Alston, Dana. “The Summit: Transforming a Movement.” Race, Poverty & the Environment: The National Journal for Social and Environmental Justice 17.1 (2010):14-17. Web. 2 Aug. 2015

Published in the 20th Anniversary Issue of RP&E, Dana Alston’s article “The Summit: Transforming a Movement” discusses the first National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, held in Washington DC on October 24-27, 1991. Alston’s article provides a useful overview of who attended the summit, the issues addressed, and the resulting conclusions achieved over the four days. Alston is not writing for an academic audience, rather her article attempts to summarize the central concerns of the summit, and give her readers a sense of the import and groundbreaking nature of this meeting. One of the key outcomes of the summit was the drafting of the “17 Principles of Environmental Justice.”  This document lays the blueprint for a national and transnational movement of people of colour who are united in fighting environmental racism, and the destruction of their ancestral lands and their communities.  Another central topic of the summit was the relationship between people of colour and the mainstream environmental movement, which is generally understood as largely white and upper-middle class. The summit concluded with a re-imagined vision of the partnership between people of colour and the mainstream environmental movement, one which is founded on equity and respect, rather than paternalism. In terms of our research intentions, Alston’s article helps us to situate our discussions of eco-criticism and de-colonial studies within the history of the North American environmental justice movement. The drafting of the 17 principles of Environmental Justice can be understood as a key moment in the environmental justice movement. Understanding this document’s import within the greater trajectory of the movement will help us think through the ways cultural theory intersects with political activism and social justice initiatives.

Connell, Robert. “National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit.” Green Culture: An A-to-Z Guide. Ed. Kevin Wehr. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc., 2011. 601-06. SAGE Knowledge. Web. 10 Aug. 2105.

“Principles of Environmental Justice.” Environmental Justice/ Environmental Racism. ejnet.org. Web. 10 Aug. 2015.

Mitchell, Kaitlyn. “Environmental Racism Remains a Reality in Canada.” Huffington Post Canada, July 5, 2015. Web. 10 Aug. 2015.

Mock, Brentin. “Are there two different versions of environmentalism, one “white,” one “black”? Grist, July 31, 2014. Web. 10 Aug. 2015

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Borrows, John. “Living between Water and Rocks: First Nations, Environmental Planning and Democracy.” The University of Toronto Law Journal 47.4 (1999): 417-468. Web. 3 Aug 2015.

“Living between Water and Rocks” examines the ways in which First Nations communities are marginalized and denied participation in environmental policy-making in Canada, while suggesting ways in which their participation could be of benefit to all parties. The author, John Borrows, is a Law and Justice professor and a member of the Nawash First Nation, and his paper focuses on a proposed development on his part of their reserve, Hay Island. The paper was written in 1999; the development has since gone through. He goes into depth into the ways First Nations people are excluded from the process; for instance, the archaic Indian Act which gives the Minister of Indian Affairs authority over First Nations communities, and creating policies that affect the way First Nations culture can be expressed. To illustrate this, Borrows mentions that the development on Hay Island risked coming into contact with ancient burial grounds. The tribe was asked to locate them for the developer, but doing so would have them labelled “unofficial Indian cemetery” under the Cemetery Act and have them destroyed. This paper is of interest to us because it does not just identify these problems, it proposes solutions, and these that are nicely in line with our goals of finding intersections between different peoples, environmental policy and culture. Borrows believes that Indigenous people, and the environment itself, “exist just beyond the borders of the North American legal imagination” – they are “cast in the role of passive objects” and not engaged. He believes these communities should be directly engaged in issues surrounding their environments, and that the knowledge held by these tribes could help governments come to mutually beneficial agreements. Additionally, he writes that Native conflict resolution is tied to the knowledge of elders, often in the form of stories that have been passed on since long before Canada was a nation. He shares two of these stories, both about how unchecked use of resources lead to the character’s demise, to show how Native forms of knowledge could be applicable in the modern setting of environmental justice law.

Borrows, John. “Indigenous Stories: John Borrows, Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota & Author.” Simon Fraser University. May 27, 2012. Web.

Lousley, Cheryl. “‘Hosanna Da, Our Home on Natives’ Land’: Environmental Justice and Democracy in Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water.” Essays on Canadian Writing 81 (2004): 17-44. Web. 25 July 2015.

In this article, Cheryl Lousley argues that King uses historical allusions to show how an “ethic of management and control” has been used by the establishment of national elites and the government to assert mastery over both Indigenous peoples and ecologies. With these historical allusion, King is showing us the disconcerting continuance of Canada’s discriminatory past into the present. It is important to note that while Lousley links the Native characters of the book (specifically Eli) with an environmentalist position, they are not “closer to nature” in the sense of being less evolved intellectually. Essentially, Lousley uses Jane Flick’s methods of tracking down references to expand understanding of the text, but she focuses specifically on environmental and colonial threads. A lot of time is spent examining the colonial rhetoric of waste or emptiness as applied to the land whereby justifying both the extirpation of Native populations and the anthropocentric appropriation of the land. Lousley even points out that, as more overtly discriminatory methods have become less prevalent, governments and corporations have mobilized their attacks on Native land rights via dams using the façade of science as justification; Sifton paints himself as a detached clinician, just another cog in a larger machine doing nothing more malicious than his duty commands (28). Still, bureaucrats exercise this kind of rhetoric to avoid personal responsibility in new constructions like the Site C dam.

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Mascarenhas, Michael. “Where the Waters Divide: First Nations, Tainted Water and Environmental Justice in Canada.” Local Environment: The International Journal of Justice and Sustainability 12.6 (2007): 565-577. Taylor & Francis Online. Web. 27 July 2015.

Written by Michael Mascarenhas, a sociologist who focuses on post-colonialism and environmental justice, this paper argues neo-Liberal environmental policies allow for the systematic marginalization of First Nations people. Companies are allowed to buy up cheap land and dump toxic waste into the surrounding environment, such as in Sarnia, Ontario, and marginalized, ghettoized First Nations reserves disproportionately find their natural resources compromised. Of note to our assignment is the way the article treats ecological injustice and post-colonialism as one and the same. The paper is especially interested in the effect this has on culture; First Nations are interviewed about the role that water plays in their belief system and cultural practices such as fishing, and the way that is compromised by tainted water supplies. The paper also focuses on the ensuing legal battles, which generally rely on the “expert testimony” of white scientists, denying the tribes a voice.

“Michael Mascarenhas: Associate Professor.” Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Accessed July 31, 2015. Web.

Shah, Anup. “A Primer on Neoliberalism.” Global Issues. Aug 22, 2010. Web.

McGuire, Patrick. “The Chemical Valley.” IdleNoMore. Aug 13, 2013. Web.

“Abolish the Indian Act.” EarthSharing Canada. Accessed July 30, 2015. Web.

Blackstock, Michael. “Water: A First Nations’ spiritual and ecological perspective.” B.C Journal of Ecosystems and Management 1.1 (2001): Web.

Joseph, Bob. “First Nations and Salmon Fisheries.” Working Effectively with Aboriginal Peoples Blog. Mar 11, 2014. Web.

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Mason, Travis V., Lisa Szabo-Jones, and Elzette Steenkamp. “Introduction to Postcolonial Ecocriticism Among Settler-Colonial Nations.” A Review of International English Literature 44.4 (2013): 1-11. Print.

This article by Mason, Szabo-Jones, and Steenkamp provides an introduction to the literary body of postcolonial ecocriticism among “settler nations”, which are defined by the authors as “regions [which have] tended to be considered together as ‘white settler colonies’ with shared histories as Commonwealth nations…and provide a basis from which to begin considering the heterogenous ways in which settler colonials in Canada, Australia and South Africa positioned themselves vis-à-vis Indigenous communities” (Mason, Szabo-Jones, and Steenkamp 3). Using O’Brien’s work as a basis for their introduction, the authors go through various ecocritical theories and writers, and provide a general overview of the various forms present in the “emerging field of postcolonial ecocriticism” (3). In addition to discussing literary works and ecocritical scholars, Mason, Szabo-Jones and Steenkamp also discuss “ongoing non-literary events that urge critical reflection informed by both postcolonial and ecocritical theory” (2), such as the 2012 Marikana miner’s strike in South Africa and the ongoing fight against fracking by First Nations peoples in Canada. Through their exploration of these non-literary events, the authors are able to broaden the scope of ecocriticism and make it a relevant item of discourse outside of academia.

Davies, Nick. “Marikana Massacre: The Untold Story of the Strike Leader Who Died for Workers’ Rights.” The Guardian 19 May 2015, US ed., The Long Read sec. The Guardian. Web. 9 Aug. 2015.

Walberg, Eric. “Canada Anti-Fracking Protests: First Nations Confront Harper Government.” Global Research. Centre for Research on Globalization, 21 Oct. 2013. Web. 9 Aug. 2015.

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Mcvey, J.A. and J.W. Windsor. “Annihilation of Both Place and Sense of Place: The Experience of the Cheslatta T’En Canadian First Nation within the Context of Large-Scale Environmental Projects”. The Geographical Journal 171. 2 (2005): 146-165. Web. 29 Jul. 2015.

O’Brien starts her intervention by stating that her status as outsider from the field of Canadian literary studies grants her a better view of what the discipline lacks, and Windsor and Mcvey’s 2005 article “Annihilation of Both Place and Sense of Place: The Experience of the Cheslatta T’En Canadian First Nation within the Context of Large-Scale Environmental Projects” presupposes her intervention. Published in The Geographical Journal, Windsor and Mcvey make the argument that place and identity are intimately connected and by severing the connection between people and land (especially if they depend upon that land for their livelihood) you potentially erase that culture’s way of constructing meaning. This is a case study surrounding the abrupt displacement of the Cheslatta T’en of Northern B.C. as a result of the Kemano hydroelectric dam and the unanimously adverse effects it had on their population. The Canadian government courted big industrial investments (in this case, Alcan aluminum) to promote economic growth, but devastated land and Indigenous cultures simultaneously.  Windsor and Mcvey make the distinction between “space” (land mass and nothing more) and “place” as being “a centre of human meaning, intention, and values. It becomes the focus of human emotion, sentiment, attachment and experience” (147). In this sense, stories invested with human emotion and experience forge the connection that transforms space into place.  It also focuses on the convergence of two conflicting ways of life, two narratives accompanied by different sets of rules; the Cheslatta were self sufficient as a hunting and gathering people prior to the flooding, but subsequent to their displacement, their methods for survival were subject to inhospitable laws. Opening the lines of dialogue between post-colonial studies and ecocritical studies through a greater focus on issues concerning First Nations’ land will help to mitigate tragic stories like this moving forward.

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Reed, T.V. “Toxic colonialism, environmental justice, and Native resistance in Silko’s Almanac of the Dead.” MELUS 34.2 (2009): 25+. Literature Resource Center. Web. 2 Aug. 2015

T.V. Reed’s article, “Toxic colonialism, environmental justice, and Native resistance in Silko’s Almanac of the Dead”, conducts a critical analysis of Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Almanac of the Dead. Reed’s central premise is that Silko’s text positions itself at the intersection between post-colonial, or “decolonial,” theory and eco-criticism. Reed uses the term “decolonial environmental justice cultural studies” to describe an emerging body of criticism which fuses eco-critical practices, post-colonial studies, and social justice activism. Reed argues that it is not only possible to read Silko’s text through the lens of “environmental justice cultural criticism”,  but rather that Silko’s text is already doing “environmental justice cultural criticism”, even before a name had been given to this field of criticism. Reed traces the development of the Environmental justice movement in the US, which links social justice concerns with those of environmentalism. In terms of our research aims, Reed’s article is instructive in multiple ways. Firstly, Reed’s notion of “environmental justice cultural criticism” provides us with a potential model for envisioning a cultural criticism that links post-colonialism and eco-criticism. Secondly, his application of this critical framework to Silko’s novel helps us potentially apply a similar framework to some of the texts that we have read this term, (I am thinking namely of King’s Green Grass Running Water, seeing as there seems to be some stylistic and thematic features in common between GGRW and Silko’s Almanac). Thirdly, Reed’s description of Silko as a “cultural worker-activist,” in both her fiction and her non-fiction, helps us to think through the intersections between politics and literary achievement.

Reed, T.V. “Biography.” Washington Sate University: Department of English. Web. 10 Aug. 2015

Silverblatt, Michael. “Leslie Marmon Silko: The Almanac of the Dead.” KCRW. April 13, 1992. Podcast.

“Leslie Marmon Silko: Biography.” Poetry Foundation. Web. 10 Aug. 2015.

Rempel, Julie. “Environmental Justice in Canada: An Interview with Dr. Michael Buzzelli.” The Centre for Environmental Health Equity. Web. 10 Aug. 2015.