The decolonial wor(l)ds of Indigenous women

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article focuses on Indigenous women’s narrative and storytelling tradition and its relation to decolonial ecologies. It argues that Indigenous women’s narratives, both written and orally transmitted, constitute sites of defiance to the eco-social structures of settler colonialism and imperialism. Drawing on the case of Palestine, the article reveals that ‘zoocentric environmentalism,’ as represented by an Israeli installation at the Venice Biennale, incarnates the material and symbolic constituents of Zionist blooming enterprise. That is, such presumed forms of progressive ‘non-anthropocentric’ engagements with ecological calamities unveil the historical continuity of the Zionist project that aims to erase Indigenous Palestinians and their multigenerational, more-than-human place thought. To counter universalising environmental projects and their inherent colonial violence, the article engages with place-based stories of a Palestinian woman’s novella; more-than-human ancestral knowledge shared by Palestinian women elders; and a visual-media project showing Palestinian refugee women returning to their ancestral villages. The article’s overall aim is to advance an Indigenous situated approach to decolonising today’s environmentalism and to centre Palestine in the wider social and cultural geography debate on Indigeneity, decolonial ecologies, and storytelling.