Maia Villalba - Land: A Space of Living and Layered Memory
DESCRIPTION:
Land as pedagogy propels us to embody intentional modes of knowledge-making through mother Earth. According to Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Betasomasake Simpson, horizontal learning occurs in context and in a kinetic network of social relations. To embrace a whole-body intelligence is to value a diversity of knowledge: intellectual, emotional, spiritual, and with divine help from plant and animal wisdom. While Western epistemological practices encourage a methodology of extraction, whereby “outright dispossession, the destruction of land through environmental contamination, imposed poverty, heteropatriarchy, and colonial gendered violence” inform human and non-human relationships with Aki, or land, Nishnaabeg intelligence offers an interdependent approach to learning in relation with all living beings (Simpson 159). In a common struggle against a common enemy, we ask ourselves: Who are we and what is our responsibility to others?