Land and ethnographic practices—(re)making toward healing

Abstract

ABSTRACT While ‘place-making’ is a productive concept for many scholars, I consider land relations and research through Indigenous (re)making by narrating embodied and experiential ethnographic approaches. Through (re)making, one reimagines ethnography and ethnographic practices with Indigenous land and Indigenous land practices that work to contribute to forms of decolonial healing and Indigenous survivance. In consideration of the wounds among multiple bodies, not only humans, for which large-scale settler-colonial agricultural plantations in Hawai’i and the Sonoran Desert are responsible, this work discusses possibilities for (re)making toward healing with land. Song, poetry, and story are the agents who make such engagements with many more-than-(but including)-human collaborators translatable. As such, it asks how an understanding of ethnography in the contexts of Indigenous science and technology studies that cares about environmental research might shift the ways in which methodologies are formed and ‘data’ is shaped. And it asks how ethnographic practitioners might better affirm the plights, journeys, cycles, relations, and encounters that more-than-human beings experience, remember, hold, and live. This is one contribution among many that attend to the variety of ways in which ethnographic texts are formed and understood in Indigenous research practices that challenge Euro-Western genres and structures of knowledge production, and how/with whom such knowledges and practices are co-created.