Deeper Sense of Place, A
Stories and Journeys of Collaboration in Indigenous Research
Publication Year: 2013
In A Deeper Sense of Place, editors Jay Johnson and Soren Larsen collect stories, essays, and personal reflections from geographers who have worked collaboratively with Indigenous communities across the globe.
These first-person narratives offer insight into the challenges faced by Native and non-Native scholars to their academic and personal approaches during research with Indigenous communities. By addressing the ethical, political, intellectual, and practical meanings of collaboration with Indigenous peoples, A Deeper Sense of Place highlights the ways in which collaborative research can help Indigenous and settler communities find common ground through a shared commitment to land, people, and place.
A Deeper Sense of Place will inform students and academics engaged in research with Indigenous communities, as well as those interested in the challenges of employing critical, qualitative methodologies.
Published by: Oregon State University Press
Title Page, Copyright
Introduction: A Deeper Sense of Place
Jay T. Johnson & Soren C. Larsen
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The relationship between academic research and Indigenous peoples is steeped in a long and lingering colonial history. Beginning with the so-called Age of Discovery in the early fifteenth century, a large part of European colonial activity involved intellectual expeditions into the “field”—those regions and communities that lay beyond the figurative and literal comprehension of the Western mind. Such forays...
Poetics, Politics, Practice
Footprints across the Beach: Beyond Researcher-Centered Methodologies
Sandie Suchet-Pearson, Sarah Wright, Kate Lloyd, Laklak Burarrwanga & Paul Hodge
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The beach at Bawaka is at the heart of our research collaboration. Laklak and her daughter Djawundil’s house is on one side of the beach, and when Kate, Sarah, and Sandie stay at Bawaka, they usually stay in Djawa’s house on the other side of the beach. The majority of our time spent together has been under the trees in front of the houses on one or other side of the beach. It is across this beach that Laklak...
Singing the Coast: Writing Place and Identity in Australia
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In the beginning was the mother place.
I am parked at the estuary at Moonee Beach looking through the curved branch of a eucalypt tree. It is a blue sunny day, low tide, with strands of blue-green water winding across the wide stretch of sandy estuary. All is rounded here. The rounded knoll of a shady reserve with tents and cabins is bordered by a...
In the Canoe: Intersections in Space, Time, and Becoming
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On a cool clear morning in Kawaihae, Hawai‘i, I sat with a gathering of Hawaiian men atop Pu‘u Kohola heiau, the temple built in 1791 by Kamehameha I to unite the islands. We rose before dawn, bathed in the sea, donned something approximating traditional garb, and entered with ceremony this temple of state. It was a seemingly...
Anagyuk (Partner): Personal Relationships and the Exploration of Sugpiaq Fishing Geographies in Old Harbor, Alaska
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When I traveled to Old Harbor, a remote Alaska Native fishing community of 230 on Kodiak Island, Keith Basso’s Wisdom Sits in Places is the only book that I brought with me (Basso 1996). Its dog-eared pages followed me on skiff rides, camping trips, and to the various houses of generous community members who took me in...
The Micropolitics of Storytelling in Collaborative Research: Reflections on a Mapping Project with the Cheslatta-Carrier Nation in British Columbia
Soren C. Larsen
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In the summer of 1998 I was a twenty-two-year-old graduate student in anthropology from Kansas living with the Cheslatta band of the Dakelh (Carrier) First Nation in north-central British Columbia.1 Although I did not know it at the time, interpersonal growth is a common experience for those engaged in long-term collaborative fieldwork (Coffey 1999; Fabian 1979; Young and Goulet 1994), and...
Rocking the Boat: Indigenous Geography at Home in Hawai'i
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As Native scholars, we often find ourselves backed against the wall. It is our ability to change shape and form with shifting fluid identities in different contexts, simultaneously Native and scholar, often with hybrid ancestry, that enables us to open up safe spaces in the mountains of the academy. This shape-shifting allows...
Reimaginig Landscape, Environment, and Management
Kaitiakitanga: Telling the Stories of Environmental Guardianship
Jay T. Johnson
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My decision to travel to Aotearoa/New Zealand to explore Māori self-determination in resource management did not start out as an exploration of place. Perhaps naively, I was so preoccupied by my central goal of uncovering how the New Zealand government’s commitment to biculturalism was playing out in 2001, a decade into...
From Landscape to Whenua: Thoughts on Interweaving Indigenous and Western Ideas about Landscape
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In this essay I reflect on the understanding that Māori, the Indigenous people of Aotearoa/New Zealand, have of “landscape.” Although a quintessentially European term, “landscape” is widely used throughout the world today, even among peoples whose homelands have been settled by Europeans and especially where English is the dominant language. The essay arises out of my experiences in a number of...
Toward a Paradigm of Indigenous Collaboration for Geographic Research in Canadian Environmental and Resource Management
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In the decade since the publication of Māori scholar Linda Smith’s book Decolonizing Methodologies, there has been a remarkable emergence of Indigenous research scholarship. Groundbreaking work by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars around the world has created a community of scholars locally, nationally, and...
Indigenous and Western Science Partners in Climate Change Assessment and Adaptation in Alaska
Sarah F. Trainor
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Alaska is “ground zero” for climate change in the United States. Statewide, average annual temperatures have increased 3ºF since 1949, with the greatest warming occurring in the winter months, averaging nearly 6ºF warming. Alaska’s Indigenous peoples are arguably disproportionately affected by a changing climate in part because of their close connection to the land for nutrition and cultural identity...
Reconciling Cultural Resource Management with Indigenous Geographies: The Importance of Connecting Research with People and Place
Rick Budhwa & Tyler McCreary
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Although Indigenous peoples have possessed their own ways of knowing and being for millennia, the emergence of studies by researchers trained in the Western tradition that seek to articulate and respect this Indigenous depth of place remains a relatively recent phenomenon. Although there is a long genealogy of colonial research...
Telling Stories in the Classroom
Awakening to Belonging
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This essay is about the sense of place rather than the ontology of place. All creatures share ontology of place, as place is inseparable from being (Malpas 1999, 31–32), but as sensory, experiential, historical, social, and attitudinal differences create distinctions of being in the world, we do not necessarily have the same sense of place (Basso 1996; Feld and Basso 1996; Casey 1997; Johnson and Murton 2007)...
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Page Count: 272
Illustrations: B&W Photographs.
Publication Year: 2013