A New Kinship Ethics for the Anthropocene: Entangled Common Worlds of Indigenous Children and Dogs

• In Event: Roundtable Session 37
  In Roundtable Session: Entanglements Beyond and Inside the Young Child

Abstract

This paper considers what we might learn about kinship from the entangled common worlds of indigenous children and dogs. Drawing on accounts of Inuit children’s relations with husky and town dogs in the Canadian Arctic and Australian Aboriginal children’s relations with camp dogs living in the Aboriginal fringe camps in the Australian Northern Territory, it explores how indigenous child-animal kin relations exceed limited western notions of family. The authors draw upon indigenous interspecies cosmologies (Blaser, 2013; Wingfield & Austin, 2009) and Haraway’s (2008) more-than-human ‘queer kin’ ontologies, to propose that this much more tightly imbricated and filial notion of child-animal relations opens up new ethical possibilities for common world co-habitation in the ecologically challenging times now referred to as the Anthropocene.

Authors

• Affrica Taylor, University of Canberra

• Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, University of Victoria