Abstract
Decolonising Animals is an important and timely book attempting to un-settle settler colonial narratives about the world by re-telling this world through the lives, stories and subjectivities of animals. The book is an edited volume of eight essays, written by a diverse group of authors from both Indigenous and non-Indigenous backgrounds based in North America, Australia and New Zealand. The essays are broad in scope, with the authors introducing the reader to a wide variety of animal geographies and disciplinary approaches. Taken collectively, the main achievement of this book is to bring animal studies firmly into conversation with multispecies thinking and Indigenous scholarship. For me, it achieves this by developing two cross-cutting ideas that unfold across each of the eight essays: (1) the notion of Indigenous erasure, and (2) the possibility of seeing, and thus making, the world differently.
The erasure of Indigenous lifeworlds is a foundational aspect of settler colonial violence. This book explores how certain stories have permitted this erasure to happen – and in particular, the role of animals in these stories. The first step in the enactment of this colonial story is, as Lennox describes, the process of ‘naming’ and ‘writing’ (p. 66). Indeed, whether reading about dingoes in Australia (ch.2), tuna kuwharuwharu in New Zealand (ch.5), horses in North America (ch.1) or Jaguars in South America (ch.7), we encounter the various ways in which modern science has attempted to categorise animals according to certain Western taxonomies and epistemologies. These ‘authoritative acts of representation’, Rick de Vos argues, ‘subject non-human animals’ – and, we might add, Indigenous ways of knowing – ‘to the sovereignty of the biological sciences’ (p. 154). In other words, colonial ways of naming and writing animals have served to create a hierarchy not only between animals and humans, but also between Western and Indigenous ways of knowing. This has precipitated immense violence against both animals and Indigenous peoples alike, as they become subjected to the logic of settler colonial possession and domination.
These depictions of colonial violence serve for depressing reading – notably in Katarina Gray-Sharp’s chapter on mass extinction. Nevertheless, there are reasons to be hopeful, as we are also introduced to new ways of seeing the world, beyond the colonial gaze. Drawing on various modes of Indigenous existence, the book encourages the reader to develop a more-than-human awareness in which animals are not the objective ‘other’ but beings with agency and part of intricate kinship relations with humans. Horses (ch.1), dingoes (ch.2) and Jaguars (ch.2) become ‘persons’ with the capacity to see and relate to humans; Bison (ch.6) become ‘subjects with histories and agencies, entangled in plural relationships’ (p. 164); and birds (ch.8) themselves become storytellers in order to help humans negotiate relations ‘with our non-human kin’ (p. 283). In these ways, when we decentre the human, the stories of animals have the power to ‘destabilise settler colonial ways of knowing and seeing’ (p. 179) – and thus opening up possibilities for life beyond colonialism.
Decolonising Animals is a thought-provoking, well-written and engaging book. By bringing animal geographies into dialogue with multispecies thinking and Indigenous scholarship, it makes valuable contributions to the field of animal studies and decolonial scholarship more broadly. It is therefore essential reading for cultural geographers interested in decolonial study.
