Geography, Decolonization and Inspiration

I imagine I’ll come up for air sometime soon. It is week nine of eleven of the quarter, which means that the pressure is on…Grading, squeezing in student meetings, reading and planning for class, trying to fit everything in before the end of the quarter, and so on. This quarter, things are intensified by the fact that we have sweet Saoirse who is settling into life with the pack. I try not to leave the house for more than a few hours at a time, so after I teach, it’s a race to get back home before she has an accident in the house. These next few weeks are, in some ways, about treading water…making sure I’m there for any students who need me, being attentive to Saoirse and the other animals with whom we share our home, planning and hosting a vegan Thanksgiving, and generally hanging on until the end of the quarter. But I’m also trying to enjoy each moment. The teaching is wonderful and I love to learn from the students new ways of thinking about the material. Some of the students suggested that we have a vegan potluck so that everyone can taste some vegan food and learn about veganism. So next week, everyone is going to bring vegan food and we are going to get together for a meal—I think it should be a lot of fun!

I went to Vancouver this past weekend for the annual Cascadia Critical Geographies mini-conference. Last year, it was discussed that calling this region Cascadia is a new form of colonization—a claiming of the territory as an economic trade zone that further denies the indigenous claims to land and the region. In the spirit of the conference, I tried to think carefully about the ways in which my work relates to colonization/decolonization without trying to force a connection. Many animals were originally colonized and domesticated alongside land and indigenous peoples. These animals were then selectively bred and over time constructed as commodity producers who became more and more efficient at this role. These animals were then used in other colonization projects as tools of colonization. As land was violently appropriated by colonial settlers from the indigenous groups living on the land, agriculture became a way of physically claiming space and transforming the land. The cow was a key figure in claiming this land (the near extinction of the bison, after all, was caused by colonial settlers slaughtering bison to make room for cows on the land). But in addition to the ways in which animals were and are used as tools/weapons of colonization, they were and are also colonized themselves. My talk for the conference was on this theme and this was the first time I was thinking about the cow in dairy production in this light.

The title of the talk is “Re-placing the ‘Dairy Cow’/De-colonizing the (Animal) Body” and you can listen to a recording here:

Replacing the Dairy Cow Talk November 2012

This conference was thought-provoking and exciting and reinvigorated my interest in Geography in a lot of ways. I got some really productive feedback for thinking about these issues moving forward and I’m always so grateful for questions, disagreements, and provocative conversation. Much of this was due to my getting to spend time with Rosemary, an amazing graduate student at UBC who is writing her dissertation on the exotic animal trade and animals in the film industry in Hollywood North (Vancouver). I’ve known Rosemary for a few years, we’ve chatted over email and organized conference sessions together a couple of times now. But it wasn’t until this weekend that we actually got to sit down and talk for hours about our work and interests. What we discovered was that our projects are quite similar. We’ve both used the auctionyard as a site of research and a way to gain access to otherwise shut-off worlds. We are both thinking about the commodification of animals in these spaces. Our theoretical framings overlap quite a bit. In these and many other ways our work is very similar. And yet, the specificities of our work that make each project unique and different complement each other so well. Her work touches on issues of captivity and captive breeding and what being captive means for the animal; mine explores domestication and selective breeding. Rosemary’s subject is about the extraordinary, the ‘exotic’ animal—the captive parrot, flying squirrel, camel, etc. My work is about the ordinary, the mundane, the everyday animal—the cow. Talking with Rosemary was inspiring and thought-provoking and it made us both want to sit down and write our dissertations! I realized as we were talking just how starved for this kind of exchange I was. I am really lucky (and grateful!) to have so many family and friends who are interested in the work I am doing and who talk with me for long hours about it and provide amazing insight and unique perspectives. But there’s also something really special about talking to another geographer who is reading many of the same texts, engaging with the same ideas in her work, fighting the same struggle to make a place for this work in geography.

And so I returned to Seattle ready to write my dissertation and other writing projects and eager to continue these invigorating conversations. But first, to finish up this quarter of teaching with this glorious group of students!

Follow