Think place/ Place-thought

Attached is the Think place/Place-thought worksheet PDF

Think-place

“Settler people settle … Settler identities become rooted in particular places. Land … refers to something akin to “place” (p. 48)

“Settler common sense” involves separating “the way of thinking about the land from the experience of being on the land.” (p. 49)

Settler “think-place” is partitioned out as follows:

1. Epistemology (the way we think about the land) is divided from Ontology (the way we experience the land)
2. —> which leads to separating the constituents of the world from how the world is understood
3. —> which then limits agency (who’s in power and empowered) to human
4. —> which then creates an exclusionary relationship with nature.

— Watts, 2013 cited in Battell Lowman & Barker (2015. p. 49)

Place-thought

“Indigenous identities and histories are shaped by “place thought,” the inseparable relationship between how indigenous peoples understand and interact with the world as a living entity, with will and agency of its own, and how the living, intelligent elements of the world shape indigenous thinking, culture, and social practice. p. 51.

As expressed in creation stories and oral histories, economic practises and systems, indigenous nations are rooted in land in place. This is not a myth or a metaphor, but an establish fact and also an important and powerful way of understanding how indigenous people understand themselves and their societies. p.50

The shifting relationality, complexity and circularity of indigenous knowledge (is) productive and necessary. The situatedness and place-specific nature of indigenous knowledge calls for the validation of new kinds of theorizing a new epistemologies that can account for situated, relational indigenous knowledge… p. 50

Battell Lowman, E. & Barker, A.J. (2015).Settler Identity and Colonialism in 21st Century Canada. Fernwood Publishing.

LINK to this book description here