SEE - THINK - WONDER
What do you see in the pictures?
What do you think is going on?
What does it make you wonder?
Ritchhart et al., 2011, pp. 55ff.
Read the extracts about indigenous worldviews about humans' relationship with the earth. Contrast with what you can see in the pictures.
“I agree with you that the language of sustainability is pretty limited. If something is going to be sustainable, its ability to provide for us will not be compromised into the future. And that’s all a good thing. But at its heart, sustainability the way we think about it is embedded in this worldview that we, as human beings, have some ownership over these what we call resources, and that we want the world to be able to continue to keep — that human beings can keep taking and keep consuming. The notion of reciprocity is really different from that. It’s an expansion from that, because what it says is that our role as human people is not just to take from the Earth, and the role of the Earth is not just to provide for our single species. So reciprocity actually kind of broadens this notion to say that not only does the Earth sustain us, but that we have the capacity and the responsibility to sustain her in return. So it broadens the notion of what it is to be a human person, not just a consumer. And there’s such joy in being able to do that, to have it be a mutual flourishing instead of the more narrow definition of sustainability so that we can just keep on taking.”
Christa Tippett & Robin Wall Kimmerer (2016) On Being Podcast.
https://onbeing.org/programs/robin-wall-kimmerer-the-intelligence-of-plants-2022/
See also:
Kimmerer, 2013. “The Grammar of Animacy” and “The Honorable Harvest”, essays in Braiding Sweetgrass.
In the English language, if we want to speak of that sugar maple or that salamander, the only grammar that we have to do so is to call those beings an “it.” And if I called my grandmother or the person sitting across the room from me an “it,” that would be so rude, right? And we wouldn’t tolerate that for members of our own species, but we not only tolerate it, but it’s the only way we have in the English language to speak of other beings, is as “it.” In Potawatomi, the cases that we have are animate and inanimate, and it is impossible in our language to speak of other living beings as “its.”
Kimmerer (2016) On Being Podcast
https://onbeing.org/programs/robin-wall-kimmerer-the-intelligence-of-plants-2022/
See also:
Kimmerer, 2013. “The Grammar of Animacy” and “The Honorable Harvest”, essays in Braiding Sweetgrass.
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Chihuailaf (2021) Interview for LatinAmericanLiteratureToday
https://latinamericanliteraturetoday.org/2020/11/within-each-one-us-lives-thought-our-elders-and-our-ancestors-conversation-elicura/
“[A]ll of us who live in this world come from native peoples / cultures, but only a small number of us still maintain the memory of our belonging to the Earth, to Nature, no more and no less than all living beings and all those that appear inanimate, like stones and minerals. It is the awakening of deep nations and peoples—all over the planet—that are beginning to realize we have to fight against fragmentation, against the violence carried out by a small group of families that have taken hold of power and embedded themselves within it (the superficial United States; the superficial, alienated Chile). Itrofil mogen: the whole without exclusion, the entirety with no fragmentation of life, of all living things.”
