Epistemology
Seascape epistemology builds oceanic literacies and creates connections where there have been ruptures.
Practices of Resurgence
After over a century of epistemological, ontological, political, economic and geographic colonization by governments in Canada and the United States, Indigenous communities across the Pacific Ocean and around the world are enacting practices of resurgence through the revitalization of their oceanic traditions.
The ocean serves as a site of transportation, source of food, medicine, shelter and migration. In the ocean, people dance, harvest, cleanse, train, play and die. It is full of abundant life. Seascapes connect past, present and futures. As is well known, the ocean brought colonizers, missionaries, merchants and naval ships to the shoreline in their quest for power and dominance across Oceania.
Simultaneously, this oceanic pathway connects humans and sealife to constellations of islands, gathered in an archipelago. The ocean connects a sea of islands and contends with discrete boundaries and disconnection. In these ways, seascape epistemology challenges the primacy of linear, property-centric, landlocked liberal individualism and colonial governmentality.
Seascape community engagement requires a deep relationality with more-than-human sealife.
Any conversation about reconciliation is impossible without significant consideration of a reciprocal relationship with the environment.
Engaging ethically with communities requires more-than-human relations, it also involves connection to ancestors, gods, oceans, rivers, valleys, winds, rains, stars, as animate forces not static objects of analysis. This fluvial orientation to the sea connects humans with the more-than-human world in a reciprocal dance.
Seascapes are emergent, embodied practices of geopolitical mapping that situate the site-specific ways humans connect with their local environments. They move between worlds. Seascapes are sites of vibrant knowledges that are shifting like the tides, moving through diverse theoretical frames, challenging dominant ideological narratives that impose absolute truths. They are prismatic places of change, adaptation, flows, events, ideas, reflections and refractions of light and shadows.
A seascape is a sensuous, flowing way of being-in-the-sea that mobilizes bodies through time and space while anchoring communities to culture in an ever-shifting practice of regeneration and renewal. They connect communities of kinship across coastlines.
Across the Pacific Ocean, communities articulate a deep relationship to sealife.
The ocean is to be considered as not merely an instrumental thing to be commodified but rather as animate, as a life force, with the power to kill and the power to heal. The seascape is a vital matter of life and death. Oceans are places to be feared and revered.
Stories and lived-experiences reveal this in layered ways. Interrogating the settler colonial governmentality of natural resource extraction and management lies at the heart of this research collaboration with the aim of centring relationships. Transcending statist borders, as resistance efforts to extraction initiatives from Standing Rock (US) to Kinder Morgan (Canada) reveal, women’s bodies are uniquely positioned at the frontlines of a movement to protect vital ecosystems.
The seascape epistemology discussed here is a fluid framework, it challenges the ways in which we draw boundaries between bodies and ecosystems, inside and outside, us and them. Instead, it centres relationships and reciprocity. A seascape is not a static plot on a map or simply a geographical referent: it is a relational way of being in the world that invites humans into an emergent and reciprocal dance with more-than-human lifeworlds. Seascapes connect human bodies to their environments in vital ways beyond a technocratic understanding of water. This fluid, relational experience of seascapes requires deep immersion. Seascape epistemology builds oceanic literacies and creates connections where there have been ruptures.
The seascape epistemology discussed here is a fluid framework, it challenges the ways in which we draw boundaries between bodies and ecosystems, inside and outside, us and them. Instead, it centres relationships and reciprocity. A seascape is not a static plot on a map or simply a geographical referent: it is a relational way of being in the world that invites humans into an emergent and reciprocal dance with more-than-human lifeworlds. Seascapes connect human bodies to their environments in vital ways beyond a technocratic understanding of water. This fluid, relational experience of seascapes requires deep immersion. Seascape epistemology builds oceanic literacies and creates connections where there have been ruptures.
This approach to knowing is visual, spiritual, intellectual and embodied.
It does not treat the ocean as a thing or resource; rather, seascape epistemology is a philosophy of knowledge about the interconnected relations between humans and the more-than-human world, connecting human experience to the continuous movement of shifting tides and currents.
Seascape epistemology cannot be mapped absolutely as it is a constantly emergent force. As such, it is a radical way of intervening upon Western ways of thinking and being in the world. Seascape epistemology seeks to turn the tide on settler-colonial liberal governmentality. It interrogates dominant narratives and systems and recenters local lived-experiences and situated knowledges about sealife. It makes coastal communities and intertidal zones vibrant sites of multilayered ecological meaning. Seascape, as a way of knowing and being-in-the-seaworld, is fluid, multiple, complex, affective, sensuous and relational.
Following from this then, turning to the canoe voyage is a natural point of departure for deepening our understanding of this relational approach, informed by Indigenous methodologies and ways of knowing and being-in-the-seaworld.