AC Discussion | Dr. Zoe Todd
On February 25th, Dr. Zoe Todd joined Corson Androski to talk about her research in human-fish relations and the ways in which thinking across disciplines, and with other species, opens pathways to dismantling the structures of white supremacy, colonial capitalism, and imperialist expansion. Watch the full discussion below and share your thoughts in the comments section to join the conversation.
Transcription
Speaker: Dr. Zoe Todd
Moderator: Corson Androski
Date of Talk: February 25th, 2021
List of Acronyms: ZT =Dr. Zoe Todd; CA = Corson Androski
[CA] Welcome everyone. Before we get started, I just wanted to really quickly mention that Amplify recently hosted a really wonderful conversation on land acknowledgments with Marisa Cummings, Risa Puleo, Steve Tamayo, and Annika Johnson which is online on the Alternate Currents Blog, the same place this talk will be. Take a look at that if you haven't. I wanted to try and keep that conversation going by opening this event with a quick statement that is hopefully working through some of the criticisms raised on that panel. I want to start by recognizing that the land where I'm speaking from, where I live, where my food is grown, where my drinking water is drawn from, is land which several Indigenous nations including the Umónhon, Ponca, Pawnee, Otoe, Missouria, and Ioway were displaced from using illegal coercive treaties and violence. This is also land which, despite these injustices, is still cared for and protected by those peoples, both indigenous residents of our city and residents of reservations upstream from us, care for this land, these waterways and all of their residents very directly. That looks like Water Protectors blocking pipelines which pollute the rivers we drink from; that looks like food sovereignty projects restoring abundant self-determined relations between people and more than human beings. A local example of both would be the planting of Ponca corn in the path of the Keystone XL pipeline, which has been going on yearly for the past six or seven years. I also want to acknowledge that it's very easy for settler institutions and individuals like myself to use Indigenous ideas and aesthetics for our own personal gain without respect or reciprocity. So, I want to explicitly frame all this information not as a way to absolve myself or even as a way of expressing gratitude, but [instead] recognize my responsibility to be a better relation to those around me and support Indigenous sovereignty including the rematriation of land and cultural materials.
With all of that said, I want to introduce Dr. Zoe S. Todd, who I feel we are extremely fortunate to be hearing from tonight. [Dr. Todd] is an artist and a professor whose work focuses on Indigenous Ecological Knowledge, specifically Métis legal traditions and philosophy centering on fish and the watershed. I also want to introduce Zoe as someone who does all this work with what I think is a truly special care for the ethics of citation and pluralist relations as someone who is thinking and practicing ethical ways of coalition building and exchanging knowledge across difference. Zoe should also be introduced as the one largely responsible for the existence of this exhibition [Alluvium], as it's very heavily based on a teaching exercise which she developed. While I get a few images ready for us to look at, Zoe would you mind explaining what that exercise originally looked like and what role it played in your curriculum, it’s significance?
[ZT] Thank you, Corson. It's such an honor to be here tonight. I will properly introduce myself in my own language so that you can gage my set of ethical relations as well, but [first] to give the audience a sense of this really cool exhibit that you've put together, a few years ago when I started teaching at Carleton University in Ottawa, I didn't even have my PhD yet. I didn't really know what I was doing, but I had done many years of experiential learning in Alberta with model UN camps and also global education programming at the University of Alberta and we did a lot of immersive activities. So, one day I was at a loss for how I could encourage students to engage with the watersheds that the university is in and so the night before I said, “Well, I have a ton of Post-It notes and I'm going to take them into class tomorrow with some Crayola markers and I'm going to ask everyone to take the Post-It notes, think of three bodies of water that were very dear to them for one reason or another, and then tell them which way was north in the classroom to sort of orient where the class was in relation to the rest of the city, and then to populate the walls around the classroom with the names of these bodies of water. Then, we did a follow-up exercise where people who felt like it, we didn't pressure anyone, but anyone who wanted to share could share stories about why those bodies of water mattered to them. It was kind of beautiful because the whole room was transformed with these blue Post-It notes. I also included information including a quote from a talk that Caitlin Tolley gave. She's a former counselor for Kitigan Zibi, which is an Algonquin First Nation north of where Carlton is situated in Ottawa, in unceded Algonquin territory. So, I was using it as a way to situate the class within the watersheds that the university occupies and get students thinking about the spatiality of the campus and also the connectedness to these broader watery relationships and how Indigenous homelands map onto watersheds so that state borders actually become kind of irrelevant. Water is fluid and moves and it moves people and ideas and fish and all sorts of things. So, it was a hit and I've used it ever since in almost every class.
When I decided to put my materials online in the fall, I decided to include it with the request that if people used it, they credit it back to me. Then I got this wonderful email from you asking if you could use it and I was, “Oh my gosh, it's so much cooler.” The Post-It notes are cool, but what you were able to do with it, just took it to this whole other level. I’m really really honored that you've included this in the gallery. So, thank you.
[CA] Thank you so much. That really means the world to hear. I'll pull up a couple images for people who haven't seen [the exhibition] themselves. Can everyone see that? Okay, perfect. So, we had the idea of adapting this exercise to live in an art gallery and adding this visual component. This was a project that involved many people besides myself, including Allis Conley, Sarah Rowe, Amplify’s 2020 Alternate Currents Working Group, as well as of course the dozens of visitors who participated and added to the exhibition. The visual component we added that you see here is a map of the watershed positioned so that when you stand in the middle of the floor, you're standing at the gallery's location and everything you see around you is directionally accurate, like the notes were in the original exercise. So, for example, on the east wall you see the Missouri River down there in the same way that it's just a few blocks east of the gallery. Also like in the original exercise, all visitors were invited to share their own experiences and connections with the watershed to be added to the walls and floors on notes.
When we were adapting these notes, we also broadened the prompt a little bit. We asked people to not just think about places that were really important to them, but also think about places that they were concerned about or mourning, even local instances of environmental injustice. Because these are usually long conversations and long stories that come out of these visits, they don't entirely fit on any of these cards and so the job of the facilitators in the gallery to remember that knowledge, and share with other visitors, became really, really crucial to the show building up this web of relationships between people and the more-than-human environment. At Sarah Rowe’s suggestion, we have also been adding cards with the indigenous place names of local water features, mostly Umónhon and Ponca but also Pawnee. We found some really rich connections between the histories and literal translations of these place names, and the experiences that have been brought in by visitors. Now that we have all that background information out of the way, I want to uh pass things over to Zoe for the talk that she's prepared and also quickly say that during this talk you can submit questions down at the bottom and, if we have time, we'll get to them at the end. I'll pass things off to Zoe. Thank you.
[ZT] Thank you so much Corson and Allis and Sarah and Peter and everyone who's participated to make that possible. That is so beautiful and it's so cool to see how that could happen mediated through the internet, you know? One of the great fears I had when moving my teaching online was that I would lose the immersive aspects of how I was trying to teach responsibilities to water and fish and watersheds. When we lose the ability to go visit the river physically in class, it's amazing to get to see how you've taken that and built this whole other way of immersing people into their watery relationships.
Tansi! Zoe Nitisiyihkason . Nia otipemisiw iskwew. Ekwa maga Qualicum Snaw-naw-as ni-wiigen. Kinanaskomitin’awaw. Marsii kahkiyaw niwahkômakanak.
My name is Zoe. I'm a Métis woman from Alberta. I grew up in Edmonton. My family has ties to St-Paul-des-Métis settlement and also to Saskatchewan, the Fort Pitt and North Battleford areas, and also St. James Parish and the Red River Métis homeland, which is also on Anishinaabe territory in what is currently known as Winnipeg. So, I am a Métis woman, but I also have settler ancestors. My mom is a settler, and my dad is Métis, but his mom is also white, so I have responsibilities and obligations both to my Indigenous ancestors, but also to rectify the harms that my settler ancestors have wrought collectively on the homelands that we engage with here in what is currently known as Canada.
I'm just really honored to be here today because I love the play that is really obvious in this exhibit. When Corson reached out, I was really touched that someone would take a classroom exercise and then turn it into this beautiful immersive activity. It's very much in line with the kind of knowledge mobilization work that a team I work with at the university, not the University of Alberta (that's where I did two of my degrees), but um at Carleton University. We have a team called Fluid Boundaries and we had developed an immersive proposal that was shortlisted--it was one of the potential teams to represent Canada at the 2020 Venice Biennale. We weren't the ones that were chosen, but I think that what we developed was a really beautiful immersive space that was meant to bring visitors into the space as if they were a fish to experience a refraction of their world through this immersive, watery environment and think about their collective responsibilities to fish.
So, I'm just going to chat at you for 30 minutes about fish and art and science and how those have come together in my work. Then, I will try very hard to leave time at the end for questions so that we can have a bit more of a collective engagement. I wanted to share with you some of the work that I've been doing.
My first degree is in biological sciences. I have a degree in biology. I started that really with the hopes of actually becoming a doctor, a medical doctor, but I actually am scared of blood and it became very clear that I couldn't go into medicine. So, then I was looking for other ways to enact my responsibilities to community and found my way eventually into environmental anthropology. My work today really focuses on collective responsibilities to fish as non-human persons, or can, depending on your positionality in freshwater locales in Alberta, where I grew up.
You may know of Alberta as a western province in Canada that relies very heavily on oil and gas extraction and other forms of non-renewable resources. Fish have faced a lot of very deleterious consequences because of these heavy settler extractive economies in Alberta. I was really lucky to grow up in a family where my settler mom was an environmental journalist. She was one of the first people in the province to take on the environmental beat in the late 80’s, early 90’s. That connected her with some really interesting scientists--environmentalists, naturalist ecologists--who are working to protect watersheds in Alberta. My Métis dad, he is an artist and he's also a boat builder. He builds, to this day still, builds boats by hand so he can go out on lakes in and around western Canada. My stepdad, Wayne Roberts, who passed away three years ago was a zoologist with a specific interest in fish, amphibians, and reptiles with a deep passion for protecting wetlands and freshwater fish, explicitly in Alberta. The three of them have really deeply shaped my passion for fish.
So, I'm a quote-unquote “failed scientist.” I didn't find a very welcoming space to study science in the early 2000’s as a Métis person, but what I did get to do in the end was work with more iterative approaches to understanding how fish weave their way into people's worlds, both indigenous and non-indigenous back home. I had the incredible privilege to work with uh fishermen in the community of Paulatuk in the Northwest Territories over a number of years doing two different projects with the community that really brought me into a much richer understanding of the role of in fish in Indigenous Law and also the foundational importance of Indigenous Legal Orders, in what is currently known as Canada, in protecting fish.
In that sense, Indigenous Cosmologies, Philosophies, Legal Orders in what is currently known as Canada, which are very diverse across First Nations Inuit and Métis communities, [share] something that is pretty central and certain [in that] every part of Canada is a fish place. Fish are present in every part of the country and every Indigenous nation or society in the country has a specific understanding of how fish play into their governance. So, I'm really interested in helping settlers to understand that fish are more than just species who cohabit with us, but that they are actually integral political actors in shaping the country as we know it. When we are approaching questions of water conservation or fish conservation, we're not just looking at fish as a species that happens to be impacted by human behaviors, but actually that fish are integral to the very existence of the country. Fish came long before us. If we do our job properly as good relations, fish will exist long after us. Fish have been around for roughly 500 million years on the planet and have survived multiple mass extinctions.
Leroy Little Bear, who is a Blackfoot and Kainai scholar, an eminent scholar in southwest Alberta, at various points in different talks that he has given over the years, he has talked about the fish and the importance of fish as teachers to humans. To paraphrase something that he has said in the past and he said explicitly in a talk that he gave in 2016 at the Congress of Humanities in Calgary, he said, think about it--the fish have been around long before the Neanderthals, long before the dinosaurs I wonder what scientific formula the fish have. We should ask them.
So, in my work, I'm really trying to take his question to heart. What do the fish have to teach us? This is something that is best approached interdisciplinary, transdisciplinarily, and multidisciplinarily. So, I work with a team of really fascinating people [Freshwater Fish Futures]. Collectively, we bring together as many different methods and approaches as we can to try and understand what the fish have to show us and how to be better relations in places that we are today. Obviously, we're building out from relationships in Alberta. We're not trying to say that people elsewhere have to do what we do within Indigenous and non-Indigenous cosmologies in Alberta, but rather that we're looking for all the different ways that fish can act as the glue to a lot of different societies. If fish are doing well, then a whole bunch of other things are doing well, but if fish are not doing okay, considering the fact that they've survived 500 million years on the planet but are barely surviving white supremacist colonial capitalist extractive paradigms, there's something there. It's very urgent for us to figure out how to do things differently. I hope this is making sense.
As a quote-unquote “failed scientist” who still has a deep passion for trying to understand what the fish have to teach us, one thing that I turned to when trying to communicate fish ideas to the public, was drawing fish. My dad is an artist. I'm not a trained artist so everything I'm doing is figuring it out as I go, but my dad does have a formal BFA, Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Alberta, which he got when I was a little girl. He taught me some of the very basics of how to draw, color theory, things like that and a little bit of art history as well. So, it was a really natural progression to go from writing about fish, thinking about fish, listening to fish stories, trying to understand fish through time on the land with knowledge keepers and experts, to then drawing fish, especially when I've had to spend most of the last decade outside of Alberta, out of the watersheds that I grew up in and that many generations of my Indigenous ancestors have been tending to. So, I started drawing fish in 2016, well actually, the fall of 2015 and have never looked back.
This is one that I drew in response to sort of white supremacist actions in the US, but we also have really problematic and terrifying white supremacist movements in Canada as well. One thing that I think about is, in that 500 million years that fish have existed on the planet, they have never once fomented fascism. They definitely are anti-fascist. I've explicitly stated that through this walleye here. [I’m thinking about how to get] people to think about what the fish have to tell us. One thing I found is that almost everyone has a fish story. Whether you grew up fishing or not, you know fish have played some kind of role in your life. Whether it's eating fish, or not liking fish, or encountering fish in an aquarium, there are so many different ways that we can come to engage with fish. You don't have to be like the epitome of the western environmentalist who spends all their time out in the woods hiking to be an expert on fish. Everybody has some kind of entanglement with them and what I'm really interested in is how can those fish stories help us reorient collective societies, collective and plural societies, and what can we learn from one another across these fish stories.
It's really interesting to think about how through my work in Indigenous communities, certain fish are very valuable in one community, but then might have a different role in another. That speaks to specific relationships and responsibilities that a community might have with fish and so it's at the intersection of those pluralities of stories that we really start to kind of build different ways of organizing society, if that makes sense. What do sturgeon mean to the city of Edmonton? What do whitefish mean to the city of Calgary? what does it mean in Toronto for the salmon to return? These are all really important questions and they're actually really big questions because if you just take the fish as sort of a beginning point, all these other relationships come with them. That's another reason I really enjoy working with fish and thinking alongside them. It's because they are very captivating. One thing I really wish is that more people would be able to spend time with fish in watersheds. The better job we do of protecting and restoring watersheds, the more people have opportunities to come to know the fish who might have been extirpated or heavily impacted by urban development, or pollution, or resource extraction, or pipelines in a given place.
This is a shortjaw cisco. It's not heavily prevalent in Alberta, but I really like the character it has. This is a drawing I did recently in the fall. Also, through the work I've been doing with the collective that I work with, we've also been doing a lot of playing with layering images and temporalities and doing short animations to kind of think through what my colleague and friend AM Kanngieser called, “attunement to place,” or learning to listen and listening in a way that calls upon settler colonizers, people who may have a fraught relationship to a place that has been dominated through violence and genocide, to really consider what we are being called to do to be in better ethical relationality to place, not in a way that replicates or appropriates from Indigenous peoples or First Peoples, but instead [acknowledges] there's a limit to what I am supposed to know, but I still have responsibilities to place and to more than human beings that require I carry myself in a way that is attentive, that is thoughtful, and that is conscious of the impact I have in place. Given that I live outside of my traditional homelands, I think a lot about what my responsibilities are to Algonquin people in Ottawa and how I can be in better relation, given that they're continuing to fight genocidal incursions into their lands.
I've been playing with a lot of drawings and layerings and through that, thinking through how I can be in better relation. I know it's fairly ephemeral, and it's very different from the scientific work I set out to do 20 years ago, but we see this as part of what our team is calling a “fish restor(y)ing methodology.” We draw on restoring from the work of Cutcha Risling Baldy, who has a really beautiful piece called “Coyote is not a metaphor,” which looks at the deep philosophical teachings carried in Indigenous stories and how these are really important tools of engagement for thinking the of world not only in the way that anthropologists imagine an Indigenous way of knowing, but in a way that is constantly renewed and engaged with and played with and ultimately upholds collective responsibilities of being in place. So, I've been playing with imagery that draws attention to very minute details in the environment to sort of think through what I could be missing when I'm caught up in sort of the human drama, of my existence, and the things that I get caught up in through being an academic. Sometimes you can rush through the world and forget that there are very specific, explicit things being communicated to us in the places that we are.
This is me playing with an image of ice that I took from the gravel driveway outside my little house. I don't know that I have a really central message to share for this talk, other than it’s really exciting to see people engaging with an immersive, attentive relationship to place and taking the time to think about where we are situated, how did we get there, and what urgencies emerge from those considerations. When we're standing in lands in Canada or the US, we're being called to pay attention to histories of anti-Black racism that have been brutally executed across the country that continue to this day. We're thinking about violations and dispossession of Indigenous peoples, nations, and societies. We're thinking about the ways that non-human persons, more-than-human beings--fish, plants, rocks, other beings--are violated in the name of economic growth, economic development, imperialism, military incursions into other nations around earth. So, I do hope that it comes through in the work that my team and I are doing, maybe not in these drawings that are shared today, other than the the anti-fascist walleye, and also that this isn't a disconnected kind of ecological romanticism. It's a very urgent, explicit call for all of us to interrogate what the fish can teach us about how to be in better relation in the places that we are, precisely because our continued flourishing and existence requires it. When Leroy Little Bear calls upon us to think about the dinosaurs, think about fish, it's a very explicit political call to really think through what is required, and what relationships are required, to live here well and what needs to be dismantled.
So explicitly, when I think with fish, I think about how in Alberta, Lorne Fitch, who is a retired biologist, a fisheries biologist, who's done an immense amount of really important work in the province, published a piece a few years ago looking at how almost every fishery and every fish population in Alberta essentially is in crisis. We also know from the Living Planet Report in 2016, and other subsequent studies before and after, that freshwater fish also are explicitly understudied in Canada. They're like an out-of-sight, out-of-mind entity. That puts them at extreme risk. But if we reorient ourselves, or we return to the fish, then that calls us into these different sets of relations that ask if the fish aren't doing well, it's because cities have expanded in ways that are unsustainable. We haven't built with them in mind. In Alberta at the moment, the provincial government tried to remove really stringent protections that were put in place in the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains that had prevented coal mining, open pit mountaintop removal coal mining, in the Eastern Slopes Category 2 Lands. They quietly rescinded that on a Friday of a May long weekend in the pandemic last spring. It was to open these territories, these Indigenous territories, Stoney [Nakoda], Blackfoot, other First Nation territories to incredibly damaging metallurgical coal mining. That is also the headwaters of the rivers that provide drinking water to Edmonton, Red Deer, and other major Albertan cities and provinces downstream.
What's kind of cool that has emerged from that is that fish have played a really important part in the resistance. Paul Brandt, who is a very prominent, popular country singer, spoke out with an image of him fly fishing in the region and said that this can't happen. Corb Lund who's a very popular at-country musician, was one of the people that took this up publicly and stood up against the provincial government for this. And then people were sharing their fishing stories and images of fishing and hiking and other things to really underscore why it was so important not to open this region up to this really unnecessary and violent resource extraction. The good news is that I have never seen Albertans united on anything in my entire life. I'm 38 years old. But Albertans are one hundred percent almost, well, there are people who still support it, but it's a very vehement opposition. So, the province actually had to withstand quite a bit of what it had put in place. There's still pressure because it is Australian coal mining companies that are trying to push this through.
So my team and I, we have a project. We're calling ourselves the Institute for Freshwater Fish Futures. We say that we're restor(y)ing fish futures together. We have several projects that we are currently working on collaboratively. One is a project with the Stoney Nakoda nations in southwest Alberta looking at bull trout and cutthroat trout. We're also bringing in interviews with scientists to understand the work that they've done on fisheries conservation in the province over the last several decades. Our goal there is to really encourage scientists to understand the role of Indigenous Law in protecting fish. Explicitly this isn't about science and Indigenous knowledge--it's kind of existing out there as these two different polar opposites--but more that Indigenous people have laws that go back to time immemorial that center fish as non-human persons with political agency who have their own nations. In some cases, some Indigenous nations view fish as having treaties and other really robust political formations that delimit their presences in different watersheds. Our work through restor(y)ing fish is to really encourage scientists to understand that they're working at the plurality, the intersection of plural Indigenous Legal Orders and also that they have to explicitly take an anti-racist approach, and an environmental justice approach, and really understand how environmental racism plays out in places like Alberta.
We're trying to encourage this work in a collaborative spirit. We're working with really exciting people. So, Corson and Allis and Sarah and Peter, I'm so honored to get to share a little bit with you today and for the space that you've created through that beautiful exhibit. I hope this is the beginning of maybe some other collaborations. We would be really lucky to get to work with you in the future. I think that I've probably taken up all my time, and I really do want to make sure that the question period is open, so thank you for listening. I hope that made sense. I'm always delighted to talk about fish and stories and law and art and our collective responsibilities to different freshwater fish. Oh, and I work with a team, just to make sure I recognize our team. I work with a really beautiful team made up of scholars and activists in Canada, the US, Australia, the Pacific, and Borneo. We're building several concurrent projects and we're adding different nodes all the time. Do feel free to keep checking back on our work because I feel like we're at the beginning of something really exciting.
[CA] That is wonderful, Zoe. Thank you so much. I can't tell you how exciting it is to hear about your work. I'm so excited to see what that work looks like in the future. It already has been so formative for me in changing my relationship with the watershed locally for the better. I really cannot overstate. I'm going to be processing for years the experiences that people have brought into this exhibition. While we're waiting for questions to come in, I might want to start by asking you about some common features between our watershed, or even similar species, because I know the sturgeon has been really central to your work and thinking about fish time. That work has really helped me think about one of my own favorite fish in our local waterways, the alligator gar. Do you have them up in Alberta as well?
[ZT] I've never seen one, but I have a friend who is a Chickasaw/Choctaw artist and they draw beautiful, um yeah [laughter].
[CA] I have actually never seen one in person either. The way that I connected to those fish, or it could also be articulated as this fish let me know that it was here, was that I found it beneath the perching spot of some fishing bird of prey, I think a bald eagle. I found some of its remains and your work on thinking about how we listen to the fish has kind of opened up a possibility for thinking about even animal remains, and the hunting relationships involved in producing those remains, as a way that fish communicate with us. If you wouldn't mind sharing a little bit more about the sturgeon and ways they might be similar to alligator gar being these old, old fish an entirely separate system of time than us, I would love to hear a little about that.
[ZT] Yeah, I grew up in Edmonton and Edmonton in the 50’s still pumped raw sewage into the North Saskatchewan. North Saskatchewan River, also known as the kisiskâciwanisîpiy, is a water body that forms in the Rocky Mountains and flows through central Alberta and makes its way to Saskatchewan where it joins the Saskatchewan [River] and then continues. I've never actually seen a live sturgeon, but I grew up in this place where they've been incredibly important for a very long time. They're actually part of a Néhiyaw or Cree story cycle, which I feel I can talk about because public versions of it have been shared. Sturgeon are really important in the region, but it's taken a really long time for them to recover from the impact of urban development, raw sewage and then Frank Tough and others have talked about how the fur trade also had a very heavy impact on lake sturgeon, for example. That's what we have in Saskatchewan are lake sturgeon.
I became really captivated with them when I was in Scotland because--I've written about this--there's a theory that actually the Loch Ness Monster is a Baltic sturgeon and just a very big one that has made its way up the River Ness and into Loch Ness and what people have been seeing is actually a lovelorn sturgeon looking for a mate and then there's nobody there and so it leaves. I was on a visit to Loch Ness with some Métis cousins who were visiting from Canada while I was living in Scotland and we went to this kind of cheesy Loch Ness experience and I just remember sitting there--you go through these different rooms; there's like animatronic things and it's kind of amazing--and then we got to the end and they're like, “and it could also be a sturgeon.” So then, I became very obsessed with them. That's where this character that I’ve written about, the Ness Namweyo, who's this lake surgeon from the prairies that has dealt with the near extirpation of surgeon in the North Saskatchewan and the slow rebuild of their population, and who made his way to Scotland to be like, “I got some things to tell you about the impact that Scottish people have had on Indigenous peoples and non-human beings in the prairies.”
Obviously, Kyle Powys Whyte has written about sturgeon and he's done work with people who are doing sturgeon recovery work. I think there's something about the charismatic megafauna aspect to fish like sturgeon. They can just get so big and they live so long and they can actually live periods that are longer than the existence of Canada. That opens up all these questions about like, if a state is so important, but it's younger than a fish, why does it have such a high opinion of itself? It's not even one extraordinarily long lake sturgeon lifetime. So, I also really enjoy how sturgeon disrupt temporalities because you know they've been on the planet for millions, hundreds of millions of years in different iterations. Similarly, with--oh my goodness, I'm gonna forget the name of them--lampreys! Also, very old very, very old fish in different iterations. You know they have things to tell us too.
A fish that I did spend a lot of time with, that I can concretely say I spent a great deal of time eating and catching, are our northern pike or jackfish, which are some of my favorite fish. I have a lot of stories and actually, before my stepdad died, the last time I was able to go home was about a year before he passed. He said, “Oh, I've got some fish on the stove.” It was some pike that he had caught on his land. He had some re-watered wetlands that he cared for in central Alberta. The last fishy kind of entanglement I had with my stepdad was pike that he had caught and cooked. So fish are good to eat as Louis Bird says, stories are good to think with. Fish are good to think with as well, but also get to eat [laughter], as long as we do that we care.
[CA] So we do have one question coming in from Danielle Mammers. Daniel says, “Thanks for a very generous talk. Both of your stories of unseen or indirect interactions with sturgeon and alligator gar is striking. Can you say more about the potential for art to circulate or regenerate animal or other-than-human memories? I'm particularly interested in possibilities for creatively and critically tending to other-than-human witnessing to histories.” That's a fantastic question.
[ZT] Yes! I know Danielle, so thank you, Danielle. It's a great question. I love my friends. I know they’re all very busy and it's just such an honor when you make time to come to my talk. Danielle would be familiar with the work that different people are doing with bison back in Canada and the importance of art, accessible art. Art doesn't have to be Banksy. I just thought [of a story about] someone who sold the side of their house because Banksy had drawn [on it]. This is going to show how old and out of touch [I am]. I was watching something called the Global Cycling Network and they just had a clip about how Banksy had created a piece of art that integrated a bicycle. Then, very quickly, the owner of the building dismantled it brick by brick and sold it for $600,000.
That's one form of art, but what my dad raised me with is this sense of art as a very accessible, malleable, playful thing. We can exist outside of the official spaces that it circulates. I think that part of the reason I do the fish drawings is that I want folks to really understand that art can be playful, and art can help us tell stories. We don't have to be caught up in the western art world to be legitimate artists. Encouraging people to bring art into how they do things, I try to do that in the classroom as well to encourage students to bring art into their work. It's always so rich because it's coming from a place of their connectedness and knowing.
I don't know that I'm answering the question really directly, but [art can play] a really important role in helping us to narrate our witnessing of violence, environmental injustice, environmental racism, and other genocidal histories in places like Canada. At the same time, I work explicitly in Canada and I don't want anyone to ever feel that I'm dictating how to do things from Canada to other places. I really love getting to learn and engage with people who are working in other places that might have other approaches that are more appropriate. So, I also recognize the limitations of where I'm coming from and [try to be] really explicit about that. Maybe restor(y)ing isn't an approach that will work everywhere, but where it's possible, it's really powerful to play with it.
[CA] I think that's a fantastic answer. This question, or a question that kind of precedes this, is the question of how you access those other-than-human accounts of histories in the first place, before communicating them with art. Again, the surgeon come to mind, thinking about...I'm forgetting the name of the bone.
[ZT] Otolith, in the ear.
[CA] Yeah! As a way to talk about how we communicate with other-than-human living things about the history that they have witnessed, would you mind elaborating on that or other examples?
[ZT] Yeah, so when I worked in Paulatuk, I worked with two really incredible fishermen and elders and knowledge keepers, Andy and Millie Thrasher. They spent a great deal of time taking me out on the land, and teaching me things on the land, and I was really lucky to have that experience. What was really powerful was learning about how deeply present fish were across colonial experiences that have taken place in that region over the last 100 years. So, in my doctoral thesis, I actually have a chapter where I look at fish, and what I call “human fish relations,” act as a micro site of engagement for colonial encounters in northwestern Canada, at least. I really looked at the oblates of Mary Immaculate. The missionaries relied heavily on fish. Actually, they were able to fish because local people taught them how to fish. But in their journals, they were sort of saying it was divine intervention that they were able to catch fish at this one lake. It was like, “Well, no. A few days earlier, you clearly credit this individual from the community in the 1920’s showing you how to fish.” Then, thinking about how the Hudson Bay Company relied very heavily on fish at posts in the north, but also throughout the northwest. Frank Tough has looked at that. Liza Piper has also looked at the role fish played in the sub-Arctic.
I feel like I'm losing the thread of the question, but fish have been ubiquitously present through so many human encounters, both joyful and also deeply full of sorrow. What does that mean in the prairies where fish live in these homelands that have been shaped by millions of years of geological development that led to these marine worlds. Alberta's in a place that used to be the Western Interior Seaway, which was a seaway that at times stretched from the Arctic all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. What that left behind, through the specificity of time and pressure, is oil and gas. So, I feel like there's a really intimate connection there. What that also brings to mind is that freshwater and marine locales are often artificially thought of as separate. It was actually two years ago that it dawned on me that the tiny little lake that my settler family has a cabin on in central Alberta, the creek flows into the Athabasca, which flows into the McKenzie, which flows into the Arctic Ocean. When I was working in the Arctic and considered that I was so completely disconnected from that part of the country, actually I had spent years as a child on a body of water that was intimately connected to that delta. I think also that fish and water kind of implode a lot of the artificial boundaries that human western dominant thinking has put in place to help us understand space and time and relationships. That's another reason I love working with fish. They defy a lot of categorization. There isn't even a fully formed consensus on really what a fish is because they have a lot of these characteristics that cross boundaries. I love that as well. There's a queer aspect to fish. They implode boundaries. I just love fish a lot [laughter].
[CA] We've got one more question. This should be the last one, probably. Sean Burkholder asks, “Thank you so much for such an inspiring talk. You quickly mentioned this with respect to the sturgeon, but perhaps you could elaborate on the role of fish as agents or allies in questioning the conceptions of settler or western time that dominate decision making protocols?”
[ZT] Yes, that's a great question. Thank you.
I'm currently working on my book--my long-suffering editor at the University of Manitoba Press [laughter]. It will eventually be done, but I'm trying to take my time precisely because I want to tend to the relationships properly in the homelands that I'm writing about. I started working about four or five years ago on a concept of sturgeon time to help me understand how all these relationships become folded together in Alberta and thinking through multiple registers of time that sturgeon work with. There's the 65 million years certain forms of sturgeon have been on the planet. Then there's the up to 150 years or 140 years that specific sturgeon can live one lifetime and thinking about how that implodes and obliterates settler concepts of how time matters. That aligns with a lot of Indigenous concepts--well, to be careful not to use a pan-Indigenous concept of time--but, for example, we know that many Indigenous nations in what is currently called Canada and the US have explicit knowledge of being in place 15,000 years and more. Tens of thousands of years in place. The conceit of western white supremacist colonial capitalism to say that 200 years in place is a long time, and to denote an authority over place, is hilarious to think about. At the same time, I want to be careful not to dismiss that just as fish implode borders and boundaries, making space and acknowledging knowledge that peoples who are forced to come to Canada or the US through violent machinations, through US imperialism, Canadian imperialism, the violences of the Middle Passage--those stories that people bring--also are important and, in a way, can be thought of in this iterative sense that they also matter, and they also are place based here, now.
I’m really trying to just be careful in not creating really rigid dualities about time but thinking about time and place together. Space, time, and matter are obviously all connected and so I’m careful not to create binaries that prevent us from creating powerful restoring methodologies that can oppose white settler supremacy. I don't know that's making sense, but just the fact that fish, and specifically sturgeon and lampreys and other sorts of these fish that have been on the planet for a very long time, there's so much they can teach us about how they have moved from place to place and the different ways that they've found to answer questions and the problems of existence on a planet with a very specific set of conditions. That's what I'm trying to think through in that part of the book. Whether it gets published or not will depend on what direction the planet goes, but it has been really fun to think with sturgeon time as I'm playing with it. They really show that this artificial enforcing of a post-enlightenment, universalist sort of understanding of the world that was put in place by white Christian men, as Sylvia Wynter powerfully shows us, has nothing on fish knowledge because they've just been around so much longer. We have so much to learn from them. I'd rather listen to the fish than Heidegger.
[CA] That is a fantastic answer [and place to close]. I'll be looking forward to the book, whenever it comes out. In the meantime, is there anything else that you’re up to that you want to draw attention to or point people towards?
[ZT] I'm just really thankful. I just saw that my colleague Ozayr was in the chat, so shout out to Ozayr and everyone I work with. Ozayr, Lorelei, Bill Snow, Janelle Baker, June Rubis, AM Kanngieser, Karen Lutsky, Émélie Desrochers-Turgeon, all of the Fluid Boundaries team. I feel like I'm winning an award at the Oscars. We just have a really beautiful team. We're so lucky to work with them and we're continuing to build these networks. Do check out our website and our different social media platforms because we're going to be adding projects as we can. We're going to be hustling as much as we can. We really love working with people who are centered in reciprocity and care and passion for fish and water and other aquatic species, so we hope that we'll see some of you in the future, if what we do is resonating with you. My explicit goal is to liberate the ill-gotten funds of these settler institutions and return it to people who are doing the work on the ground, which is a line I steal from my friend Joanna. I'm very honored to get to be here today with all of you. Thank you for taking the time.
[CA] Perfect. We’ll look forward to keeping up with your work there. The only thing I have to add is that we have two days remaining for the show. If you're in the area locally and would like to see the show, you can sign up on Amplify’s website or on Instagram. With that, again thank you so much, Zoe. It means the world to have you here and to be able to engage with your work in this way.
[ZT] I'm waving if people are seeing this. I really am so grateful and what you did with the exhibit is just so beautiful and thoughtful and the way that you use that perspective to kind of draw people into their awareness is just so brilliant. Thank you for creating that beautiful immersion for people. I hope that there's opportunities for us to cross paths in the future. Stay safe out there.
[CA] Like you said earlier, if you ever would like to collaborate on projects, I would be so excited to work with you in the future as well.
[ZT] Awesome. Okay, I'll keep working on procuring the money. Good night to everyone. I hope everyone's safe out there. These are really hard times so just take really good care.
[CA] Absolutely. Good night everyone. Thank you.
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*This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Zoe Todd (Métis/otipemisiw) is from Amiskwaciwâskahikan (Edmonton), Alberta, Canada. She writes about fish, art, Métis legal traditions, the Anthropocene, extinction, and decolonization in urban and prairie contexts. She also studies human-animal relations, colonialism and environmental change in north/western Canada.
Her research is on fish, colonialism and legal-governance relations between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian State. In the past, she has researched human-fish relations in the Inuvialuit Settlement Region, and has also conducted work on Arctic Food Security in the Inuvialuit Settlement Region in the Northwest Territories, Canada. Her current work focuses on the relationships between people and fish in the context of colonialism, environmental change and resource extraction in Treaty Six Territory (Edmonton, amiskwaciwâskahikan), Alberta and the Lake Winnipeg watershed more broadly. Her work employs a critical Indigenous feminist lens to examine the shared relationships between people and their environments and legal orders in Canada, with a view to understanding how to bring fish and the more-than-human into conversations about Indigenous self-determination, peoplehood, and governance in Canada today.
She is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University.
Corson Androski is a researcher, conservationist, software developer, and photographer/filmmaker from Hutchinson, Kansas. Their work uses the concept of care—as labor, affect, and ethic, given/received by humans and other-than-humans, individuals and systems—to consider subjects like institutional medicine alongside state ecological regulation, and beyond their respective margins, emergent communities of illness alongside informal conservation of the small, overlooked ecosystems of weeds and fungi that spring up in the seams of our patchwork flyover states.