Afterword: Wisdom Still Sits in Places: Relationality, Ecology, Story

Introducing anthropologist Keith Basso to the concept of ‘igoya’i, Dudley, an Apache informant, asserts: “Wisdom sits in places. It’s like water that never dries up. You need to drink water to stay alive, don’t you? Well, you also need to drink from places. You must remember everything about them. You must learn their names. You must remember what happened at them long ago. You must think about it and keep on thinking about it. Then your mind will become smoother and smoother. Then you will see danger before it happens” (Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996, p. 70). Ostensibly a study of meaning making—the relationship between land and language; the making of place in space—Basso and his informants’ classic study foregrounds the importance of relation to, and relationality within, place that reverberates in contemporary environmental analysis. Situating this afterword in the context of the long history of analysis of Indigenous relation to place, I will offer commentary on the preceding chapters, paying particular attention to the ways that focus on people-land-story has moved increasingly away from place-making and towards understandings of ecological deep knowledge that have profound implications for the climate crisis today.