Teaching for the Always Here: Interspecies Reciprocity and Responsibility

• In Event: 72.034 - Feminist Approaches to Animal-Focused Education: Illuminating the Intersections and Following New Tracks in Environmental Education

Abstract

The tangled knot of anthropocentrism is tied up with patriarchy, racism, ableism, and speciesism. To hold certain humans as the centre of all meaning and actions is a violent form of estrangement from other Life forms and the splitting of humans from other animals, from the relational ties across ecologies, tears natures and cultures apart (Haraway, 2003) and reinforces the oppressive dualisms (i.e., culture/nature, male/female, human/animal, etc.) that feminist philosopher Val Plumwood (2002a) warned us about. Feminist theorists of animal studies, particularly materialist, ecofeminist scholars, have a history of contributing to intersectional analysis across gender and species boundaries (Gaard, 2011). As Carol Adams (2014) exemplifies, being treated like an animal means, “I was made vulnerable to violence by being moved down the species ladder” (p.22). In glaring contrast to anthropocentrism and oppressive dualisms and the ways in which these are typically taken up in teaching practices, Indigenous scholars have discussed the relationality of all knowledge, Opaskwayak Cree scholar Shawn Wilson (2008) states, “It is not just interpersonal relationships, … but it is a relationship with all of creation. It is with the cosmos, it is with the animals, with the plants, with the earth that we share this knowledge” (p. 176-177). Further, Anishinaabeg scholar, Leanne Simpson (2008) emphasizes, “animal clans were highly respected and were seen as self-determining, political ‘nations’” (p. 33). To hold such Indigenous epistemologies beside the current rates of animal extinctions is to recognize and witness the demise of innumerable relationships—known and yet to be known. I argue that learning about and from Indigenous perspectives offers environmental education an antidote to settler colonial curriculum that reinforces both anthropocentrism and the dualisms that concern feminist theorists such as Plumwood (2002a), particularly the recognition of the responsibilities we have in reciprocal relationships. As Yellowknives Dene scholar Sean Glen Coulthard (2014) eloquently states, “the land as a system of reciprocal relations and obligations can teach us about living out lives in relation to one another and the natural world in non-dominating and nonexploitive terms” (p. 13). Drawing on these ideas and my research with diverse Canadian children (ages 7-9 years) in which I listen to their voices and positions on multispecies relationality, I work to re-imagine a more reciprocal, socially just environmental and science education.

Author

• Leesa K. Fawcett, York University