Kristi Leora Gansworth & Karen Werner

Abstract

The essay blurs boundaries between art and theory and is intended as an experience of profound relationality, explicitly rejecting exclusive adherence to Eurocentric political and economic theories for their failure to have relevance to Indigenous concerns while situated on Indigenous lands. We acknowledge sacred and economic dynamics that inform each of our subjectivities, resisting binaries that are often applied to individuals through imposed categorizations of settler society. Considering perspectives that exist and carry meaning outside the variety of sociopolitical conceptualizations familiar to us, the authors describe and experience the actual treatment of water, finding Indigenous revisions of Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation useful for better understanding how humans can develop a relationship with water and all animate material as living relatives rather than relating to the world as a series of properties or resources in a globally extractive paradigm.

Key Words

Chaudière Falls, Decolonization, Primitive Accumulation, Two Row Wampum, Water

From: Rethinking Marxism 2016 28 (3-4) (Special issue: Marxism and spirituality)

Editor: Wang Yi