“Don’t bother the earth spirit […] she is working on a story”: Indigenous Perspectives on Human-Land Relations

This chapter takes as its starting point the poem “Don’t bother the earth spirit” by ecofeminist author Joy Harjo (Muscogee Creek) to highlight how, for Indigenous epistemologies, land, storytelling and humans are profoundly entangled. Human relationships with the natural world are dominant topics in today’s discourses of environmental sustainability, environmental justice, and climate change, discourses that tend to be dominated by Western perspectives and that leave Indigenous voices at the margins, especially at the time of political decision-making. Whilst acknowledging that there have been important scholarly efforts to challenge mainstream, Western environmentalism and to promote a dialogue between postcolonial and ecocritical criticism, this chapter calls for the urgent need to move beyond the concept of “postcolonial” ecocriticism in order to encompass the histories and land-based knowledge systems of Indigenous communities from around the world, communities who are still suffering from the logics of colonialism and its associated binary thinking human versus nonhuman. This chapter proposes Indigenous storytelling as a research methodology and as a model of decolonial practice that can challenge mainstream, Eurocentric, and anthropocentric understandings of the land, while simultaneously foregrounding Indigenous kinship values in order to offer a pathway towards stewardship and sustainability. Acting as an introductory section to Indigenous Storytelling and Connections to the Land, this chapter also provides an overview of the essays included in the volume, alongside a critical reflection on the importance for the outsider, non-Indigenous academic to position themselves with reference to Indigenous critical studies.