Grounding Relations: Indigenous Political Ecologies & Environmental Humanities

Grounding Relations: Indigenous Political Ecologies & Environmental Humanities will develop an edited volume that addresses pressing concerns around climate change, environmental stewardship, and ethical obligations to land, water, and non-human relations in Indigenous Communities. On September 23, 2024 at the University of Washington, Grounding Relations’ public facing symposium will engage Indigenous concerns around land and environment through a series of roundtables that ground us in Coast Salish territories. This will be followed by a closed workshop sessions for the organizing team participants to build out our edited volume.

As an interdisciplinary collective of Native scholars situated across a range of fields, methods, and communities, we understand our project to be a model for scholars and community members who work on environmental scholarship and ethical publication methods. Our interdisciplinary writing and approaches emerge from our overlapping fields of training and interest—including Native American and Indian Studies (NAIS), geography, anthropology, environmental history, and American studies—which helps us to theorize our contemporary environmental dilemmas at the nexus of the humanities and social sciences. Such an Indigenous humanities intervention is particularly needed in the context of political ecology, which too often sidelines other ways of knowing.