Learning to Inherit Colonial Relations With Raccoons in a Child Care Center

• In Event: Responding to Current Times of Anthropogenic Inheritance: Multispecies Relations in Early Childhood Education

Abstract

This paper resonates with environmental humanities scholars’ endeavours to find ethical ways of living and relating in the Anthropocene (Haraway, 2013; Gibson, Rose, & Fincher, 2015; Lorimer, 2012). These scholars have taken the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch of human-driven planetary change, as a potentially transformational moment. They suggest that we can no longer deny that humans have fundamentally altered the planet by our short-sighted human centric actions, nor can we deny any longer that human and nonhuman histories and futures are inextricably entwined. They propose that the Anthropocene may be an opportunity for humans to accept the impossibility of maintaining colonialist separations between humans and wild animals.
In this paper, I take the challenges posed by raccoon-child cohabitation as a potentially transformative moment. Instead of seeking techno-fixes and grand solutions, I use child-raccoon stories to develop broad, complex notions of how lives and deaths of raccoons and children unfold and perform worlds (van Doreen, 2014), how they interrupt anthropocentric and colonizing relations with animals (Haraway, 2013), and how we might pedagogically inherit the complexities of accountabilities and responsibilities to more-than-human others (Haraway, 2008). I draw on a multispecies ethnography (Kirksey & Helmreich, 2010) conducted in a childcare centre complex comprised of 9 different childcare centres, each with at least three educators providing care for up to 25 children. The narratives are based on field notes and conversations with children and educators. I first draw attention to the ways that raccoons cross boundaries and radically disrupt the order of the colonial nature/culture divide. Then, I focus on (human) attempts to maintain these boundaries through raccoon drills, “poo” checks, and other strategies. In the final story, I emphasize the impossibility of maintaining colonialist separations between humans and raccoons in our mixed-up, threatened world. I end the paper by gesturing toward the idea that, to learn to inherit the messy and disconcerting space of raccoon-child cohabitations, we might need new ways to think about our modern Western nature/culture boundaries.
The raccoon-child encounters that I narrate in this article are fraught with frictions and negotiations around the binaries that separate nature from culture. Day after day at a childcare centre, raccoons attempt to cross these boundaries, and day after day educators and children diligently labour to keep the boundaries intact. These are the actual and imperfect worlds that raccoons and children inherit and co-inhabit along with other human and nonhuman beings and entities in this mountain forest. Haraway (2008) entreats us to learn to inherit and co-inhabit our entangled multispecies worlds and to respond and act in these worlds in ways that allow all to flourish. We are to pay attention to how pedagogues might take seriously such multispecies relations that are deeply woven in our colonial past-present-futures (Common World Childhoods, 2015).

Author

• Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, University of Victoria