Indigenous Ecofeminism? Decolonial Practices and Indigenous Resurgence in Lee Maracle’s Works

• Lucía López-Serrano ^[1]
  1. [1] Universidad de Salamanca

     Universidad de Salamanca

     Salamanca, España

     
• Localización: Canada and Beyond: a Journal of Canadian Literary and Cultural, ISSN-e 2254-1179, Vol. 12, n. 1, 2023 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Everything Is Awful? Ecology and Affect in Literatures in Canada), págs. 85-101
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Ecocritical and ecofeminist studies have frequently borrowed from Indigenous epistem-ologies to conform new approaches to human-nature relations, particularly now that the pressing climate crisis is making western societies contemplate the need for radical solu-tions. As Leanne Betasamosake Simpson remarks, “the western academy is now becom-ing interested in certain aspects of Indigenous Knowledge” such as “Traditional Ecologic-al Knowledge (TEK)” (373). However, the scope of this interest is reduced and disconnects ecological knowledge from decolonial practices, such as land claims or Indigenous fem-inisms.1 Maile Arvin et al. emphatically support that “settler colonialism has been and con-tinues to be a gendered process” (8) and thus its ramifications and effects (upon nature or Indigenous communities) cannot be detangled without an Indigenous feminist perspec-tive. In this article, I focus on an ecocritical analysis of several works by Lee Maracle, who dedicated her career to the regeneration and revalorization of Indigenous systems of knowledge, in order to pinpoint the intersections between feminism, decolonization, and nonhuman ecological thinking that might develop into a potential Indigenous ecofem-inism that truly recognizes Indigenous epistemologies in their full context. Basing myself off Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s theories on Indigenous radical resurgence, which assert that a cultural resurgence (such as a revalorization of Indigen-ous ecological knowledge) cannot take place without a political resurgence (such as the acknowledgement of Indigenous sovereignty), I argue that Maracle’s portrayal of natural elements and her imagining of human-nature relations is inextricably linked to a decol-onizing perspective foregrounded on Indigenous feminism