Forging a Sustainable Future Together: Conversations in Black-Indigenous Ecological Solidarity

Abstract

Emergent conversations at the intersection of Black and Indigenous studies are reshaping histories of Western empire by gaining more nuanced knowledges about pre-colonial Afro-Indigenous and American Indian worlds, and how the violences of slavery and colonialism upended and transformed American Indian and Afro-Indigenous relationships to land, water, and the more-than-human world. Most importantly for this conversation, these intersections are also concerned with the epistemic traditions that have been submerged or lost in the process of sedimenting the logics and praxes of empire. This themed intervention, centered around Black and Indigenous environmental geographies, brings together two early career scholars whose work on the Texas Gulf Coast and the Pascua Yaqui (Yoeme) and Huichol (Wixáritari) lands (Arizona) to discuss their relationships to and critiques of dominant scientific inquiry, their histories in their respective geographies, and their aspirations for how Black and Indigenous methods can shape future epistemic practices.