Indigenous Geographies

Patty:  So we're here talking Deondre Smiles about Indigenous geographies. And I took like grade 10 geography that was the extent of my geography training, which means I learned about glacial movement and labeling rivers and all of that stuff. But I mean, first off, just the idea of Indigenous geographies from a land bank perspective is really interesting. Because colonial borders are one thing biozones are another thing. And so it's just seemed like a real this really fascinating topic that I know almost nothing about. So why don't you introduce yourself? Explain a little bit about your work and then and then we'll get into kind of what what we mean when we're talking about Indigenous geography.

Deondre:  Sure, I'd be happy to. So my name is Dr. Deondre Smiles.  I use he him pronouns as well as the Ojibwemowin general pronoun win.  I am a citizen of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe, I'm of Ojibwe, Black, and settler ancestry is specifically Swedish. On my mother's side, my mother was Ojibwe and Swedish. My father was African American man from Oklahoma. And so I am currently an assistant professor of geography at the University of Victoria. I'm out on the west coast of BC, Canada. Some other interesting facts about me, I'm originally from Minneapolis, did a did a bachelor's degree in geography at a tiny little State University that probably noticed nobody's heard of in Minnesota, I did a master's degree in global Indigenous Studies at the University of Minnesota and did a PhD in geography at Ohio State where I also did a postdoc for a year as a, as a history postdoc. Well, they're kind of interesting things about me, I tend to not think of myself as a super interesting person. So usually, I'm at a loss about this. I also, also sometimes, trying to talk about myself is really hard, but that's perfectly alright.

Probably the coolest thing about me are probably, you know, the people surrounding me right? Married to a wonderful woman for almost two years now we have a cat so um, that's probably what I'm, besides posting a lot of things about Indigenous geographies, on Twitter. I'm also well known for posting photos of my cat um, quite often. So I do that. I live out in Victoria. Most of the time, I'm actually talking to you tonight from Columbus, Ohio, where my wife is still here doing a doctoral degree at OSU. Back for our reading break, and doing some doing some other kind of appointment type of things. Avid musician. Yeah, that's pretty much that's pretty much me in a nutshell.

I mean, obviously, there'll be far much more that we'll talk about here in this interview. But specifically when it comes to Indigenous geographies, because that's what I really describe myself is, my interests in that work are multifaceted, to say the least. And so there's kind of a couple of key strands of my work that I really have drawn upon. And the first one is what we would call critical Indigenous geographies, right? Like bringing the way that Indigenous peoples engage with space and place into conversations with power and race and economics and capitalism and colonialism and all these things. The other strand is what what we would call in the United States like tribal cultural resource preservation, probably north of the border in Canada would be you'd probably use a term of, you know, Indigenous resource management or a cultural resource management.

And so a lot of my work over the last, oh, six years of my, my education and in my academic career have been focusing on the ways that tribal nations in the US and First Nations in Canada and Indigenous nations around the world have found very creative and unique ways to protect on cultural sites such as burial grounds against development and disturbance. That's been that was the focal point of my dissertation. And what I'm doing now at UVic is bringing in some of my other interests that such as science and technology studies, political ecology, or the studies of how politics and power engage with the natural environment. In an Indigenous research ethics in exploring the ways that these Indigenous nations are now using the lessons that they learn from defending the dead and applying that to more than human relatives such as you know, the land, water animals, plants, especially in an era of anthropogenic climate crisis that it seems like we as Western global northern society seem to have the throttle down, like at full in our hurdling ourselves straight into this.

And I think it's important with that where you see a lot of discourse nowadays about oh, well, the world is ending we need to look at you know, colonizing space. And you know, what are we going to do when the world ends, and I draw upon really, really awesome scholars like Kyle White, and other Indigenous scholars, especially a lot of Indigenous women and Two Spirit and queer thinkers that say, well, Indigenous peoples have already lived through the apocalypse, right? Like we have already seen, the apocalypse happened on our lands, and in the ways that colonialism and capitalism seeks to sever us from those connections. And so maybe if folks actually listened to Indigenous peoples, we might be able to offer something about how we can deal with Apocalypse, and how it's not necessarily the end of the world, but maybe an opportunity for us to reframe how we are in relation with the world.

And so that's the work that I do. I'm starting up a lab, a geography lab at UVic. In that regard, we call ourselves the Geographic Indigenous Futures lab, or GIF lab for short. While I say we have labs, mainly me right now, but I'm recruiting graduate students to work with me and work in the lab. So, if you're an Indigenous student who's really interested in space and place, and you want to go get a master's in geography, I'll make sure to drop my contact information here with the host some definitely come talk to me, I'm recruiting for fall 2022. Now, so I'll leave it there. Because otherwise I could do the time honored Ojibwe tradition of kind of going on and on and talking for a while, but we have, I'm sure you'd have some some questions you want to throw my way. And I'd love to just have a conversation with both of you. So thank you for having me.

Kerry: You know, it's interesting, I just left the shores of BC. On Saturday, I was on the west side, visiting my family, my daughters out there. And the one thing that I will say about being in BC, especially in the Vancouver area, we were right in Burnaby. North Vancouver, like we were around places there is that you you pick up, the land speaks you know, there's there is no doubt that there is a sense about the space of BC that feels old and nurtured and loved. And that energy, that space of being in that can only have been curated by those who have known and understood this land.

And interestingly enough, I was I was there spending time with my granddaughter. And I you know, Halloween was coming up. And she mentioned the idea of a zombie apocalypse. And so I thought it was so funny when you mentioned how we understand the land because what I had turned to her and said Is she was like, what if there's a zombie apocalypse Nanny. And I said to her, let me tell you something. We are people of Indigenous and of color. We've been there and done that. We don't, no nothing about the apocalypse is gonna sway us. And so she looked at me and she was like, Wow, is that true? And I said, look at where we are. This land is eons old, it has existed before us, and it will exist after us. And there are some of us that do understand this space.

So with that, Deondre.  My question for you is, are we listening anymore? Do you believe and it sounds like you know, I kind of feel that you may go this way that the the ears are now right, to truly hear the voices that are have always been an understood meaning out.

Deondre: So yeah, that's a really, really great question. Kerry, I think that we are definitely in a position where the ears are more open than they were probably a generation or two ago. I mean, one of the things that I deal with as an Indigenous geographer is still this, this this overarching kind of thought that well, you know, why do you study Indigenous geography? You know, are there Indigenous people left?  I think about in my PhD program, being at a departmental happy hour. Having fellow grad students decided that I was going to be the person to try to sharpen their theoretical claws on and say, you know, why do you do Indigenous geographies? Didn't didn't colonialism win?  And I'm you know,  I'm like, well, it didn't because I'm standing here right in front of you right now, you know, right like

But, you know, these are the things that we have to deal with. I think that in the current political climate that we find ourselves here in North America, particularly, I think that people are starting to realize that Indigenous peoples have a lot to say about how to live in relation with the environment. And it's becoming more than the romanticized  “Oh, yes, Indigenous peoples are these like, you know, very deeply spiritual folks that are out there, you know, living in community with the, with the, with the animals and things like that,” you know, this very kind of pseudo spiritual environmentalist BS that really infantilizes Indigenous peoples and kind of places us as part of, of the environment.

And what they're starting to realize is, oh, no Indigenous peoples have, you know, these really complex systems of environmental stewardship, um in particular, some that my colleagues do really, really great work on, you know, ecologies of fire management and stewardship, or lands, you know, stewardship, that are based upon, you know, long standing, you know, worldviews and ontologies and epistemologies that have predated