Indigenous Cosmologies Research Articles

The Climate of Indigenous Literature: Thomas King’s Anthropocene Realism

ABSTRACT This essay argues that the Cherokee-Greek author Thomas King writes a realism for the Anthropocene avant la lettre, aiming to illuminate how his fiction – including Green Grass, Running Water (1993) and Truth and Bright Water (1999) – becomes even more significant when we perceive how his approach, from the situations he explores to his narrative modes, acknowledges states of dislocation, historical entanglement, and socio-material interconnection as the condition of reality in our catastrophic present, thereby educating the reader into a systems thinking that recognizes the indivisibility of the projects of decolonization and environmental justice. In contextualizing the realities of a present in which the interests of capital and empire and their discursive and institutional handmaidens have been forcibly made paramount within Indigenous frameworks and experiences – bleeding into Indigenous cosmologies, storytelling practices, lifeways, and histories, as well as means of resistance and survivance – King achieves in his fiction a mode of realism with the capacity to teach his readers how to scale their imaginations to climates of crisis, illuminating what Indigenous literatures can and should mean as we strive to inhabit such climates in ways conducive to communal survival.

Idealist Individualism or Indigenous Cosmology; Finding Entanglement across Species and Strata

Science and technology have been associated with modern Enlightenment, in a manner that elevated the rational mind over emotions and the body, a separation of the subjective mind from the object of observation, universal categories, objective observation, and linear causality. These assumptions, consolidated by Descartes and then Kant, have underpinned the philosophies of science, economics, policy, and political theory. They have shaped the modern world and enabled corporate freedom to exploit all ‘resources’ in the name of consumerism and global trade. Idealism has alienated subjective rationality from an idealised universal created world. In contrast, ancient indigenous ways of knowing are emerging as better exemplars of the interrelationship between individuals, communities, and organic and anorganic life forms. Celtic shapeshifters and praise poems forge an interwoven dance of geology, weather, plants, animals, and humanity with wisdom and politics. The Māori concept of whakapapa is the kin relations of everything, tied into complex claves as a taxonomy of familial ties. Animism was understood as pagan misidentification by modernity, but if the alienation set out by modern linear physics is severed, then the intra and inter-relationship of strata, atmosphere, ocean, and species are better relayed by indigenous philosophy than by outdated, colonial, modern assumptions. Celtic and Māori pantheism show us how entangled we are, and how special relationships are in place that last across generations.

Earth-Bodies as Re-Existence: Ana Mendieta's Siluetas Beyond the Limits of Ecofeminism

This article engages the earth-body, or Silueta (Silhouette) (1973–80), works of Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta to signal the Western limits of ecofeminist discourses and imagine a human-earthly relation beyond them. Ecofeminist thought has gained traction in feminist studies, especially given new materialist interventions which mark its ability to think a non-anthropocentric feminism in a time of environmental crisis. I recognize the potential of ecofeminism, and explore the ways it informed Mendieta's practice. Yet, drawing on decolonial feminist theory, I argue that a global South context and the "coloniality of [her] being" (Maldonaldo-Torres 2007) shifted Mendieta's engagement with the ecofeminist project. I read Mendieta as enacting an "aesthetics of re-existence" (Alban Achinte 2013) in response to a dehumanizing colonial context, using her art to "re-member" (Anzaldúa 2015) the negated dimensions of her existence in the Americas. Doing so reveals a persistent Western humanist lens that underwrites mainstream ecofeminist understandings of human-earthly relation, and also thinks with the African and Indigenous cosmologies Mendieta incorporated into her Siluetas about alternative modes of human relation to the earth. As Mendieta re-membered her own colonized being through her art, she helps us re-member ecofeminism's relation to the earth.

Book Reviews / Compte Rendus: Contemporary Indigenous Cosmologies and Pragmatics, Françoise Dussart and Sylvie Poirier, eds

Book Reviews / Compte Rendus: <i>Contemporary Indigenous Cosmologies and Pragmatics</i>, Françoise Dussart and Sylvie Poirier, eds

Tropical Materialisms: Toward Decolonial Poetics, Practices and Possibilities

Tropical Materialisms concur on at least three things: humans are always entangled with non-human/material agents; such entanglement is necessary for any creative act to take place; and these same entanglements allow us to interrogate and re-evaluate preconceived notions about the world. This Special Issue aligns itself with the fields of new materialism and posthumanism. What is particularly exciting is the opportunity to rearticulate these fields in tropical terms, that is, with scholarly and creative practices from and about the tropical world. This focus is crucial given that current scholarship in new materialism and posthumanism predominantly comes from European temperate contexts and is informed by Western philosophies. In order to decolonize the ontological turn, this Special Issue recognises not only that colonial knowledge systems impacted the tropics, but also that matter’s liveliness was and is well understood in Indigenous cosmologies, ancient philosophies and ‘animist materialism’. The papers collected together in this special issue offers materialisms informed by decolonizing intuitions. They variously demonstrate how the tropics, as geographic zone and as pertaining to poetics (via "tropes"), can theoretically inform and historically problematise new materialism and posthumanism. They offer new vocabularies through which discourses on "tropical materialism" may be initiated; and a cartography of practices across disciplinary fields which demonstrate what this "tropical materialism" may be. The Special Issue collection it itself a form of poiesis: a creative engagement with the world.

Feminism and Decolonizing Decoloniality: Decolonizing the Coloniality of Power in Aymara Cosmology

This article demonstrates the import of feminist reflexivity for the decolonial project. At its best, the decolonial project reveals the form and extent to which contemporary ideas and power structures are imbued with generations of power structures whose foundations were laid during colonialism. However, some power dynamics can be lost in reified forms of decolonial critique. Feminist methodologies, especially reflexivity, remind us to revisit the particulars of the constructions of power within dominant power structures and, as importantly, within resistant power structures. We revisit the decolonial stance within an Indigenous cosmology, Aymaridad, ‘the’ Aymara worldview as constructed for the second largest Indigenous population in Bolivia. Aymaridad is an important site for feminists to revisit the relationship between feminism and decoloniality because over a decade ago, María Lugones charted a course for decolonial feminism that drew on an Aymaran approach to decolonizing gender. By revisiting the coloniality embedded in the construction of Aymara (in academe and in politics), we reveal that feminism’s persistent reflexive methodology, even more than its attention to gender specifically, makes it an essential part of the decolonial theory.

Indigenous cosmologies of energy for a sustainable energy future

Indigenous cosmologies of energy for a sustainable energy future

The Cartography of Kallihirua?: Reassessing Indigenous Mapmaking and Arctic Encounters

This article examines a cartographic encounter that took place in 1850 between Kallihirua, a member of Inughuit community of Northern Greenland, and members of the British Admiralty. Drawing on recent literatures that critically assess histories of indigenous mapping, the article explores the troubling circumstances that surrounded this encounter and analyses two maps which were produced as a result. Informed by ongoing debates pertaining to the decolonization of geographical knowledge, the article also reflects critically upon the extent to which historical indigenous cosmologies were commensurate with non-indigenous cartographic traditions and thus reassesses the motivations that lay behind the production and circulation of these maps. The article thus concludes by arguing that while Kallihirua certainly did contribute various types of geographical knowledge during this encounter, to label him as the sole author of these maps would be a problematic act of “cartographic ventriloquism.”

“What Would the Mushrooms Say?” Speculating Inclusive and Optimistic Futures with Nature as Teacher

When approached through the theoretical lenses of canonical literature and the reductionist Western science of settler colonialism, climate crisis discourse grapples with a conception of apocalypse wherein catastrophe and hopelessness engender eco-anxiety and a sense of environmental nihilism. Drawing from the works of Jessica Hernandez, Sherri Mitchell, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and others, “What Would the Mushrooms Say?”, both as a class and concept, envisions a healing-centered, interdisciplinary approach to climate discourse in learning spaces, one that centers the theoretical and practical applications of an Indigenous science and mythology to flip the dominant narratives we tell about the dystopic dead ends of climate change, extinctions, anthropocentric hierarchies, and other events predictive of end times. Instead of only reckoning with white settler colonialism’s false promises of technocratic off-planet societies, students interact with a multiplicity of apocalypses and possibilities found in Indigenous cosmologies, mythologies, epistemologies, and speculative fiction of Indigenous, Indigequeer, queer writers of color, and the natural world. Posited as an exemplar text, Amanda Strong’s animated short film Biidaaban is discussed in terms of its instructional potential and depiction of Indigenous ways of relating, as kin, to human and nonhuman alike when speculating about futurity. “What Would the Mushrooms Say?” calls for slowing down and embracing the natural world as a teacher from whom we learn and speculate alongside. It suggests as a lifelong practice ways of relating to our planet and engaging with the climate discourse that interrupt a legacy of white settler colonialist eco-theorizing and action determined to dominate and subdue the natural world. In conclusion, this project documents the emergence of students’ shifting perspectives and their explorations of newfound possibilities within learning spaces where constructive hope rather than despair dominates climate discourse.

Indigenous Peoples on the Move: Intersectional Invisibility and the Quest for Pluriversal Human Rights for Indigenous Migrants from Venezuela in Brazil

ABSTRACT Indigenous migrants are often treated without regard for their status as Indigenous Peoples, as if their migrant status would hierarchically supersede their Indigenous one. The flow of Indigenous migrants from Venezuela to neighboring countries has largely increased over the years. Currently, there are several Indigenous Peoples from Venezuela in Brazil. This evaluative interdisciplinary research addresses the relations between Indigenous and migration human rights protection with consideration for decolonial perspectives. It questions how living coloniality impacts Indigenous migrants' rights, leading to their intersectional invisibility, and how decolonial views on human rights may help overcoming these challenges. It claims that a decolonial perspective on human rights rooted in the pluriverse may situate human rights as emancipatory scripts when led by Indigenous cosmologies. Ultimately, this article aims to contribute to critical understandings on the intersectional oppression faced by Indigenous migrants and, by calling for a shift towards pluriversal approaches to their human rights, illustrate possible paths to the realization of Indigenous migrants' rights and the need to decolonize their lived realities. This may inform potential directions for decolonizing the human rights agenda as well as the law and practice of human rights in the case of Indigenous migrants in Latin America.

‘The Eliminated Gods’: The Christian Reconfiguration of Jukun Theism

This article looks at an aspect of the cosmology of the Jukun of north-central Nigeria, specifically their theism, and how it has changed through their encounter with Christian monotheism. Many contemporary Jukun people assume that their indigenous cosmology has always been anchored on a Supreme Being akin to the Christian God. In this study I show that this currently held belief is largely due to the theological framework which Christian missionaries sought to make the Jukun worldview fit into. And even prior to the first Christian contact, Jukun indigenous cosmology had been in contact with Islam. I give a very brief history of the Jukun and of the Christian missionary efforts among them starting in 1906 and, starting from my own questions growing up as a Jukun, look at how indigenous concepts and categories for deities were adapted over the course of time as the majority of Jukun became Christian.

Yemapoetics: Towards a Theory of Healing in Indigenous Poetry from Sikkim

Literature that is being composed from or about the politico-geographical category of Northeast India focuses on violence and ethnic movements in major ways (Hazarika, 1996; Barpujari, 1998; Baruah, 2005; Paula, 2008). While Weberian understanding of indigenous cosmology has led to archiving, documenting and research on ethnic epistemologies from Northeast India, in the absence of indigenous literary theories, literature from this region faces the challenges of homogenisation or becoming case studies for ethnographic documentation and anthropological inquiry (Karlsson &amp; Subba, 2006; Subba, 2009; Lepcha et al, 2020 in the context of Sikkim). This paper intends to propose a theory of reading that upholds the role and participation of the poet(ess) as a shaman- a transforming agent and a transformed individual herself. This theory is being named Yemapoetics, deriving its epistemic framework from the figure of shamaness or Yema in the Limboo healing tradition in Sikkim. Yemapoetics is an attempt to propose a new indigenous paradigm for indigenous literary expression around the world. This theory identifies stages of poetic composition as well as reception, ranging from purification, possession, communication to catharsis. An indigenous literary theory like this will provide contexts for locating the poet(ess), examining her/his role as community healer who connects the modern, urban psyche of individuals with communal, archetypal symbols. This enables a process of retracing and re-membering through the poetic act that is essential to healing and recovery. Just as Limboo cosmology recognises women as first humans to be created, this paper argues that women’s psychospiritual agency should be at the centre for poetic theories to accord validity and applicability of feminist spirituality to indigenous literary theorisation. For the purpose, an illustration of the proposed theory will be made with reference to select indigenous poets from Sikkim.

Reading Extractivism

Reading Extractivism Jens Andermann Extractivism, World Literature, Jungle Novel, El Dorado, Ecocriticism, Transculturation, New Materialism HÉCTOR HOYOS. Things with a History: Transcultural Materialism and the Literatures of Extraction in Contemporary Latin America. Columbia UP, 2019. 302 pp. CHARLOTTE ROGERS. Mourning El Dorado: Literature and Extractivism in the Contemporary American Tropics. U of Virginia P, 2019. 340 pp. "Literature" (in the singular or plural), "contemporary," and "extractivism" are the buzzwords looming large in the titles of two recent book-length studies by Héctor Hoyos and Charlotte Rogers. The key addition to the triad is, obviously, the last of those three, "extractivism": it is the one that shakes up relations between literature and contemporariness we had taken for granted and, thus, also makes us look at these in a new light. What is "contemporary" when the timescales are counted not in generations or schools but rather in climate regimes and geological eras, or in the lapse of things and objects into (planned) obsolescence? And what happens to our received notions of literature once we interrogate it from the vantage point of its ability to accommodate living to verbal matter or to expose and subvert extractivism's objectification of the nonhuman? But literature—as both books wager, albeit from very different angles as we shall see—also has something to give back to post-extractivist critique and practice: "recent Latin American fiction," in Hoyos's words, "puts forward a negative political ecology which not only thinks together environmental and social issues but also investigates in language their blind spots, lacks, and omissions" (87). Books do not have arms, Hoyos concedes, but—as Rogers would no doubt agree—they do things nonetheless, and not just with words: "readers are their arms" and therefore interpretation, as performed by any reader but, in a more focused and thus also public and political fashion, by the critic, "extends the eventfulness of literature" (101). Both works, then, make the case for literature and aesthetics to matter when it comes to critiquing the extractivist matrix that has underwritten Latin America's inscription into the world-ecology of colonial and neocolonial capitalism, to borrow ecological [End Page 95] historian Jason W. Moore's term for the "bundling" of "capital, power and nature" in the colonial-modern "web of life" (45). Indeed, despite a more recent flurry of article-length studies asking about the historical and formal interfaces between aesthetics and resource-extractive economics in the region, more comprehensive contributions in the field of Latin American studies to the debates unleashed by Indigenous and environmental activism and the legal-political struggles for the "Rights of Nature" have been in short supply, even though José Miguel Wisnik's recent book-length inquiry into the importance of mining in Carlos Drummond de Andrade's poetry (Maquinação do mundo: Drummond e a mineração) has certainly broken new ground—no pun intended. With few exceptions—the pioneering work of Jorge Marcone, Gisela Heffes and Patrícia Vieira deserves special mention—Latin Americanism has been a latecomer to ecocriticism, in part because of a well-justified suspicion towards the latter's frequently race-and class-blind wilderness ethos as prevalent in its U.S. iteration. Critiques of extractivism, on the other hand, have largely remained impervious to aesthetic considerations, at least in their more macro-sociological incarnations as exemplified by the work of Eduardo Gudynas or Alberto Acosta. "Post-extractivism," as a critical discourse and as activist practice, split off from resource-nationalist neo-developmentalism during the 2000s, in a critical rereading of the dependency theories that continue to underwrite the former. Instead of maximizing revenue in order to create conditions for the leap into industrial modernity, post-extractivism aims at a societal transformation, fostering "a life that puts the self-sufficiency and self-management of human beings who live in communities at the core of its existence" (Acosta 99). Yet even though such a collective change of attitude would by necessity also require a cultural shift of sorts, debates on the cultural dimensions of extractivism and the possibility of its superseding have, thus far, remained restricted almost entirely to Indigenous cosmologies and to the role of science and technology as "epistemic...

The ‘Church of the Poor and the Earth’ in Latin American Mining Conflicts

Conflicts over large-scale mining in Latin America have received growing scholarly attention. Whereas this scholarship has provided very valuable insights into the anatomies of these conflicts, the role of religious ideas and actors has received scant attention. This is remarkable, since the largest church of Latin America, the Catholic Church, seems to be in the midst of an ecological reorientation and increasingly emphasizes its image of the ‘Church of the poor and the Earth’. This research aims to fill this gap and examines the role of Catholic ideas and organizations in mining conflicts. Combining document analysis and ethnographic research on a mining project in Ecuador, the paper argues that Catholic ideas and actors play a significant role in discourses regarding nature and the subsoil, and in configuring the power relations part of conflicts. However, when engaging a historical and gendered perspective, it becomes clear that this role is not without ambiguities and tensions. The paper particularly urges researchers to remain critical of the reinforcements of a patriarchal system of power as well as the essentialization of indigenous cosmologies that continue to undergird present-day discourses and interactions of Catholic organizations in mining conflicts.

Ambivalence, Contradiction, and the Differentiation of Primordial Wholeness in Amazonian Cosmological Thought

In spite of the fact that the ‘ontological turn’ in anthropology has championed the cause of indigenous cosmologies in Amazonia and elsewhere, the selective use of ethnographic material to promote this cause has had the effect of obscuring some of the most remarkable qualities of these intellectual systems. It will be shown here that the widely divergent interpretations of the Ge myth of the bird-nester, as presented by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Terence Turner respectively (the latter as part of his critique of the ontological turn), as well as the well-known earlier treatment of the same myth by Claude Lévi-Strauss as the key myth in his Mythologiques, arise from the fact that they are focusing on different aspects of the cosmological thought expressed by this myth—aspects that appear to directly contradict each other. This is because indigenous thought based on concepts of the differentiation of primordial wholeness accommodates these apparent contradictions in complex and sophisticated ways that have largely eluded these commentators.

Review: Imagining Apocalyptic Politics in the Anthropocene

Imagining Apocalyptic Politics in the Anthropocene speaks to a widespread contemporary perception of crisis which is constituted, among others, by rapidly deteriorating environmental conditions, the rise of nationalist politics, and the spread of infectious disease. The book's chapters offer a wide range of compelling engagements with the predicaments of existence in the era that is called the Anthropocene, with subjects ranging from the climate emergency to geotrauma to urbicide, and from indigenous cosmologies to ageism to selfies.&amp;nbsp;

“Amazonizing” world cities through paintings: Indigenous cosmovisions encountering urban centers for the lost balance

Currently, Peruvian Amazonian Indigenous artists are receiving unprecedented attention as they exhibit their paintings in galleries worldwide. In this context, I focus on three paintings of world cities as Havana, Miami, and Paris by Bora artist Brus Rubio (born 1984). Unfortunately, these paintings have not been analyzed from Indigenous studies and Amazonian Indigenous cosmologies. I argue that the paintings manifest Rubio’s Amazonian resilience by offering a new imaginary of the urban space associated with Indigenous cosmologies, which facilitates the preservation of Indigenous lands, rights, and traditions for the globalized world. In this vision, the Western and the Indigenous worldview find harmony when the human and the non-human encounter and celebrate a balanced cohabitation as in Bora’s narratives. This is his way of amazonizing the world or claiming his right to world citizenship and proposing a new understanding of globalization.

John Song: Modern Chinese Christianity and the Making of a New Man, by Daryl R. Ireland.

Until now, scholars have remembered the story of Chinese revivalist John Song (Song Shangjie) primarily in the form of variations on a single theme: that of Song’s dramatic encounter with Jesus and resultant conversion experience while a student at Union Theological Seminary in New York, of his facing discrimination under modernist professors who lured him into a mental institution, and of his returning to China to propagate a fundamentalist expression of Christianity through his influential revivals. Daryl Ireland, in John Song: Modern Chinese Christianity and the Making of a New Man, draws on previously unreleased archival material to promote a different version of the story: one featuring Song’s repeated revising of his own faith testimony. Ireland makes the case that Song’s continual reinvention of himself corresponded to the cultural movement in twentieth-century China centered on renewal on both the national and individual levels.The introduction, subtitled “The Quest to Become New,” features the May Fourth Movement, beginning in 1919 and building on the larger New Culture Movement, in which proponents sought to modernize all of China in order to strengthen the nation and overcome vulnerability to foreign oppression. In chapter 1 Ireland reinterprets Song’s sojourn in New York, including at the Bloomingdale Hospital for mental patients. Ireland unveils accounts from Song’s personal journal about intimate spiritual interactions with an all-consuming figure Song called “the Mother,” whose identity apparently combined those of three women accompanying Jesus in the Gospel of Luke: Mary, Jesus’ mother; Mary Magdalene; and Susanna (23). Song’s understanding of the Mother evokes the deities Guanyin and the Queen Mother of the West associated with Chinese Buddhist and indigenous cosmology (34).Ireland asserts in chapter 2 that it was in China, after conversing with missionary W. B. Cole, that Song truly came to view his New York experience as an example of Jesus’s intervention—rather than the Mother’s— and also as a conservative victory in the Fundamentalist–Modernist controversy (37). Ireland claims that Song’s career as an evangelist was characterized by his repeated reinterpretation of his testimony, in addition to his strategy to invite the hundreds of thousands who attended his revivals to likewise sever ties with their past and become new. In chapter 3 Ireland describes Song’s adoption of a three-step revivalist method of preaching through the Bethel Mission, as well as techniques associated with traditional Chinese storytelling (74, 78). Chapters 4 and 5 describe Song’s ministry as an independent, itinerant revivalist, marked by wild popularity and significant expansion among the “petty urbanites” (114–15). Chapter 6 highlights the ways in which Song’s scientific education—including a PhD in chemistry—afforded him leeway to promote a supernatural spirituality which the government deemed superstitious, but which women often found salient (156). Chapter 7 emphasizes Song’s faith healing, an alternative route to the bodily renewal which those longing to become New Men and New Women so fervently sought (202). Due to its expansive reach, the expression of Christianity Song promoted—associated with traveling Bible teachers, supernatural healing, and urban life—remains the prevalent form in China and its Southeast Asian diaspora today (204–5, 207).This book offers a nuanced portrait of Song’s ministry and introduces a fresh perspective on his conversion. In retelling Song’s story, Ireland compellingly highlights the influence of women on Song’s work, including his sister (148); his female supervisors at the Bethel Mission (183–84); Mrs. Guan, a woman from whom Song willingly receives spiritual correction (136); and the many Singaporean women serving on evangelistic bands in response to his invitation (145). Ireland also underscores Song’s penchant for applying feminine imagery to himself and to Jesus (127, 148–49, 201). One question I would raise relates to Ireland’s interpretation of Song’s relationship with the Mother. Ireland asserts that Song eventually came to realize that “it was not her, but Jesus Christ” with whom he had interacted at Bloomingdale (51). Given Song’s account of the Mother as one who revealed to him “the failures of Jesus Christ” (23), however, I find it difficult to imagine Song conflating Jesus and the Mother. In light of Song’s claim that individuals who “invoke the spirits” thereby “become the subject of them” (192), I wonder if Song reinterpreted at least some aspects of his connection to the Mother not as union with Jesus, but with a malevolent spirit. Nevertheless, with its groundbreaking research and captivating style, John Song constitutes an invaluable scholarly contribution. I highly recommend this book to professors of World Christianity and church history, and also to seminary students interested in the development of Chinese Christianity.

Bridging the gap between science and indigenous cosmologies: Rheumatic Heart Disease Champions4Change

Australia has articulated a commitment to eliminate rheumatic heart disease (RHD) by 2031. Business as usual will not achieve this goal. Diverse sectors need to work together in implementing complementary strategies towards this ambitious target. Rheumatic Heart Disease Australia’s ‘Champions4Change’ program is one important element that provides a novel and vital approach. Champions4Change is a culturally safe program of people living with acute rheumatic fever (ARF) and rheumatic heart disease (RHD). The Champions support each other, advocate for ending RHD, design education and awareness programs and inform resource and program development through their lived experiences. New approaches that acknowledge the complex and challenging environments in which ARF/RHD exist are required to eliminate RHD and improve care for those living with ARF/RHD. Approaches taken by the program include local engagement, improved capacity and opportunities for Champions and their communities to make self-determined decisions based on culturally informed information. This paper highlights success stories using culture and locally appropriate approaches to improve community knowledge and awareness of RHD. We describe the rationale, development and purpose of Champions4Change, illustrating how this is far more than a peer-support group, and provides benefits for health services and researchers, as well as empowering community members.

Humans and Non-humans as נפש ח;ה and Ntu-beings: Ecological Appraisal of Gen 2:7 and 19 in Dialogue with African-Bantu Indigenous Cosmology

The Hebrew text of Gen 2:7, 19 describes both humans and animals as nephesh hayya' (living being). However, a large number of contemporary influential Bible translations render this expression differently for humans and animals. It is translated living being for humans (v.7), but living thing/creature for animals (v.19). This is however not justified by any clue in the text, which views humans and non-humans as both adamah-beings and nephesh hayyah. Likewise, African-Bantu cosmology depicts humans and non-humans as ntu-beings (muntu: human being; kintu: non-human being; hantu: place and time; kuntu: means or approach).The root ntu in the word kuntu implies that the way muntu (human being) interacts with other beings (kintu, hantu) must be informed by a vision of nature not as a "thing" but a living being. In addition to elements of socio-historical approaches and African-Bantu indigenous cosmology, this study makes uses of a hermeneutics of suspicion and the Earth Bible principle of mutual custodianship to retrieve ecological wisdom of Gen 2 in the African context.