http://hdl.handle.net/10366/160140 Sat, 18 Apr 2026 09:05:25 GMT 2026-04-18T09:05:25Z http://hdl.handle.net/10366/166077 [EN] Ecocritical and ecofeminist studies have frequently borrowed from Indigenous epistemologies to conform new approaches to human-nature relations, particularly now that the pressing climate crisis is making western societies contemplate the need for radical solutions. As Leanne Betasamosake Simpson remarks, "the western academy is now becoming interested in certain aspects of Indigenous Knowledge" such as "Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK)" (373). However, the scope of this interest is reduced and disconnects ecological knowledge from decolonial practices, such as land claims or Indigenous feminisms. Maile Arvin et al. emphatically support that "settler colonialism has been and continues to be a gendered process" (8) and thus its ramifications and effects (upon nature or Indigenous communities) cannot be detangled without an Indigenous feminist perspective. In this article, I focus on an ecocritical analysis of several works by Lee Maracle, who dedicated her career to the regeneration and revalorization of Indigenous systems of knowledge, in order to pinpoint the intersections between feminism, decolonization, and nonhuman ecological thinking that might develop into a potential Indigenous ecofeminism that truly recognizes Indigenous epistemologies in their full context. Basing myself off Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson's theories on Indigenous radical resurgence, which assert that a cultural resurgence (such as a revalorization of Indigenous ecological knowledge) cannot take place without a political resurgence (such as the acknowledgement of Indigenous sovereignty), I argue that Maracle's portrayal of natural elements and her imagining of human-nature relations is inextricably linked to a decolonizing perspective foregrounded on Indigenous feminism. Fri, 20 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10366/166077 2023-10-20T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10366/166080 [EN] What does an understanding of the self as constantly rearticulated mean for ecopoetry and the lyric "I"? And how might an emphasis on a multiscalar semiotics, where different forms of writing are understood to carry the capacity to literally reorganize material life, reframe the possibilities for writing under the contested sign of the Anthropocene, in the midst of the Earth's sixth extinction event, the accelerating acidification of the planet's oceans, and the largescale climatic reorganizations wrought by climate change? This article reads the idiosyncratic mode of production and the poems of Adam Dickinson's Anatomic alongside recent scholarship in ecopoetics, environmental humanities, and science and technology studies to advance a particular and specific (that is, non-generic) understanding of Dickinson's experimental poetics. From its beginnings in the desire to catalogue and identify the presence of a dizzying array of bacteria, chemicals, metals, and other substances in the body, Anatomic narrates the movement from a misguided and despairing purity politics to a transformative conception of the individual body and consciousness as shot through with relations at multiple, unfathomable scales. Intervening in the discourses, techniques, and worldview of what Max Liboiron (Métis) has termed "dominant science" (20), Dickinson's text elaborates an experimental practice that invites us to rethink our modes and forms of relating to one another and the more-than-human entanglements that sustain, feed off, or simply co-exist with us. Fri, 20 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10366/166080 2023-10-20T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10366/166079 [EN] We read differently outside. Discussing works by two experimental poets, a. rawlings and Christine Stewart, this essay draws on geocritical and ecocritical methodologies alongside Indigenous theories that link language, story, and land to consider how an outdoor pedagogical practice attunes readers not only to the spatial dynamics of language, but also to the linguistic dynamics of place. While the colonial, sedentary structures of traditional classrooms shut out the world, immersing us in literary realms as though they were separate from our physical realities, reading outside makes us viscerally aware of how land and language shape one another. Beyond the walls of our classrooms and homes, we can feel our entanglements with the land, its histories, and other species. In the colonial spaces of Canada, which continues to grapple with considerable ecological and social harms, cultivating such awareness matters: while reading outside is not enough to save us from the environmental crises we are facing or assuage colonial grief and guilt, doing so brings us closer to the living edges of language, which is where new forms of attention might nourish a more mutually sustaining relationship between land and words. Fri, 20 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10366/166079 2023-10-20T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10366/166078 Fri, 20 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10366/166078 2023-10-20T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10366/166075 [EN] Between February 2021 and March 2022, Ariel Gordon and Brenda Schmidt wrote a collaborative poetry manuscript, formatted like a call and response. Ariel intended to write about urban Manitoba, the city and its trees, and Brenda was to write about rural Saskatchewan and birds. Over the course of the year, the matter of place took over and the intentions branched and flew apart. They both wrote birds and trees but also moose and mushrooms, pronghorns and wild turkeys, and people making their way through it all. They wrote climate as it was manifested in drought-stressed trees and stunted crops covered in grasshoppers, in wildfires and wildfire smoke hanging over the prairies. They wrote home as they found it. Fri, 20 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10366/166075 2023-10-20T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10366/166076 Fri, 20 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10366/166076 2023-10-20T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10366/166073 Fri, 20 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10366/166073 2023-10-20T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10366/166074 Fri, 20 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10366/166074 2023-10-20T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10366/166072 Fri, 20 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10366/166072 2023-10-20T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10366/166069 [EN] This article explores Marian Engel's portrayal of what Animal Studies scholar Donna J. Haraway terms "significant otherness" (the simultaneous interconnection and mysterious difference between animal and human life/connections) and othering as a form of dismissal and a perpetuation of colonial hierarchies of gendered and racial power. I explore the overlaps of Engel's othering of Indigenous characters in the novel and the racism present in speciesism, exposing why the character of the bear is more knowable to the protagonist than Lucy Leroy (Cree). I offer a decolonial reading of this seminal Canadian text, drawing on Engel's desire to disrupt literary utilization of animals as images of nationalism and emblems of patriotic virtue, while simultaneously exposing the prevalence of entrenched gendered and racial hierarchical perceptions of Indigenous women and relationships to nature. In offering this reading, I hope to suggest that decolonial readings offer us the tools to integrate the ideals expressed in Haraway's "significant otherness" reading of companion-animal relationships with decoloniality and the deconstruction of hierarchies of power as pioneered by Indigenous authors, artists, and activists. This generates hope. Fri, 20 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10366/166069 2023-10-20T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10366/166070 [EN] My research-creation examines how colonial language and words inspire the logic behind resource extraction, appropriation, and exploitation. Through found poetry—a creative and analytical process of using different ("found") sources and various methods to critique and view the world—I create a collection of poems responding to Daniel Macfarlane's Fixing Niagara Falls: Environment, Energy, and Engineers at the World's Most Famous Waterfall (2020). Macfarlane claims that the "result" of Niagara Falls is a "compromise between scenic beauty and electricity generation" (208). However, I argue that Niagara Falls is not a "compromised" space but a hub of ecosystems coming into being. My poetic techniques emphasize the arbitrariness of colonial practices that classify beings as successful, political, and economic gains or progress. As such, I use various found methods to think with water and Indigenous modes of healing with Niagara Falls. By redacting, cutting, and layering the found words, I create an ethos of confusion, apprehension, unease, and responsibility in order to call into question the colonial logic that defines how settlers position themselves on Indigenous lands and in order to offer the possibility to listen otherwise. Fri, 20 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10366/166070 2023-10-20T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10366/166071 [EN] Most Western humans think of more-than-human animals as having certain spatial requirements adequate to their needs to feed, reproduce and survive but assume that their territorial needs are more or less generic and interchangeable. In his acclaimed literary nonfiction book The Black Grizzly of Whiskey Creek (2008) Sid Marty represents the spaces and places of two bears, a black bear and a grizzly bear. In this animal biography cum forensic account of a series of bear attacks upon humans in Banff, Alberta, Canada, during eleven days in 1980, Marty reconstructs the events by researching the particular bears and interviewing the wardens involved, and factoring in the climatic and environmental forces – particularly the eruption that spring of Mount St. Helens and the concomitant alteration of weather patterns and plant growth as far away as Banff, Alberta – that led to the unusually high number of tragic bear-human encounters that summer. I argue that The Black Grizzly of Whiskey Creek, several chapters of which Marty writes in the third-person as if from the points of view of each of the two individual bears involved, allows us to explore how we might think of bears' and by extension other more-than-human animals' senses of place and exemplifies how literary works can play a role in coming to understand more fully the lives of some of our animal relations. I argue that bears' tremendous olfactory senses are so indelibly connected with their familiar surroundings as to constitute a veritable "scents of place." Fri, 20 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10366/166071 2023-10-20T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10366/166068 Fri, 20 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10366/166068 2023-10-20T00:00:00Z