Anthropocene may enable this: the planet’s unlimited capacity to make vulnerable creating the ‘emergency conditions’ in which we live (and in which colonised peoples have lived for centuries). Larsen and Johnson argue that we can use this vulnerability to increase our receptivity to place. Trauma, loss, hurt can help us open, and recognising the call of place from that receptive state can facilitate action for and with that place. This is one element of the active agency of place. Engagement with this agency calls us to ‘the edges of our worlds’.
There is an extensive bibliography that usefully brings together a large amount of work by First Nations and Native American authors. Australian researchers are also prominent, including radical work that lists ‘Bawaka Country’ as the first named author of a paper. This book continues earlier work by the authors and others, including A Deeper Sense of Place; 1 a series of papers in Progress that began to assertively define the place of Indigenous geographies;2–4 and a key paper by Sarah Wright. 5 Reflecting the place-based histories of the authors, the focus is settler-colonial states. The book does not engage with Indigenous dispossession in nations subject to internal colonial processes (e.g., Sami people in the Scandinavian states) or where colonialism was resource-extraction rather than settler-state (e.g., India or the African continent).
In the nearly two decades since Linda Tuhiwai-Smith’s landmark Decolonizing Methodologies, 6 Indigenous scholars across a range of disciplines but perhaps especially geography have been challenging the exclusivist and assimilationist structures of the academy. Being Together in Place, by providing a lucid account of Indigenous ontologies of place and showing the relevance of this understanding for our ‘emergency conditions’, is required reading.