Today my ecocritical praxis continues to focus on literature of environmental justice and also involves biosemiotics, which is the study of qualitative semiotic or communicative capabilities that are considered to exist in a variety of nonhuman life forms, from the largest redwoods down to the simplest organisms living in the soil.
A more satisfying definition entails important ethical and often activist dimensions relating to both human and other-than-human life.
Inuit artists such as Ashevak and Teevee have created works that celebrate local ecologies and multispecies relations, but also have offered significant portrayals of the disintegration of the ecological fabric and tattering of ecospiritual and ecosocial relations.
Historical art does something ecologically significant with form by revealing implication (from the Latin implicare, meaning to entwine)—an intractable state of entanglement, interconnection, and mutual responsibility.
The seemingly paradoxical phrase indicates that an enduring disposition toward Native cultures as earth-sensitive alternatives to the damaging ideologies and practices of Euro-American industrial modernity is inadequate to the challenges of complex crises.
in my view, the most compelling cultural work is that which explores and develops modes of ecology-as-intersectionality, wherein political ecology links with Indigenous and/or queer rights activism and/or movements against police brutality, media censorship, and capitalist extraction.
Instead of a river, time is now more like a vortex or maelstrom, a rotating body of water that draws down anything lying on the surface, yet at the same time—due to currents and cross currents—jettisons any objects, animals, and plants lying at depth.
In the moments when I feel like I do not belong or that we are not doing enough to decolonize inherently colonial institutions such as museums and universities, I try to pause and think not only about the absurdity and seeming infeasibility of the project we have set for ourselves, but also these moments when the intangibility of our research materializes in practice.
Centering on T.C. Cannon as narrator of the exhibition, and decentralizing my curatorial voice as the authority, was an intentional strategy I employed to activate Cannon’s Native perspective and to build empathy with the audience.